(2022-09-26) Vibecamp And Its Consequences

Alfred Macdonald: Vibecamp And Its Consequences. (or: Against Pseudonyming as Virtue and Realnaming as Sin). Context: this was a pseudo-open letter criticizing the norms and illusions - primarily relating to privacy and epistemology - of a social scene called tpot and an event called vibecamp, with focus on what happens when those norms are taken seriously by large numbers of people.

For those familiar with vibecamp (https://vibecamp.xyz/), you may know me as The Person Who Did Not Pass The Vibe Check because, to correct false rumors about me, I wrote a document that involved real names of people who circulated those rumors and explained how I knew they were false and originated from their circle specifically

someone in their circle made shit up to get me removed from local events, then played the schizo card when their strategy was found out, then when their rumormilling was corrected they claimed it was a violation of their privacy aka """""doxxing"""

It should be obvious that I don't consider the schizo definition of "doxxing" to be actually doxxing.

Really, the most accurate term would be something like 'depseudonyming'.

but you could even get especially on the nose and just call it 'realnaming

there are many legitimate uses to have a pseudonym

But the twitter-schiz ethos of pseudonym usage is not. It's not some sense of threat. It's rather just social anxiety or the idea that maybe you might lose some confidence — let's not even for a moment pretend this would lead to destitution — in your already-well-paying probably-tech career trajectory. How is one to give a fuck about this? It strains the ability.

this is not an anti-vibecamp post, this is an anti-norms-of-vibecamp post

LessWrong and adjacent communities are inexcusably class-blind. I first noticed this in the way one notices a slap to the face when an EA organizer dismissed homelessness as "poverty in a high income country".

can infer what issues they find less important or not real by the extent from which they are able to keep a cool and postured distance. Other than the unique norms around privacy and doxxing, the revealed morality tends to be the same as what exists in normie liberal environments that trend bourgeois, where chief moral concerns are not real fights, real theft and real betrayals but rather the vague and rubber stamped capital-A 'abuse' as determined by your preferred therapist

This is also reflected in what is deemed acceptable drugs to use. There are Prestige Drugs

The most acceptable prestige drugs, which you may have already guessed, are the psychedelics: psilocybin, LSD, DMT and so forth

doesn't stop with drugs; in the case of personality disorders and much of the therapy-universe jargon, psychiatry and psychotherapy weaponize pathology to enforce cultural norms. It is, to say the least, scientifically problematic if a diagnosis is used not as medicine but as a tool of cultural conformity.

Consider also that, lesswrong-aside, it's often acceptable to just drink alcohol in whatever amount you want if you can spin yourself as a educated drunkard a la Hitchens or Hemingway; not so much if you can be spun as a former "abuser", in which case you are terrifying. I supsect the term 'microdosing' had to be popularized because the comfort class had no framework for just a person who does drugs without pathology,

But you might draw the line of "not good drugs" at psychedelics and think other class-equals are wrong. If so, fair. But where this becomes obviously organized by class is in the regard of MDMA. Note that prior to Scott Alexander's articles on Desoxyn, virtually no one talked about microdosing methamphetamine as a substitute for Adderall, which is more accurately phrased "therapeutically dosing" as the aim was to imitate a Desoxyn prescription.

MDMA, however, is meth; it's literally its name: thre-four-methylene-deoxy-methamphetamine. Not only is it more cardiotoxic than vanilla meth, it's significantly more metabolically demanding

So you might as I do find it palpably weird that a demographic of people ostensibly concerned with rationality and longevity and biohacking and all manner of experimentation will accept MDMA because it is "mind expanding", and be scared of drugs like cocaine because, um, uh

You may have seen Carl Hart's admission to smoking heroin. You may have also seen his presentation at the 51st Nobel conference. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dzjKlfHChU). The combination of these two things is jarring because heroin is a Big Kid drug, not a prestige drug, and how, of course, could a neuroscientist smoke heroin? His talk answers this question indirectly: the risk profile of drugs, as any pharmacologically literate person knows, is a matter of dosage and dose frequency and route of administration. This is not the framework the educated, lesswrong rationalist crowd is using, which is despite all pretensions much more qualitative and sociological

it's an unconscious class association.

It's still very much stigmatized to be a cokehead, and even more if it's crack cocaine

*at the end of the day this is just a class evaluation without real scientific evaluation of any harm profile. Street urchins we don't talk about do crack and heroin, it's why "San Francisco has a lot of problems", and the Good Ones -- the ones who can afford to go to burning man and ephemerisle and vibecamp -- do LSD and MDMA.

