lasersail

This is a surprising read. I recently listened to Lex Fridman’s 6+ hour conversation with DHH, and don’t recall any mention of white nationalism, eugenics, or far-right adjacent topics. In 6 hours DHH presented himself as a passionate, opinionated, and intensely intelligent programmer & product builder.

I was at Lighthaven that week. The weekend-long LessOnline event Scott references opened what LightHaven termed "Festival Season", with a summer camp organised for the following 5 week days, and a prediction market & forecasting conference called Manifest the following weekend.

I didn't attend LessOnline since I'm not active on LessWrong nor identify as a rationalist - but I did attended a GPU programming course in the "summer camp" portion of the week, and the Manifest conference (my primary interest).

My experience generally aligns with Scott's view, the community is friendly and welcoming, but I had one strange encounter. There was some time allocated to meet with other attendees at Manifest who resided in the same part of the world (not the bay area). I ended up surrounded by a group of 5-6 folks who appeared to be friends already, had been a part of the Rationalist movement for a few years, and had attended LessOnline the previous weekend. They spent most of the hour critiquing and comparing their "quality of conversations" at LessOnline with the less Rationalist-y, more prediction market & trading focused Manifest event. Completely unaware or unwelcoming of my presence as an outsider, they essentially came to the conclusion that a lot of the Manifest crowd were dummies and were - on average - "more wrong" than themselves. It was all very strange, cult-y, pseudo-intellectual, and lacking in self-awareness.

All that said, the experience at Summer Camp and Manifest was a net positive, but there is some credence to sneers aimed at the Rationalist community.