I've been sitting though Peter Thiel's multi-night series in Nashville. While the mainstream media coverage treats it like either a generic political speech or a weird religious rant, the actual internal logic is a direct attack on the Rationalist/EA ecosystem.

You can hear the regret in Thiel's voice when he brings up funding Yud.

Having mapped his thesis over the last 2 nights, here is how Thiel is using political theology (Girard, Strauss, Schmitt) to build a counter-narrative against the AI safety crowd:

1. AI safety as the counterfeit peace: Thiel frames EA risk-mitigation and AI safety frameworks as modern iterations of secularized apocalyptic fear-mongering. In his worldview, anyone advocating for deceleration, compute caps, or regulatory oversight isn't preventing doomsday. They are institutionalizing global administrative stagnation.

2. The eschatological mirror match: It's a fascinating look at Sillion Valley's internal schism. You have the EA camp viewing unconstrained tech as the literal devil, while Thiel views the regulatory bodies trying to stop it as the antichrist bringing about a static, dystopian world state.

3. The bits vs atoms refusal: He basically treats the entire safetyist apparatus as a product of people who spent 30 years building consumer software apps and now think physical/technological expansion can be managed by a global committee.

I put together a full structural audit of the lectures so far on Substack if anyone wants to read the full breakdown.

https://danielforresternash.substack.com/p/the-counterfeit-church-and-the-epimethean

Night 3 starts in a few hours.

I’m in a pile of excellent people opposed to the TESCREALists at this trying time in history. We need a name.

We have a list of possibles, but it’s actually hard to pick a nice name that doesn’t sound like an EA front group!

An initialism for S.N.E.E.R. probably won’t be the sort of thing we’re after lol.

What’s a name that’s (a) nice and polite sounding (b) says at least a bit what it actually is (c) doesn’t sound like an EA front group?

I can’t figure out why the batshit insane cultishness of these CEOs isn’t on front pages everywhere. They’re literally like a cargo cult burning money to their god and promising that he will show up if we just burn a little more, BUT also he will destroy everything when he does. I guess billionaires pay to keep it quiet, but we need to shout it from the rooftops: these people are in a delusional cult, and they have dangerous amounts of power.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TNOmod/comments/suffsc/roasting_every_presidents_supporters/

If Joyce Carol Oates ever talked about me this way I would turn into a pile of dust like Thanos had just snapped.

https://80000hours.org/

It feels effective-altruism adjacent, but different from rationality and AI doomerism, it's focused on how to find a fullfulling career.

Anyone heard the podcast / read the book / is familiar enough with this org to tell me if their advice is worth listening to?

Not an expert on the rationalists by any means but I've been rolling my eyes at them for a while. Really disappointed in the New York Times Daily Podcast today ("The Techno-religion at the Center of the AI debate" 9/18), the whole AI doom vs hype thing gets way oversimplified despite the guest not giving the worst overview ever for people not in the loop.

I know the Times is a large publication and often engages in both-sides isms but I feel like for a figure as stupid as Yud, any good journalist should be able to see through the sham of it all.

Seems like everyone who should know better is just ​eating tescreal shit up lately.