0xJoy

Rationalists, Aliens, and Loss This'll be a very long and meandering (and, frankly, skippable!) post about a strange week I had in mid-June. That week started on a humid Monday in Cherry Grove South Carolina with tremendous grief at suddenly losing my dog...and ended on a sunny coolish Sunday in Berkeley California, at the Manifest rationalist conference, making $325k of side bets on strange lifeforms, both of the extraterrestrial variety and the Kamala variety. My birthday was squeezed in between, where I went to see Disclosure Day (rating: even more skippable than this post). -- We'll start with Manifest, and for relevant color from an actual journalist: @jcbeam at Bloomberg has written a readable dispatch from this year's iteration bloomberg.com/news/features/…. Manifest has become the de facto prediction market conference, because it existed as a place to discuss/promote prediction markets before they became ubiquitous (the organization which runs Manifest also has a play-money/user-created/very fun prediction market called Manifold, which hosts various markets on what will happen during the weekend). And so the conference definitely WAS a lot of what I do for a living (trade prediction markets), both in terms of attendees and also sessions. And my favorite moments were meeting other traders for the first time and talking odds. When we wildly differed, it made for good discussion! But Manifest was also a lot of another thing: rationalists or "rats" (their term). The conference takes place in a literal walled-off compound, a former hotel, called Lighthaven. Rationalists are a bit controversial! I did see a protester stationed outside of Lighthaven, although his pet cause seemed to be something to do with testicles that I didn't quite grasp. But given the possibility of (more relevant) protests, there was a security guard to prevent people who didn't belong from getting in. Having now attended, I'd politely suggest there should be a second security guard to keep some of these people and ideas from subsequently getting out. I started the weekend asking a rationalist what "rationalists" means, and I was basically told, in a serious manner, that it is someone who interacts with a lot of blogs. Which I thought was a haha-funny joke, but it turns out this is the definitive description: the Wikipedia article says it is a "21st-century movement that formed around a group of internet blogs, primarily LessWrong and Astral Codex Ten." This definition was further reinforced by witnessing interactions where rationalists referenced individual blog posts by their title, and the room largely nodded along knowing exactly what that blog post contained. Felt quasi-religious. Aside from prediction markets, the biggest topic of conversation at Manifest is easily AI safety (and this cause has become closely affiliated with the rationalist community). With the Trump-mandated Fable 5 shutdown being the breaking news on the opening Friday night (with multiple rationalist-adjacent Anthropic employees in the building when the order came down!), AI safety overtook prediction markets as the dominant discussion topic. And tbh, I didn't mind this much! Because I have very, very strong views that AI is not going to kill humanity. And this belief is a minority view at the conference, so that's kinda wild and interesting, right? The more popular view was that humanity will be "paper clipped" by artificial superintelligence. Made for good conversation! Nerdy and apocalyptic conversation. The conference also had varying levels of discussion - both formal sessions and informal debates/lectures - around topics like...animal welfare, effective altruism, expanding the rationalist movement, and...polyamorous relationships. When I described to a family member what Manifest was before I went, I said "It's a conference of mostly prediction markets and AI safety with...(switching to a whisper)...an undercurrent of debauchery." And I'd say that ended up being my experience. The sensualityness of it all was not in-your-face, but as the day wore on, the tension was bubbling up. I believe each year they have a Manifold market on whether there'll be an orgy, and it's won at least once! And the star of that strain of the conference is definitely Aella, a sex worker turned Internet celebrity. I attended one of her sessions, and I half-expect to see what I witnessed in a future documentary...something in the vein of "Wild Wild Country" (rating: must-watch!). The enraptured audience watched intensely as Aella orchestrated - like some sexual maestro - a succession of awkward men approaching women. The women appeared to be Aella acolytes. Aella would often intervene and physically move the appendages of the men and women around like dolls. She gave suggestions on what to say, where to stand, and what to think about. It was equal parts awkward, odd, and grandiose. It was all very guru-coded. It was the furthest thing from rational blogging that I saw that weekend. (I'm sure I'll be tut-tutted that this was actually science-based, but skepticism is warranted). Which is not to say that any of the events that weekend came across with bad intentions in mind. By and large, everyone was well-meaning and highly open and seemed to be enjoying themselves (the only topic that I broached that seemed to be taboo was questioning the rationalist movement itself, which was kind of just widely held to be virtuous). Overall, the participants all seemed to be in various stages of contentment that they had made a great decision in attending this event. Some that seemed very socially awkward seemed like they took a lot of meaning from attending. In finding a group that fit their interests and beliefs. That was really cool to see! And I understood the quiet power of finding an "in-group" in those moments. A sense of belonging for people that may not get that elsewhere. But...but...as a first-time observer, and as a naturally curious person, I tried to feel around to the outer edges of the rationalist community and go to as many open-ended and "controversial" events as possible. And I have to say that the flip side of an in-group, the echo chamber, also became very obvious, very quickly. I'm a smart person. I'm an educated person. But part of being a really good prediction market trader is realizing that as smart as you are as an individual, you do not have it all figured out or anywhere close. If you put your intelligence on a pedestal, the uninvited guest hubris will crash that party with a quickness. Or another way to put it: superforecasters are not really a thing. To the extent there are superforecasters out there, their superpower is being a little better than average at forecasting. But humanity is very bad at forecasting! So the superpower is...you're still kinda bad, but you are slightly less bad. Any lessons on hubris or humility seemed a bit over the head of many of the attendees at the event, who seemed to view the people inside these walls as the smart crowd. That they were productively moving the ball forward, maybe even solving, many of humanity's problems. And the hard thing for them to figure out was how to