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And while a sex-cult abusing women is one thing. Theft is another. More emphasis should be put though on the lying scums in their ranks, like the polyamorous SBF and Caroline Ellison or their guru and its $15m ill-acquired mansion in the UK (which hasn't been clawed back yet but could).
And speaking of lying scums stealing money, we know about several making constant announcements were they lie, lie and then lie some more to ensure a never-ending stream of money and insane valuation of their proprietary, closed, not altruistic at all companies.
A despicable movement and I, for one, I'm very happy that there are companies out there releasing open-weights models so that the thieving-and-sex-cult at least get some competition.
That picture is literally a joke based on a meme, which is based on a porn star's promotional image. To the extent feminists care, I would expect that care to be about the underlying subject matter rather than about this satire of it.
Predictably the original submission got flagged.
It's terrible as a fan fiction. Not a single character acts anything like the original, the world is unrecognizable, and the plot is derailed entirely by the end of the second or third chapter. The original story needs to be distorted beyond recognition because the author's bizarre worldview works even more poorly in a fantasy world than it does in reality.
It's demonstrably effective as a manifesto, but that is despite the fact that it is riddled with scientific and conceptual errors.
It's one of the worst things I've ever read. The fact that people like it is evidence of the bizarre incestuous nature of the community that produced it.
Anyone who knows anything about Harry Potter fandom in those years knows that its readers were always thirsty for something new in the Potterverse to read or be exposed to. By latching onto that universe's incredible popularity, Yudkowsky exposed a large number of young, inquisitive people to the ideas of rationalism. It was essentially a recruitment mechanism, one that was wildly successful. Many rationalists freely admit that their first exposure to rationalism was via HPMOR.
Excuse me. It was Draco Malfoy, our rapist deuteragonist, who said that. Our hero merely agreed.
Maybe Harry Potter fans would read a bad fantasy book, but HPMOR is not just a bad fantasy book. It is repugnant to healthy people from the first few pages.
Do you dislike succession too? Some people just need completely heroic protagonists in their stories. Thats fine, but it doesnt make the story bad.
Hundreds of pages later, Harry uses the first iota of power he is given to prohibit students from playing Quidditch according to rules he believes are irrational. There is an immediate outcry which he dismisses because it's just the mewling of inferior intellects. It's hard for me to see any signs of growth here.
(Harry's contempt for sports is amusing, given that about a third of the story is dedicated to his love of cheating at a particularly moronic sport invented by the Lord Voldemort ripping off Ender's Game.)
I don't claim Yudkowsky believes these things consciously, but they are omnipresent in his story and they reflect his bizarre attitudes to morality. The fact that he acknowledges at the very end that the characters he created are fools doesn't change the fact that he spent six hundred thousand words holding them up as paragons of virtue and rewards them with apotheosis.
For many reasons voldemort is an ultimately worthy adversary. Much of that has to do with Harry's biases that come from being too invested in rationalism. Since he considers himself above everyone he's ever met he longs to find someone he considers his better and voldemort fills this role. He wants a mentor so badly that he's willing to throw out his entire ideology to keep him. I think yudkowsky's portrayal of voldemort as the ultimate adversary to rationalism is better than pretty much any plot arc in the original story. Harry does ultimately completely reject voldemort so Im not sure how sexual violence, genocide, and mass murder as treated as forgivable. From the very beginning Harry is deeply concerned with human rights, his distractions and the path he takes toward achieving human rights in this messed up world is again an integral part of the story.
> The fact that he acknowledges at the very end that the characters he created are fools
I think this is my biggest issue with your characterization. Yudkowsky shows harry to be a fool from the very beginning, as you pointed out with the draco/ron stuff. With his dismissal of much of hermiones advice. He very consciously did not create harry as some ubermencsch character who can do no wrong. He shows that harry believes himself to be a parity of virtue, but that he very much is not until hermione's death.
But then if you did not read it it seems a little disingenuous to say "this is a bad book", because you would not only not know but anything you did know you would not understand.
You can be a sexually predatory sociopath and still be of value in Yudkowsky's world, but like sports and you're dismissed in your entirely within a single paragraph.