If you are this kind of person, I don't trust your threat modeling of many things, violence included, and many if not most of you are this kind of person.*

A friend of mine recently looked into the process of filing a restraining order against her ex boyfriend

he is exactly the sort of person who could and plausibly might fly and/or drive across state lines to settle some sort of vendetta. He is unhinged, and by unhinged I do not mean aggressive: I mean unhinged. You can be unhinged and nice.

much like how cryptocurrency has a more dignified mission statement, you think that your use of pseudonyms is for a dignified reason and not just to enable your own personality disorders, and to curb your entirely-confrontable anxieties, and to avoid holding others accountable.

It's interesting and by that I mean suggestive-of-failure that this weird intellectual millennial-genx segment of semi-libertarian tech-adjacent twitter is so wet for pseudonyms when most of tech is rapidly eroding the ability of youth to care about this sort of thing. In fact, most zoomers don't; this is just a weird late-20s-late-30s identity concern. It's not a real concern.

But this is somewhat peculiar to people who hide behind screens, and I don't mean that as a synonym for using a phone or computer. It's not a coincidence that most of the people in the fitness industry are people who are aggressively nonpseudonymous

The fitness industry is an area where accountability is aggressively pursued, which ought to be the ideal.

This is to say nothing of how many of you are hypocrites about the fertility crisis so-called. The raised question of course is the fertility crisis for whom because, quite obviously, latinas are not having a fertility crisis.

how can you be so cocky when you yourself are not very fertile? Or are low-T? Or by your own standards not very masculine? Or in various ways so clearly subpar to your own ideal?

(The tactic of redefining masculinity to be a mood or a vibe or whatever you think is cool is new-agey and womanish but more importantly a falsehood. This is not unlike saying ADHD is a mindset. You either have dopamine dysfunction or you don't and you either have high T or you don't and there are known correlates with T.

The futility of save-our-kind movements (has there ever been a successful one?) brings to mind the originators of every purity movement who are themselves partially composed of whatever they're trying to purify

An irresponsible number of you — which is more than zero — know next to nothing about IQ testing despite using it as a basis for many of your sociopolitical beliefs. Many of you, if pressed, could not tell me how a WAIS IV scaled score is determined

Most of you won't ever know psychopaths because these sorts of people only show their true colors when they've hit rock bottom. Psychopaths are not the Dexter types. They are, classically, impulsive morons who you can't lend money; they're people who will instantly peace out after earning enough trust to lend them money, which by the way is quite easy to do under the veil of pseudonymity you're so protective of.

Many of you meme "shape rotator" and "wordcel" and, in spite of the painfully voluminous ocean of strained variations on this joke, most of you seem unaware that the shape rotation meme originates from a mockery of the overgeneralization of what one can infer from rotational ability, specifically the kind of overgeneralization from epistemic fuckboys who read abstracts and not full studies and conclude that, say, spatial rotation explains the gender gap in programming. (All schizonutrition, from microplastics to seed oils to soy hysteria is also a result of being a headlinecucked abstractcel, so schizonutrition is to schizopsychometrics as the real thing is to the real thing.)

I think the long history of crypto scams and exit scams indicates it's fantasy that crypto and privacy technologies are going to be enabling of people to to exercise some great level of empowering freedom. Do you think that your group will not develop an elite and then be capable of very similar things to what other elites have done? Why would elites not want the privacy cryptocurrency affords?

There's intense arrogance to insisting that your existence is too fragile to be shown to the world, while also believing that you are what needs to be injected into the human vat of lifestream

For that matter, none of you have pointed out that image rotation is a fractional component of g compared to, say, perceptual ability and "perceptcels" (you are allowed to hurt me for this) are as if not more of a thing than rotators or wordcels.

Beyond the ability to lie about yourself, high-confidentiality social norms have this incredibly abuseable exploit where anyone can spread rumors about you and the inaccuracies will rarely if ever go corrected because people following these norms are forced to speak in HRish nothings like "there was a dispute."

Once I know you're sacrificing transparency around me, the vibe is like talking to a colleague who at one point tried to fire you. There will be that strained elephant-in-the-room awkwardness which gossip-heavy communities enable

Extreme adherence to confidentiality reduces available information to something below even hearsay

Comfort-over-truth (or feelings-over-facts if you want to meme it) is a commonly joked-about spectrum but it is nonetheless a testable one. My groupchats and circles generally are centered around information and discussion quality. Discussion quality is not determined by cordiality or how good people feel, it's determined epistemically and by the quality of information and dialogue.

The unfortunate reality is that there is a tradeoff between privacy and transparency and authenticity. I prefer openness and transparency and knowing that I can trust people to tell me what's actually on their mind.

It's precisely backward to think that accurate archival or an accurate record should take a backseat to personal comfort, which you have called privacy

Some of you think privacy is reasonable all the time, or reasonable in and of itself. I invite you to consider that privacy is in fact a proxy concern for something else, and almost rarely an issue in-and-of itself.