IMPLEMENT all of these things. And, to be clear, this is very well-meaning. But it is also paternalistic. And beyond paternalistic, it is absurdly unrealistic. The sense I got was that this was a group of people in various stages of arrested development, with sometimes very low introspection. Sort of like an adult kickball league, except it was adult model UN/debate club. And instead of kickball being a way to wind down, their leisure activity is the most meaningful thing they have going. And being a little delusional isn't necessarily a bad thing. What struck me as a bad thing was that some of their beliefs are downright scary. Ideas that we have tried already, and as a society decided this was a terrible idea. I went to a session on creating "Superbabies", or -- to use the loaded historical term -- eugenics. It was beyond merely controlling for disease (this is great!), it was talking about maximizing IQ and other "good" traits like bravery. The room (and even talking to people later who were not in the room) seemed overwhelmingly sympathetic to this being a good idea. And look, I'm not a woke person...but I was in a bit of shock that this very white, very intelligent, very high-earning cohort of individuals were discussing such a history-loaded and racially-loaded idea so cavalierly. The word paternalistic again pops into my head as the best way to describe this. The worst event of the weekend bears mentioning, although I don't want to dwell on it, because I don't think it represented people there. I should also caveat that this was at a session titled "Share your most politically incorrect belief (nothing leaves the room)." I definitely made a social promise when I stepped into that room to not let anything leave. But I feel like the seriousness of what I heard overrides that promise, especially because of the connection to the eugenics bit. A youngish white person who a few hours earlier had been a vociferous audience supporter of eugenics at the Superbabies session decided that their most politically incorrect belief was that we should be able to say the n-word (at which point the word was yelled out). Further, that it was cowardly not to use the word. Personally, I love controversial ideas and against-consensus discussions. But I've studied enough history to know that this word harkens back to one of the darkest times in all of our species history, enslavement and wanton violence. As a society, we have correctly and collectively decided to excise this word the hell out of existence. The idea that some flippant, ignorant dipshit wants to wheel it out as a hyper-libertarian "gotcha" at a conference like this, and did so hours after expressing that he wants "high IQ" babies like himself is all sorts of wrong. Again...I don't want to dwell on this. I'll just say that there was an exchange between Phil Donahue and Milton Friedman that must be almost 50 years old at this point. I saw it on Youtube like 20 years ago. And they were discussing the merits of capitalism vs socialism, etc., a long-running debate. And Friedman said at some point, rhetorically, "Where in the world are we going to find these angels who are going to organize society for us?" At this conference, there were smart, funny, kind people, but they were also...just people. And I felt that key parts of this group, speaking generally and not specifically, seemed blinded to their own paternalistic attitudes, and were totally losing the plot on some topics. I felt compelled to write about this for anyone considering going to this event in the future. This was just my experience! And ymmv. -- But to end the Manifest chapter on a better note, because I did have a good time: there's tons of people there with a betting mindset. And those are my people, so naturally I made some bets. One is with @CodyZervas -- who expressed that he thought the UAPs "Unidentified anomalous phenomena" or more colloquially UFOs may be alien in origin. He also said he had made various side bets with people to where he would win $200k if it was proven to be aliens. To the dismay of my AI agent, who thought the odds were terrible, and purely because of my love of round numbers, I decided to throw my $300k into the mix (bringing him to half a million in potential winnings) in exchange for $3k -- 4 years from now. So either we'll have proof that we're not alone in the universe by the year 2030, or I'll be $3k richer. This is a win-win! The agent is the idiot! And the other bet was with @aokadam who expressed that Kamala Harris stood a chance in the 2028 Dem primary. She does not. He also expressed skepticism around betting at all on 2028 right now, because it's so far away. At this point I had to intercede, and I offered him my $25k to his $1k on Kamala. $1k will be his price to learn that Kamala is a below average politician who ain't winning any primaries anymore, AND he's now betting on something he said we shouldn't be betting on yet. Unfortunately, as I am typing this, I now realize these events may be correlated, to my detriment. Kamala winning the nomination could indicate that virtually every other Democrat has been wiped out by aliens, and I lose both bets in one fell swoop. -- Finally, to wrap this meandering post up, I want to eulogize one of my very best friends in my life, my dog Chester, who just a few days prior to this crazy Manifest weekend had passed away. I met Chester in 2017, a timid and nervous dog (pictured below trading PredictIt with me). And we spent most of every non-travel day together ever since, both of us changing and growing. I had a dog as a child, and I guess I never really internalized what the personality of a dog was or could be other than "I'm a dog." When I expanded to two and then three dogs a few years after Chester, the differences in personality became READILY apparent. And Chester's true personality was this: loyal companion, a natural leader, and totally fearless while also endlessly kind (pictured below after conquering a mountain). He died at the ripe age of 16, but he was so puppy-like in both appearance and countenance that it seemed like he would live until 20. An emergency room visit on a Saturday morning for not eating turned into a diagnosis of multiple cancers by the afternoon. And so on Sunday, I drove my boy out to the beach. He'd never walked in the ocean before, and the ocean is so calming and important to me personally that I had to do it. I thought he might've hated it, but he let the waves lap up against his paws with pleasure. He went to sleep the next day in my arms, and it's still hard to process that. I never thought I would get a tattoo; I'm not that type of person, and maybe not even cool enough for one. But I'm going to get a Chester tattoo, so he's always close to me. I have a death zero philosophy on my life. My kids (if they avoid getting "paper clipped") will be cut off from non-loans by 18. Maybe 19 if I like them. I don't believe in dynastic money or intergenerational wealth, and it'll all be given away. So, if I do ever make a very large amount of money, spoiler alert: there's going to be a very large dog shelter built with it for other Chesters out there.