The ending? https://hpmor.com/chapter/122
> "Ah..." Harry said. This was very hard to say. "Actually, the rest of the world doesn't know this part, not even the Headmistress. But in point of fact you were one hundred and twelve percent correct about [spoiler], and I'll remember for future reference that although 'Dark' and 'evil' may not technically be the same thing, there's a great big statistical correlation."
> "Oh," said Hermione, and fell silent again.
> "You're not saying that you told me so?" said Harry. His mental model of Hermione was yelling: I TOLD YOU SO! DIDN'T I TELL YOU SO, MR. POTTER? DIDN'T I TELL YOU? [spoiler], I SAID, BUT YOU DIDN'T LISTEN TO ME!
It feels like most people who criticize the story didn't actually read it, and just start with the premise that Yudkowsky sucks at writing, then conclude that obviously Harry Potter must be Mary Sue, and that whatever Harry says is what Yudkowsky wants you to believe.
If you actually read the story, you will find out that many things that Harry said and believed turned out to be wrong. That ending was written by Yudkowsky, too. The characters that disagreed with Harry since the beginning, such as Hermione and Dumbledore, were written by Yudkowsky, too. Perhaps there is a little more depth in the story than if you assume that it must be a Mary Sue story.
Pretty much all fan fiction is terrible literature. I find yudkowsky's prose to be above average for fan fic which admittedly is just saying hes among the best of the worst. Every single fanfic ever written that doesnt end after 1 book has significant boring sections, theres no editor.
> Not a single character acts anything like the original
This is the point. Yudkowsky recognized that the hp world acts as a natural foil for his ideology. By changing the characters he points out the original characters flaws, but also the ways they are better than the rationalist versions of the characters. I dont understand why people claim fanfic should be always be faithful to the original setting. Using it as a foil can work too. The characters in the original, especially the authority figures are all incredibly flat. Why would you want more of that? Even the ones he largely keeps the same, like dumbledore, he explores in a new light which makes them seem different even though they are very similar to the original. The reveal that the 2 Dumbledore's are actually very similar(the exact same?) characters is central to understanding rationalist harry's deficiencies.
> The fact that people like it is evidence of the bizarre incestuous nature of the community that produced it.
Agreed but I think this says more about how crap HP fan fic tends to be than anything else. Yudkowsky saw unmet demand and used it to shoehorn his ideology in
'"Voldemort," said the old wizard. "I understand him now at last. Because to believe that the world is truly like that, you must believe there is no justice in it, that it is woven of darkness at its core. I asked you why he became a monster, and you could give no reason. And if I could ask him, I suppose, his answer would be: Why not?
They stood there gazing into each other's eyes, the old wizard in his robes, and the young boy with the lightning-bolt scar on his forehead.
"Tell me, Harry," said the old wizard, "will you become a monster?"
"No," said the boy, an iron certainty in his voice.
"Why not?" said the old wizard.'
as you can see its nothing special, just good enough
What a classic narcissist.
> Main character syndrome stops being a character flaw the day you join a religion whose plot has you in the lead.
This is some great writing.
Sure, but the realm of fictional problems is so huge that we just can't come up with solutions to all of them. I like watching the Terminator movies (well, the first couple) as much as the next person but I can't be spending my time imagining how we could defeat skynet.
"Somewhere, some rationalist-brained person is reading this and saying I'm a "low decoupler", and that whether they run a sex cult has nothing to do with whether they're correct."
That's enough internet for today, back to playing video games
And idk why it's really worth mentioning anyway, as a gay furry I suppose vanilla normie straights are STILL hung up on what people do with their sex lives. As long as it's legal and consensual who gaf? Y'all, apparently.
This would be a _Fascinating_ citation.
First hit in a Kagi search.
Hopefully this isn't to imply that people with fantasies actually want to have non-consensual sex in some capacity. If so then this completely misunderstands sexual fantasy!
I think in one common understanding of the word, that I assume the OP was using, having a taboo fantasy that you merely roleplay with a partner you are deeply intimate with, in full consent from both, can very well be classified as "a kink", even if what you're experiencing is the not really SA.
Based on your response, I'm assuming that in your understanding, it would only be "a kink" if it was a desire to actually experience a real sexual assault, which of course no one, or perhaps only an extreme extreme minority, actually wishes for. I don't believe OP meant to imply that this is at all common.
