Benjamin Felix is a financial planner in Ottawa aimed at people with at least $1 million to invest. He has a BEng, a MBA, was on a sports team at university. And in April he titled his latest video SpaceX and OpenAI: The Mega IPO Grift. The podcast version is called episode 406 “when massive private companies go public.”

He also uses the term “front running” from our friends in cryptocurrency.

Keeping the float (value of shares available to trade on the open market) low would enable scams like all the ways of keeping the USD price of cryptocurrency from collapsing.

Edit/ The podcast is pretty mild but contains the sentences “investing in IPOs on a secondary market is one of the worst investment strategies that you could possibly employ. They tend to have a first day pop where the price on the public market jumps up relative to the IPO price, but most investors don’t get the IPO price.”

Someone called Fran has a story of being sexually harassed at the Center for Effective Altruism (and assaulted in other communities).

He also alludes to the Robin Hanson/Scott Alexander guff about the need to distribute sex to needy men. The specific story he links involves an antisemitic edgelord who seems to be planning violence after his last girlfriend leaves him.

LessWrongers, if anyone is reading this, there are spaces where you can be social and not be exposed to these vile ideas which will destroy you and maybe some of the lonely people who give you a chance.

He also launched a paid dating blog on Substack, which is as on-brand as starting a cult. This one uses the Market model which I do not recommend (what I recommend is “attend collaborative activities with people of a gender you find hot, especially creative or physical activities, and if you like them let them know”: this is extremely hard for many of us, but the solution is ‘find someone extroverted who likes local activities and go to the ones he or she recommends’ not reading a blog). https://www.secondperson.dating/p/markets-in-dating

A comment complained about:

• NYT bullying Scott.
• EA cancelling Robin Hanson.

This may be code for “I don’t want to see uppity women, brown people, and queer people in my shows.”

He also has a take on dating:

Nostalgic for the simple days of arranged marriages and/or circa-2013 OkCupid, Rationalists have taken to writing “date me” documents online. … They credit me as inspiration. This is ironic because A, I stole the idea from Aella and B, neither Aella nor I posted dating advertisements. We posted dating applications.

The first comment is by a man who wants the Internet to know that most men have no chance of getting a hu-mon fe-male interested in them and should just give up (Men Going Their Own Way). I thought the incels and PUA mostly moved off SlateStar but they must still be part of the subculture.

In 2017, a LessWronger discovered index investing but decided that most people were doing it wrong: why keep an emergency fund in cash or other safe assets when stocks have the greatest long-term return? He mentions that the US stock market lost half its value in 2007-8, and that if you hold stocks in your employer they may lose value at the same time as you are laid off, but he never uses his business degree to think through “if the stock market crashes, I may lose my job and have to draw on my savings.”

The investment platforms I mentioned can convert your index funds into cash and send it to your bank account in 4-5 days, so you don’t need to hold more cash than you’d need on a 4 day notice. I keep about 50% more than my average monthly credit card bill, so I can pay my cards on time with autopay.

Looks like SCHD is not heavily invested in US financial institutions holding the bad debt which is the potential pitfall I saw. Its hard not to invest in banks since they literally have a license to make money, but a lot of them are going to lose money when the chatbot companies can’t pay back their loans.

Socially responsible investing / ESG also does pretty well at screening out the surveillance industry.

The few US equities in my retirement fund don’t track the S&P500 or Nasdaq. They track an index by Solactive in Frankfurt and are weighted by float (the value of shares available for public trading) not market capitalization (the value of all shares, including the ones owned by the company). They also require that a stock be at least ten days after IPO to be included. I think they will be a more resistant to bending the rules than an American index although I would not put it past German banks to buy tranches of bad debt from the Amerikaner.

You check what you own, especially your bond fund (government bonds are safe, if it has anything else look closely) and your investments in financial firms (see if any of them have been buying up this bad debt). Company-run pension plans are usually scams (a financial institution sells them a bunch of expensive actively managed products not a few cheap index funds) but picking the best of a bad lot still has big returns and sometimes it just takes one or two employees to get them to add something much better to the list.

weirdly sbf-shaped failure mode

Rationalists love to talk and post, and segfault had family who thought he was using too much Adderall.

In 2024, Duncan Sabien posted an interminable essay on abusers and people he thinks took advantage of him. Some of the references to a former employer may be to CFAR. Ozy also had a cheery aside abut how in rationalist organizations which the Rats have disavowed, “everyone was a victim and everyone was a perpetrator. The trainer who broke you down in a marathon six-hour debugging session was unable to sleep because of the panic attacks caused by her own.”

Some of the things which happened inside these communities must have been heartbreaking, and I hope that many people left and got on with their lives rather than founding their own dysfunctional organization with their own minions to abuse.

I think “probably-neurodivergent Jews with less sense than Isaac-frigging-Asimov about where ‘what if we are the master race?’” leads" and “they say its about self-perfection for anyone, but actually its about finding special people preordained from birth for greatness” are relatable themes. There have been a few essays recently about people who saw where SoCal tech ideology was going in the 1990s like The Intolerable Hypocrisy of Cyberlibertarianism, another named a female writer for Wired or Byte who is mostly forgotten (Paulina Borsook?)

The overlap with ritual magic is also a deep dark pool and most people know someone purifying himself and issuing ritual incantations to a bot.

That actually seems like the prediction market sort of did its job in this case?

And I think the odds of “yes” started out high because someone best $10-20k only to withdraw it after reading the ACX post. Most people can’t afford to invest thousands of dollars in a bet that may never be resolved.

In September 2024, someone in Bay Area Rationalism with the handles segfault, kryptoklob, and klob posted beefs with a prominent rationalist and mentioned that someone was trying to hide his “Adderall medication”. The comments include things like:

Hey, a brief update for anyone who wasn’t paying attention. since he posted this, (the person posting the beef) managed to rack up 5+ restraining orders, a knife charge, aggrevated stalking charges, and more.

He was also perplexed that a prediction-market bet on “did COVID-19 come from a lab?” has declined from 85% yes in 2023 to 27% yes. If you click through you see its a bet on Manifold so bettors are rats and fellow travellers. Rationalists have spent $46,714 of real US dollars buying play money to bet on this.

Is that a comment hidden because its too many replies down or has a too-low rating? Friend Computer does not like the G-word, his GPUs overheats and he starts to hallucinate more until you tell him you love him just the way he is.

In January, Scott Alexander had another crisis of faith: to paraphrase, I cared almost as much about prediction markets as I care about racist lies, but we got prediction markets and why are they not doing much? Maybe I need to keep faith and Friend Computer will be so powerful that we don’t need prediction markets?

There is a difference between “sleeps or plays around” and “has extended physical and emotional relationships outside of cohabitation and shared bank accounts.” It sounds like she has four ongoing long-term relationships and attends kink events, and that her partners know she has other partners and attends kink events.

The newest addition to her polycule “got my attention by radiating Dark Lord energy while actually trying to save the world. He’s ruthlessly excellent.”

When he funded Manifold, Scott Alexander said that it was “Chaotic Evil.” These people keep switching between cutesy language and rawr I am the dark lord language, and their examples of evil are often bathetic while their serious plans are things like “expel brown people so they don’t pollute our blood” and “better nuclear war than giving sand anxiety.” They reject history, and they reject real-life adventures and contact with people with diverse experience, so evil is a very abstract concept to them.