Previous discussion on this forum about Vassar by @fenneko:

• Bryk, the rationalist-adjacent writer, says a prominent rationalist once told her condescendingly that she was a “5-year-old in a hot 20-year-old’s body.”
  • This was Michael Vassar.
• Joseph says he also argued that it was normal for a 12-year-old girl to have sexual relationships with adult men and that such relationships were a noble way of transferring knowledge to a younger generation. Then, she says, he followed her home and insisted on staying over. She says he slept on the floor of her living room and that she felt unsafe until he left in the morning.
  • This was also Michael Vassar.
    • This seems like a pattern for him.
  • I know this because of a line from the TIME article:
    • "Another woman, who dated the same man [the one who talked about pedophilia with Joseph] several years earlier in a polyamorous relationship, alleges that he had once attempted to put his penis in her mouth while she was sleeping."
      • And "the same man" was, of course, Michael Vassar.
  • Jax talks about other people in public threads, but I think Vassar is the only one whose alleged behavior was illegal physical abuse rather than rudeness or weird vibes.
• On the extreme end, five women, some of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because they fear retribution, say men in the community committed sexual assault or misconduct against them [...]  Women who reported sexual abuse, either to the police or community mediators, say they were branded as trouble and ostracized while the men were protected.
  • At least one of these is Vassar (possibly multiple, given how consistent he seems to be).
  • Vassar has been banned from EA events for many years, and SlateStarCodex  meetups for at least a few years.

DoJ files showing Vassar successfully requested to visit Epstein's private island in 2015: 1, 2, 3

https://web.archive.org/web/20160703171215/http://worldoptimization.tumblr.com/post/131312146249/100000-hours-introduction

It seems unfortunately plausible that despite technological progress toward alternatives to meat, humans have a revealed terminal preference for animal suffering, which mean that short of extinction we are on a default trajectory to astronomical suffering.

otoh, this is funny:

Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire and a frequent Gates critic, said in an interview that he had privately encouraged around a dozen Giving Pledge signers to undo it. “Most of the ones I’ve talked to have at least expressed regret about signing it,” he said. He has his own Epstein ties, but he calls the Pledge an “Epstein-adjacent, fake Boomer club.”

"There is already an option for people who want to hang out with the people who are currently attracted to effective altruism. It is called “the rationalist community.”"

https://x.com/austinc3301/status/2027639210874966060

Fully autonomous weapons seems to me to be a clear-cut case of differential acceleration in any case: not giving any kind of legitimate battlefield advantage for law-abiding democratic countries (human reflexes are top of the sigmoid; this is one of our main evolutionarily-selected skills for obvious reasons), but allowing authoritarians to establish a military dictatorship with minimal staff (historically "the army is ultimately made up of ordinary people who can refuse to shoot their brethren and/or shoot the dictator instead" have been an important pressure valve), or to organize genocidal massacres with automated recognition of targeted civilians (i.e. the FLI Slaughterbots scenario).

Democracy promotion is a common interest of many causes. It's highly unlikely we can do anything about (potentially, will ever be able to do anything about again) global poverty, factory farming, or existential risk, if all world powers become repressive autocracies squashing any sign of moral cosmopolitanism and freethought.

This is about the RSP v3 (front-page post), wholly unrelated.