> reasonable evidence that their influence isn't prevalent because they're right, and that they would have ulterior motives for continuing to preach that the world is coming to an end even if evidence showed otherwise.
They make a claim about a specific community in San Francisco, that is tied together by a mix of AI doomerism and sexual relations. And it's not at all surprising or some farfetched claim that people who enjoy having sex with someone might adopt their ideas, at least publicly, for fear of losing that sexual connection.
am i naive? in the direction you pose this, i can't imagine it's that common and if that happens i don't feel sorry for our imagined victim. being a bay area guy who attends so many orgies that AI doomerism rubs off on him? and he keeps spreading it to other people and that some substantial bulk of doomerism is due to this mechanism such that it voids the ideological purity of doomerism? i'm not a bay area guy and i haven't attended these orgies but i hope they have other shit to talk about at the orgies than AI
if the relationship is flipped - being genuinely interested in the theory but then being roped into weird sex shit that you didn't ask for, sure that that sounds predatory. a sex cult where AI is instrumental, rather than an AI cult where sex is instrumental. it would be more remarkable imo but i don't know if anyone is saying out loud that's what's happening.
I think this article kind of misses a crucial point. They weren't always AI doomers, that's a thing they picked up along the way. Their core beliefs are 1. That they are the smartest, and 2. That this makes them morally superior because consequentialism (This sort of follows. If you believe in consequentialism, leaving all your decisions to the superior consequence predictor is surely the moral thing to do)
Maybe one day they will stop believing in AI doom, but they will never, ever stop believing they belong to the intellectually and thus morally elect. The day any of them do that they have either broken with the cult or died.
Maybe that’s why they’re so pissed, ChatGPT’s useless verbosity is threatening to put them out of a job.
yeah, it's no coincidence that AIs sound a bit like them -- a lot of the people doing the instruction tuning are affiliated with these people.
And it's also a profound self-identity threat to them if that kind of intelligence is nothing special.
Problem is, Aella has made it her business to speak about it publicly, and the parent commenter(and I)'d be happier if we didn't read about it. It's fine to say that.
I'm not hung up about anything others are doing: but I genuinely, passionately, don't want to be informed about it.
Why is that a problem? Just don't read her stuff if you're not interested.
There are lots of people talking all the time about stuff I'm not interested in.
I agree, but... If you work hard to become a public figure, you must have known in advance that there'd be public opinions of you, right?
I find it distasteful that people want to be some sort of public figure while expecting that other people's opinions should be private.
"Why Do All These Homosexuals Keep Sucking My Cock?"
https://theonion.com/why-do-all-these-homosexuals-keep-sucki...
This retort is disingenuous when almost everyone is on algorithmic social media and trying to chase clout and drive revenue with engagement bait.
I would never read Aella's Substack in my free time, but I have a good idea who she is and what she posts just by virtue of having a feed that mostly gives me tech and politics stuff.
https://aella.substack.com/p/my-birthday-gangbang
With my approval, organizers rejected anyone associated with e/acc, because we don’t need to give nice things to people hastening our doom
Really, the most questionable thing here is that someone wrote a 2,000+ word essay about someone else's sex life.
If you don't understand human social interactions very well, or otherwise assume you live in a "world of ideas", then this may not seem salient. However, it is.
Because what we have to explain is why there's a community of people in northern california who deliver unargued prophecies about the end of human civilisation as-if their prophetic ability is a given.
The answer, unsuprisingly, is sex. This is not an unusual answer in the world of "prophetic communication". What, in the end, is prophecy as a social practice? It is some ideological Leader with followers who impart to that leader a 'charismatic power' of foreknowledge based on their attachement to that leader.
What is the mechanism of this attachemnt? In otherwords: how is this style of prophecy spreading around the AI doomer community, if not by plain argument and evidence? Sex.
> fennec butt
he was hiding in plain sight all along
The way I see it, sex is a sort of portal to another world. This sounds a bit weird, but it really does and should have a great deal of meaning behind it, as it is/was central to our species. If it becomes mundane for someone, this really does ruin a lot of that person's life. Even if you completely remove the judgment element. If sex doesn't occur in the context of a love relationship, it's just uncanny territory. It comes with some emptiness.
