Xyra Sinclair snapshot 2025JUL28
stillness jockey, strategic snack
Hi! I'm a friendly soul, maybe a bit outsizedly enigmatic, suspect I'm unusually fit for strategic grantmaking, and hope I can enliven your day. Was a military brat from poverty-background valedictorian parents, beloved Boy Scout, competitive ballroom dancer, ultramarathoner at 16, moksha seeker meditating 3+ hours a day at 17, obsessed with effective altruism as a lone Floridian in 2015, an Army Diver, a West Point cadet, 2/2 international academic competition winner, pitched a billionaire on post nuclear war logistics for AI alignment, am now Divinity-pilled and relieved of x-risk fear, experienced tremendous inner transformation on estrogen, and am into peaceful, unclenched living; surrendering to more psychosomatic transformation while also showing up for myself better; and gradually working on concrete, billion-dollar epistemic infrastructure ideas.
note: beyond flashing bits of information about my silly self, I deeply practice being corrigible to reality's signals!
what I want
- better psychic enzymes, increasing the metabolization of experience (e.g. grief in heart). more intrapsychic handshakes and cross-talk. more contact with reality, bringing more of myself to every moment. more sustained and peak visceral clarity.
- more safety, including more money. $25k/year in Berkeley IS poverty, and while it's taught me things, it's time to move on.
- find and befriend more people channeling ultra-high-wattage, epistemically-inclined titan energy.
- a bf (open to a gf too, I'm poly), and to experience more somatic changes from further getting comfortable with my femininity.
- bring more awareness and inner slack to interactions.
- build a decacorn epistemic infra company.
- someday, perhaps build an academy of vasocomputation for ultra high wattage folks to harness their full potential.
things I offer
- I tend to ask questions that get to the heart of an issue.
- outsized messy interdisciplinary clarity. I can probably steward over $1B of OpenPhil money better than them.
- deep acceptance for weirdness and shadows, with a Chaplain's confidentiality.
all my tweets (one could e.g. throw them into Google AI Studio and prompt about me.)
self modifying for x-risk
- by early 2024 I decided that I needed to live so as to realize most of my expected impact on AI x-risk by the end of 2026, because after that, AI outcomes would be presumed to be largely locked in. And maybe that wouldn't be the median case, but as an uncommonly strategic strong longtermist, I had to be strong enough to worry about say, that 10-20% of early tail outcomes. In August 2024 I was facing the tough reality that I just didn't seem productive enough to reliably realize a significant fraction of my potential impact (e.g. I could not build my startup software fast enough, my nuclear alignment continuity work was not going anywhere). There was this old silly problem of "emotions" plaguing me--if only there was a pill to just magically make all your inner gunk go away (now I understand to be a very naive view of how things work). I was trying somatic therapy and was making some progress but had to accept that it just wasn't reliably working fast enough, and that something drastic would have to happen. Women tend to process their emotions better, so yeah I figured I could try estrogen, maybe 20% chance I like it and want to stay on it long term, but I figured there was a decent chance I could take it for 3-5 months and cry out lots of debilitating suppressed grief and then go back to testosterone dominance. So yeah I started estrogen in OCT 2024, and immediately got so much more than I bargained for, and haven't wanted to go back, although I have experimented a bit with exogenous testosterone. I don't know about gender identity, but I know that I deeply love dropping into my body and relating to the world with less armor. The old scripts I was being run by just weren't actually a decent fit for the world I found myself in, so I've faced a lot of ego death and have been finding increasing lightness and wellbeing in daily life.
misc interesting historical achievements
- as a kid went down all black diamonds with no poles my first day skiing (Wisconsin tho), swam class III rapids in 45°F water, sat off the front of the boat on class IV rapids holding myself down simply with a D wring between my legs. I tend to be much more responsible about risks nowadays (am also much less freakishly fit), but I think rationalist/nerds tend to underrate the knowingness that can arise that you are actually safe in certain intense situations.
- my public arts middle and high school didn't have sports (although I was on the competitive varsity ballroom dance team) so I did distance running on my own, working up to multiple marathons at 15
- honor grad of Army dive school, which involves lots of fun/brutal "fuck fuck" games, simulated drowning, cutting steel underwater with a 10,000° F exothermic lance, and the fucked up intoxicating satisfaction of seeing lots of folks including former D1 swimmers quit (85% of my cohort failed out and got reclassed).