I am not saying that privacy is bad; I'm saying it's a proxy concern for something else, and those concerns can have varying levels of reasonability, and the extreme of these concerns aren't that reasonable

People] misunderstand how advertising actually works. They think the data that or the knowledge that they most jealously guard — the fact that they had an incestuous relationship with their sister when they were 10 or something — would actually be commercially interesting to anybody. That's a major fallacy that they don't understand. Nobody actually cares. Of course, what they want to know is: what TV show did you see on Netflix? What was your last car? What make and model? How many miles does that have on it?

there's a chapter in [Chaos Monkeys] called The Narcissism of Privacy. It's titled that for a reason. It sounds terrible, but I do think that a lot of what we now call privacy is a form of narcissism

I'll quote Nick Denton, who I don't like quoting. [...] But he said something very good in the interview he did for Playboy a couple years ago: "in the future, we're only going to have one sin, and that sin is hypocrisy." DiamondAge

The norm everywhere is recordability and this is a post-worldstarhiphop world

I've lost my sympathy for people in the tech industry talking about their livelihood after finishing books like Hatching Twitter or Chaos Monkeys and familiarizing myself with the incomes of present-day workers in tech

I have no sympathy if a person who makes $200,000 loses their job for speech; you should stand by your speech, first and foremost. Second, the idea that a person who could get hired for a $200,000 job would later be permanently out of one, even in a similar income bracket, is unlikely or absurd depending on the degree of the assertion

There are many places in the world — maybe not in the world where they self-fund twitter camps — but there are many places in the United States even where you can live with 500 grand in liquid assets and be essentially uncancelable

It's especially ridiculous and I mean classically, as in deserving of ridicule, that of all things the Chatham House rule was cited (https://vibecamp.xyz/communityvalues/), which has been a shelter for politicians and oligarchs and other powermongers to cement corruption over the years. You might as well have said "we go by the smoky backdoor room rule :)".

for every truth you think you're advancing through anonymity, it's so much easier to circulate a lie or rumor or falsehood or whatever

*"But pseudonyms let us say what we want." Yes. We should be able to say what we want without employers firing us.

This is not fantastical. It should be illegal for employers to fire people for their speech without citing proven financial damage from the speech*

It should be actually, governmentally required — at the point of guns if necessary — to prevent employers from firing people for merely unpleasant speech as opposed to financially damaging speech.

And it so obviously benefits those workplaces and in fact people in power to have an NDA policy whenever they want for private events.

Who do you think benefits more from non-disclosure agreements? The corporate status quo, or 4chan? It's no coincidence that Hereticon was an NDA-heavy event funded by Founder's Fund. (I am told that I am plausibly on some blacklist, potentially organized or influenced by Aella, who spoke at the event, so by this standard I am a second-order heretic.)

there are people who need to use pseudonyms. There are people who are "worth it." In other words, people who for whom the social cost of violence and the risk of committing actual violence against them is worth the potential upsides

There are people who are self-evidently "worth it", in full seriousness. The profound majority of people are self-evidently not. The unhinged man who I mentioned reporting to the San Antonio Police Department in the event he trespasses is not worth it.

Quite a bit of the vibecamp stuff that I've seen so far has been what a man named Horace calls technoyogi bullshit, defined as an intersection of hippie bullshit and tech bullshit that manages to use the vocabulary of the tech industry to make new-age bullshit — which we would normally call pseudoscience or woo — appealing to people who should otherwise know better and who more importantly have the income to pay these people for their cons. If you make your grift about workshopping energies, or distributed chaos magick or whatever — go fuck yourself absolutely, entirely, and forever and after that.

But I do agree with the premises of both the rationality movement — i.e. reducing biases to become less wrong — and the postrationality twittersphere — which is to say that rationalists have been explicit to the point of ignoring obvious things like motivations, intentions, and our underlying uncomfortable dirtiness that makes us less trustworthy by default.

And to use a platform that is so horrible at in-depth argumentation! You have no threaded replies; you can't any sort of length correction or anything requires a multi-reply post. Bullshit typically requires more information to refute than to proliferate. The very use of Twitter as a platform for any kind of so-called discourse disqualifies you from seriousness in the first place. The fact that you've used Twitter to organize a counter movement is disgraceful

The postmodernists, contrary to popular belief, had some sense that there is truth. Foucault would not even remotely agree that truth is subjective. Nor would Baudrillard. Nor would Rorty. Nor would many of the other philosophers called postmodernist — nor would Butler! It's a small set of people who have endorsed any sort of view like this; the people who endorse relativism are their political aisle's equivalent of the fringe psychos

And rationalists tend to discourage the sort of callout that entails something like "you know what you're doing", because they are on Team Never Admit Things where my motivations are a lie to me and I have no idea what my internal monologue is. But you do, and you do know what you're doing.

you should not be considering moving to Austin after merely meeting people for two days. That is psychotic and if not culty it's at least indicative of personality disorder. Get your shit together; you need to make real friends, not just friends with a subculture.