
Virgil Griffith arrested over North Korea: engineer arrogance, on the blockchain - davidgerard
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/12/01/virgil-griffith-arrested-over-north-korea-visit-engineer-arrogance-but-on-the-blockchain/
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davidgerard
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](https://twitter.com/nicksdjohnson/status/1201212127945605122)

~~~
pvg
That kind of use of 'Peace' is pretty standard communist regime verbiage,
though. Maybe Griffith thought that but the word in the talk title is not that
strong a basis on which to draw this conclusion. Maybe Nick Johnson knows more
- the tweet doesn't say much beyond musing on the title.

------
api
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.

~~~
davidgerard
I know other people who know Virgil (surprised how many), and they talk about
him getting "rat-pilled" \- getting into LessWrong Rationalism, neoreaction,
race and IQ theories.

There's lots of LWers in Ethereum, but (of course) most are much more on the
ball than to get into scientific racism.

~~~
api
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.

~~~
lidHanteyk
It's because, just like with Objectivism before it, once one start to accept
neoreactionary tenets, then their conclusions seem unavoidable. They're less
illogical than one would hope or imagine.

The biggest inoculant, personally, was reading "Guns, Germs, & Steel" in my
late teens. Other important concepts that have helped me to design arguments
against bullshit:

* Pedigree collapse (undermines race realism and Great Replacement)

* Sex chromosomes/allosomes (undermines binary sexual theories and pre-queer gender theory)

* (Computational) complexity theory (undermines classical analysis of Chinese Room, Simulation Arguments, Newcomb's Paradox, other LW favorites)

* Plate tectonics/basic geology (undermines space denial)

* Worryingly: History of the USA (undermines Lost Cause, Deep State, etc.)

There is a big underlying current that I have noticed: Those who committed to
classical liberalism were the ones swept away, while neoliberals,
metaliberals, feminists, and Marxists were not moved. This is the big change
in the shape of the left wing, to the extent that such a thing exists, and
probably a large part of why it seems so much further to the left than it used
to be. The alt-right tide washed in, and washed out a large part of the center
of the beach when it went back out.

Also, as you point out, people aren't getting laid. It is depressing to ponder
whether the _real_ inoculant may have been the fact that I had a girlfriend in
high school.

~~~
api
Yeah, I also learned to talk to other humans in my late teens and had
girlfriends (and friends in general both male and female). I think a lot of
this bollocks preys on people with severe social issues. Unfortunately it
sucks them into hate and resentment circle jerks and keeps them from finding
actual escape hatches.

BTW I have lots of issues with Ayn Rand but IMHO Objectivism is less loony
than this stuff. She once wrote that "racism is the lowest form of
collectivism," and I agree. She wouldn't be a friend of this stuff if she were
still around, but she died in the late 80s. I actually think reading Rand in
my teens and early 20s was an inoculant for me. I do think she was an original
and very often misunderstood thinker even though I don't think she was
ultimately successful. I consider her a liberal heretic rather than a right-
winger and oddly enough I compare her to Marx as someone who had brilliant
insights but whose prescriptions don't quite work.

This podcast is worth a listen:

[https://parallaxviews.podbean.com/e/ep-8-jeffrey-a-tucker-
on...](https://parallaxviews.podbean.com/e/ep-8-jeffrey-a-tucker-on-murray-
rothbard-the-libertarian-critique-of-the-alt-right/)