- call me crazy, but I genuinely craved to be a battalion commander within a few months at my first unit at 19 yo. At least I was able to be appointed to an E-6 position working directly with the top-3 (CO, 1LT, 1SG) as an E-3.
- competed on West Point's premier military skills competition team and then the Triathlon team, which ofc added insane challenge to my cadet experience. like 5:30 am swims, 15 hours of steady-state cardio a week plus practice logistics time, on top of my ~22 semester hour course load and multitude of cadet duties. my body was quite fast twitchy for triathlon too which meant it was really easy for me to overly damage body by going too lactic. after 10 months on the West Point triathlon team, days after I did my my sub 5 hour half-ironman and 1:28 half marathon, I deadlifted 335 lbs (2.2x bw).
- beat all the Western countries in a math modeling competition, placing 11th of 3100 teams (ICM problem D, 2018). Mind you this was the same weekend I had a ruck march and a SAMI (terribly strict room inspection) that took up about 1/4 of my the time for the competition.
- year after this, placed 1st out of 4800 3-person teams in the 100 hour Interdisciplinary Contest in Modeling. It was a subjective competition but I basically knew I was going to win. My math was even ELEMENTARY but my clarity of philosophy rizzed up the judges exactly like I predatorily intended.
- was an international sperm donor (wanted to get over instinct to have kids that could sway my EA ambitions, offer better sperm than the worrying counterfactual lads, and perhaps increase the richness of my life with a minor co-parenting role that some women are into) and dated and lived with a wonderful woman 18 years older than me.
- won 30 Verdansk Warzone mobile solos in a row, averaging a 56 K/D over 10 of them. Our mechanics are mid, we're just carried by game sense. I don't play video games much anymore, but it's hard to match the visceral intoxication of basically playing the Hunger Games with dozens of real people, and when you are on a hot streak, no matter how tricky and intense people with hundreds or thousands of hours try to be, you can just eat them up [in the silly little video game] like a mythic predator.
- bested a GM in blitz chess960. we got decent mid-game chaotic intuition.
- came up with some solid optimizations for hardware streaming top-k sorting networks that save vast majority of dynamic power for large k. not a hardware jockey but in another life...
- in person pitched a billionaire on unconventional strategies to make nuclear war less of a mega L for everyone (e.g. buying and storing cheap comms networks to restart economies faster and counter starvation).
- managing to take like HGH, retatrutide, MOTS-c, and a bunch of other life enhancing stuff, on an income of $25k/year in Berkeley. Investing your last bit of money into yourself like that--that is frugality.
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these provide statistical evidence of how I've been shaped, and are a result of past conditions and grace. My values keep evolving, so I acknowledge this is far from the peak of stuff to be pleased about.
fun tweets
some epistemic infra ideas
- sophisticated software purely designed help you sort a bunch of items/hypertext as cognitively efficiently as possible.
like a view where you can drag items to the left or right,
being able to click 2 items and hit a key representing whether A is higher than B and your confidence in that that then enforces a soft invariant when dragging,
being able to elicit higher order comparisons like A-B > 2(C-D),
disparities are gradually colored more red to help u prioritize,
there's modes that just prompt u with 2 at a time while trying to minimize the overall cognitive retrieval cost,
LLMs can look at all your items and comparisons so far, guess prompts that will yield same comparisons as you, test them, lightly pre-sort remaining items and help you prioritize comparisons to learn which prompts are best predicting your intentions. -
extremely underrated how much personal and interpersonal cognition (and in turn, epistemics) are affected by simple biology. the differences in felt sense of safety, oxytocin, cortisol, testosterone, estrogen, hunger, energy levels, etc. that simple pharmaceutical interventions can yield can make or break people and their epistemics and agency long-term.
thus ideally we'd have something like SBF-style-funded biohacking kits to help impact-driven people experiment.
include e.g. oxytocin nasal spray, variety of stimulants, propranolol (beta-blocker that blunts adrenaline-driven anxiety; low-risk tool for unlearning trauma patterns), testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, tirzepatide or retatrutide, etc. Doesn't have to be a crazy amount necessarily, just like a few weeks' worth to help people figure out if they want to go through the hoops of their medical system. - exopriors.com