Center For Applied Rationality. They hosted "workshops" were people could learn to be more rational. Except there methods weren't really tested. And pretty culty. And reaching the correct conclusions (on topics such as AI doom) were treated as proof of rationality.

Edit: still host, present tense. I had misremembered some news of some other rationality adjacent institution as them shutting down, nope, they are still going strong, offering regular 4 day ~~brainwashing sessions~~ workshops.

Mesa-optimization

Why use the perfectly fine 'inner optimizer' mentioned in the references when you can just ask google translate to give you the clunkiest, most pedestrian and also wrong part of speech Greek term to use in place of 'in' instead?

Also natural selection is totally like gradient descent brah, even though evolutionary algorithms actually modeled after natural selection used to be their own subcategory of AI before the term just came to mean lying chatbot.

Mesa-optimization... that must be when you rail some crushed-up Adderall XRs, boof some modafinil for good measure, and spend the night making sure your kitchen table surface is perfectly flat with no defects abrasions deviations contusions...

I'm thinking they hired Jar-Jar Binks to the team.