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Comment by clarkm | Hacker News Reader

> Peter Thiel is known for his financial support of... neoreactionarism

Do you have examples?

Sure. He funds Eliezer Yudkowsky through MIRI; "friendly AI" futurism is at this point a branch of the "Dark Enlightenment". Thiel himself has famously said "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible".

The first sentence above is completely false. Eliezer Yudkowsky has explicitly stated that he has nothing to do with the reactionaries, and the latest stats on the friendly AI community (as gathered at lesswrong.com) show about 2% of members are neoreactionaries. Further, with FHI at Oxford, FLI at MIT, CSER at Cambridge, the Superintelligence book being endorsed by everyone from Elon Musk, to Stephen Haking, to Morgan Freeman, calling MIRI/Friendly AI a branch of the reactionaries can't be anything else but a deliberate attempt to smear people's reputation.

I'm on the record as having several severe criticisms of EY/MIRI, but being neoreactionaries is not one of them.

EY has made a point of saying that he has nothing to do with Moldbug, but ideologically there isn't much room between Moldbug-style techno-monarchism and the 'friendly AI' utopia.

I'm referring more generally to the "Dark Enlightenment" than just neoreactionaries. In that group I include pretty much any group focused on alternatives to liberal democracy, with carve-outs for Marxists and fascists. EY fits comfortably into that category (see his "Politics Is The Mind-Killer" tract).

EY definitely fits comfortably in the gerrymandered definition of Dark Enlightenment that you just created, as does a vast amount of people, including the Pirate Party for instance. EY himself would agree with you on this.

Whether this is what most other people mean with the terms you just used, is another point entirely.

I'm quite confident that Eliezer would object strenuously to this characterization!

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