The Disturbing Cult Taking Over Silicon Valley (Inside Davos For The Tech Elite)

What happens when Silicon Valley tries to optimize everything, from AI and politics to dating, reproduction, friendship and even human behavior?

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Every year, hundreds of technologists, rationalists, AI researchers, startup founders and prediction market obsessives gather in Berkeley for Manifest. Officially, it’s a conference about prediction markets. But the ideas circulating there offer a fascinating window into a much bigger worldview that is becoming increasingly influential across Silicon Valley and the AI industry.

In this episode of Power User, freelance journalist Alex Bronzini-Vender joins me to explain what he saw inside Manifest and the strange world of Silicon Valley rationalism. We discuss prediction markets, AI existential risk, effective altruism, embryo selection, radical transparency, dating experiments, Manifold, Polymarket, Eliezer Yudkowsky, the paperclip maximizer and why some attendees see markets as a tool for optimizing nearly every aspect of life.

We also get into the growing political and cultural influence of the rationalist movement, why Manifest has been compared to Davos, and what happens when ideas that once existed on obscure blogs and internet forums begin moving into the mainstream of technology and politics