You are a NYT Journalist. Can you survive Manifest and get your scoop?

This game is unusual for being a community joke game, but not for the IF community. Rather this is a game by and for the rationalist community, the group of Californian weirdos known for its ties to such diverse personnages as Elon Musk, Ziz LaSota, and Sam Bankman-Fried, the group that got a big kickstart through Harry Potter fanfiction. The group that may or may not be an AI cult for geeky engineers and libertarian venture capitalists. Yep, that group. I don't consider myself a rationalist, but ever since I found Scott Alexander Siskind's blog in high school and liked his short stories, I've been keeping an eye out on what they're doing.

Scott Alexander, despite his bizarre and sometimes alarming political views, still writes interesting fiction on occasion. I found this game because someone linked it in the comments of Press Any Key for Bay Area House Party, the latest in his series of satirical short stories about house parties in the Bay Area of California, where a lot of rationalists are based. As someone on Tumblr said, paraphrased, Press Any Key for Bay Area House Party "has a large number of Hitler particles but is still pretty funny".

I found this game funny, but don't know how it'd read to anyone unfamiliar with rationalists. So many of the jokes are in-jokes: about wild animal suffering, secret AI language, prediction markets, and so on. The game is also loaded with references to rationalist community figures, which will be impossible to understand if you don't know who e.g. Aella is.

Even the basic context of the game can be difficult to understand: the rationalist community has had a grudge against the New York Times since they threatened to write an article about Scott Alexander using his full name, Scott Alexander Siskind, essentially doxxing him since he wasn't going by his full name at the time. Scott unsuccessfully tried to prevent this, and the resulting NYT article, covering Scott's ties to neoreactionaries, was widely considered by rationalists to be a hit piece. There's an article in The New Yorker about it, Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley's War Against the Media, that I enjoyed reading, and of course it's mentioned on Slate Star Codex's Wikipedia article as well. Nowadays, the rationalist community's "war against the media" continues with many journalistic articles, like this one by Tara Burton, offering not-exactly-positive coverage on them, which devoted community members can get worked up about. Hence the concept of this game being about an NYT journalist who sneaks into Manifest 2025 (a rationalist meetup) and tries to go undetected.

Make no mistake though, this isn't a serious game. Like Scott's Bay Area House Party stories, it's full of absurdist comedy and pokes fun at everyone, including the rationalists themselves, which is why I liked it. See these quotes:

"Haha, that's a good one," Elena Manifold says. "If you were actually a NYT journalist, we'd have to put you into the pit, of course.

> "What's the pit?"

"The pit? Oh, that's where we put people who breach our code of conduct. It's essentially a giant vat of cryopreservation fluid, where we can freeze wrong-doers so they can be rehabilitated in a post-AGI utopia... hopefully."

"You know, I was just discussing mosquito welfare with someone. Apparently when a mosquito gets its leg trapped in a mosquito net, it's extremely painful for the mosquito. Like, they have a ton of nerve endings in their leg, and they basically die a slow, extremely painful death trapped in the net, writhing in agony. And this happens billions of times per second around the world. There are about ten thousand mosquitoes for every human on Earth, and the more mosquito nets we manufacture, the more this happens. Anyway, let's get your badge printed."

Scott begins his talk again.

"So, do you all remember the Great American Eclipse of 2017? Well, a group of programmers had been training an AI to predict eclipses, in case society ever collapsed and we lost that knowledge. They thought that in the resulting post-apocalyptic world, whoever had possession of such a technology would be viewed as gods by the remaining primitive humans. Well, it turned out that the neural network just needed one more solar eclipse to crack the code, and also that predicting solar eclipses is Turing complete. Essentially, if you can predict solar eclipses, you can predict anything. But after the eclipse, people kind of forgot about it, and stashed the laptop away in a closet somewhere. For the recent eclipse in 2024, they brought it back out. It took a few months, but eventually a couple of ACX readers figured out what they had their hands on, and brought it to me for guidance. Well, we've had AGI since 2017, but we just didn't know it. It was operating on low power mode in a closet for 7 years, so it wasn't able to do much except get really good at Minesweeper..."

I imagine people unfamiliar with rationalists could understand the game fully if they looked everything up online, though that might take a while.