Epistemic status: outside view critique based on public discourse, some HQ/location discussion, and a bit of lived experience. I know there are exceptions and counterexamples; I’m arguing about the center of gravity and revealed incentives of the Bay/EA/safety cluster, not claiming omniscience about every individual.

There’s a scene near the end of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality that I have not been able to get out of my head.

Voldemort has Harry fully under his power in the graveyard: stripped, surrounded by Death Eaters, locked in by fresh constraints. Before he moves forward with his plan for Harry and the protections around that, he pauses. He looks at his followers and asks whether anyone can see a flaw in what he’s arranged. Whether he’s overlooked anything important.

And the Death Eaters just stand there.

No one suggests a change. No one points out a flaw. Not because there’s nothing to say, but because they’re in an echo chamber: too similar, too deferential, too scared of contradicting the Dark Lord. Voldemort curses them for it. It’s framed as a core failure mode of having a smart leader surrounded by people who are too similar and too deferential to catch his blind spots when it matters most.

We all read that. Many of us nodded along. Some of us built our identities around not being like those people.

I’m writing this because, from where I’m sitting, the AI safety/rationalist/MIRI cluster has drifted disturbingly close to that exact parable: on the social level, not the math level.

I say this as someone who takes the core worries seriously. I’m not here to mock the cause. I think Yudkowsky, MIRI, and the safety crowd are, sincerely, on the side of the light. But I am saying: you wrote the story about echo chambers. Then you built one.

To be explicit about scope: I’m not claiming that every person in AI safety, or in the Bay, matches this description. I’m talking about the center of gravity you get if you weight by social influence, funding, and HQ location. There are plenty of individuals who are partial counterexamples in good ways; my claim is that the structure and revealed incentives aren’t organized around them.

The Shape of the Bubble

Let me sketch the outline as I see it.

If you look at the center of gravity of the movement’s social graph, the people near the money, the org HQs, and the social hubs, it’s something like:

Bay

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