Virgil Griffith arrested over North Korea: engineer arrogance, on the blockchain

I knew Virgil and considered him a friend long ago when we were both very into evolutionary inspired AI research. I met him at one of the ALife conferences (in Bloomington, IN at IU) and he later attended a group I helped found in Boston called Grey Thumb.

Our archives are still at greythumg.org including many talks on ALife, genetic programming, and theoretical biology.

Anyway a few years ago I watched him get sucked into the same vortex as many others I knew back then. I am not talking about cryptocurrency but... I guess I'll call it "alt-right" for lack of a better term. His feeds started featuring race-and-IQ material and such and I heard stories about him behaving like a misogynistic asshole which is not the Virgil I met in the 2000s. Seems like a ton of people got their brains sucked out around 2012-2016. I know many others including a once brilliant writer and artist who now sounds like Vox Day and has done nothing but rant about it for years (and zero artistic output of course).

Virgil understands a lot about evolution, so I spent some time working on a letter intended as an attempt to deprogram him. I took the approach of explaining from first principles why I reject this ideology for not only moral but also practical and theoretical reasons. (I now feel motivated to turn it into a blog post if I can find the time, but I have a startup and am time poor these days.)

When I saw him get into Ethereum stuff I congratulated him and hoped it would give him something sufficiently interesting to do.

Anyway I wish I had some Earth-shattering point or revelation here, but this just saddens me.

Virgil had a misanthropic streak I can empathize with as someone else who grew up as a geek having an awful time in public school. Underneath that he struck me as a basically playful person with a powerful mind who could have done great things. I wish he would have found something more productive to sink his brain into like AI.

Now I'll have to listen to the media trash him too, calling him a "techbro" when he was anything but that.

Like I said I was hoping Ethereum would be that but that was before I saw how toxic that world was becoming.

These events make it look worse than I thought. Honestly I partly blame whatever weird nexus he fell into. I feel like someone brainwashed him and strapped a bomb to him and sent him off to do their dirty work. None of the other high up bag holders in Ethereum went to the DPRK and now they are washing their hands of it. Anything to pump the token value I guess. I hope if that's the case someone is held accountable but they won't be. I bet they won't even contribute to his legal defense fund.

I also wish I was less time poor. There is something deeply toxic that has infected our community. I am still not quite able to see it in its entirety, though I can see its edges and when people get infected by it its obvious. For years I've been straining to compose some magnum opus to deprogram people but I can't grasp the essence of the thing quite well enough. Maybe this is how people felt when Scientology took over Hollywood.

I remember being in the same circles circa 2012. I found LessWrong to be a bunch of not very interesting wank and pseudoprofound bullshit. I couldn't decide if neoreaction was serious or some kind of many layered satire (later learned it was 100% serious). I know too much about actual evolutionary theory to buy into the IQ cult much. When Gamergate hit my reaction was "this is the stupidest thing I have ever seen... why would anyone actually care about this?"

Then they dropped like flies. Vast numbers of very bright people that I knew got "pilled" in one way or another. As it goes in the poem "Howl" I saw the great minds of my generation... something something something. I personally know at least a dozen formerly smart and creative hackers, scientists, and artists who got their brains sucked out in that era.

I still don't get it. I feel like a survivor of some kind of zombie plague slowly making contact with other survivors.

It's so weird its enough to make me consider the strongest versions of the Russia / underground Reich conspiracy theories and think we were hit by some kind of scientifically designed mind control project... but Ockham's razor suggests simpler explanations unless I see evidence to the contrary.

It was most likely just an outbreak of contagious nonsense that happened to spread virulently through a certain population. I think the hooks were male insecurity (common among male nerds) and a very catchy form of pseudoprofound bullshit that felt like deep thought and profound insight.

I've heard some great podcast interviews on it. I think the answer is some of both, since I do think political opportunists of many sorts manipulated and rode the wave.

I do also recall LW as having a fever ward stench too when I visited it back then... not as overpowering as the 'chans, but bad. Its the stench of a lot of people thinking about and discussing nothing with many words.

In any case maybe we will emerge with a greater immunity to pseudoprofundity and superficial appeals to ego wounds and personal triggers (like male insecurity).

> There is something deeply toxic that has infected our community. I am still not quite able to see it in its entirety, though I can see its edges and when people get infected by it its obvious.

I think SlateStarCodex(!) said it well, recently:

> Rationalists wasted years worrying about various named biases, like the conjunction fallacy or the planning fallacy. But most of the problems we really care about aren’t any of those. They’re more like whatever makes the global warming skeptic fail to connect with all the evidence for global warming.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/26/mental-mountains/

Nick Johnson from the Ethereum Foundation tweets what he thought the guy was doing - Virgil Grififth seriously, literally, thought that he personally could, singlehandedly, through the power of his own intellect, bring peace between North and South Korea ... if only those dum-dums in the US Government would let him apply ENOUGH BLOCKCHAIN.

https://twitter.com/nicksdjohnson/status/1201212127945605122