There's a proper and healthy way to live. This is from my life experience. Stray too much off-course and you will experience consequences. It's just the way things are.
it is as gently and friendly of a warning as it could be.
i would say rather less nicely: people! don't be degenerate! it does not worth it. it causes harm to you, to neighbours, to bystanders too, even if you dont intend.
That kind of thinking would be acceptable if we were like… 8 years old. But as an adult, having that reasoning process is embarrassing.
dude straight up said other people are Doing Life Wrong
The post in it's entirety reads as a religious rant, but it might have had something to offer to the reader if you had bothered to provide some sort of philosophical foundation for why you feel that the middle way is the superior way. And that all excess is inherently not only nearly identical in terms of effect, but by definition harmful.
About orgies, it bothers me how much people who never frequented these circles have so many opinions about how bad or unhealthy they are. I know religious people who have the "healthy sex life" and are completely deranged. I could say that they are that way because of their sex life, but I would be as wrong as you are.
Promiscuous people are as annoying as those who refuse to eat at the same restaurant twice. You have an insatiable appetite for novelty that you need to see normalized in others-- to defer ever having to face the very emptiness we're describing.
If you actually found it fulfilling, you wouldn't need to sell others on something that sells itself.
> AI Safety Is Mostly A Sex Cult.
> I don't think these people should make policy. (1/?)
One of the learnings from things like the whole Epstein saga has been there are a lot of sex cults in the policy making world and, yes, the people making policy generally shouldn't be. But I'm not sure this article actually comes up with a good explanation of why these particular people shouldn't be making policy. People having active sex lives isn't a disqualifying trait. Being in a cult doesn't disqualify people from being in politics. It is routine and expected that fields will have a lot of similar people in them (as I recall the overlap between security researchers and the furry community is unusual too, and that is hardly more important than justifying a passing comment).
It is more routine than the article writer seems to think for all the people in a small field to know each other and get on really well.
Let's survey the American voters
> You do understand what a cult is?
Pretty much any religion and a few other organisations beside. Basically people who believe something strongly. What do you think a cult is, in the sense the article is using it?
No one considers Catholicism, or Protestantism, or Baptism cults. There may be specific communities that are cults that claim to be parts of these churches, but that doesn't mean that "pretty much any religion is a cult".
> No one considers Catholicism, or Protestantism, or Baptism cults.
Speak for yourself. I was coercively and forcefully added to the Roman Catholic church when I was baptised. Attempts to record myself as removed (the 'Count Me Out' campaign) were met with familial and attempted Church pressure. I was asked to visit the church to discuss the 'impacts of my decision'. I was not recorded as leaving, and the church updated its rules so people in Ireland could no longer request to leave the church.
The ways cults control you can vary, and they don't have to involve threats or violence to be coercive control. Threatening to take away someone's community for a lack of belief is controlling.
Well, technically military is run now by maga incel death cult, so yeah I give you that one. I forgot I was discussing on US forum.
As of what cult is, from Merriam-Webster: “ a group (such as an organization or religious sect) with tenets and practices regarded as coercive, insular, or dangerous”
Generally we today discuss as cults manipulative social sects that sureound around one leading authoritative figure who has extensive psychological control over rest of the members. Often these groups use these strange dynamics to abuse members, do financial crimes, or even murder people (I guess the Manson case and Jonestown are most famous, Cali has a history of this).
As for me, I never listen to a man wearing a fedora no matter what his credentials.
> Well, technically military is run now by maga incel death cult, so yeah I give you that one. I forgot I was discussing on US forum.
Well, we're speaking in English. I was careful to phrase that in a way that applied to what I'm pretty sure is any English-speaking country. Anywhere that votes could put anyone they like in charge of the military for any reason, cult or no cult. It isn't technically relevant - or practically relevant in most cases. It is just a question of whether the cult has the numbers or not.
I wonder if it just that you try to weasel away from negative publicity by trying to flex the meaning of words to turn the meaning of this bluesky post upside down? In that case I might suggest you to tread carefully. When nothing is true, everything is possible and all that.
But when used simply as "a cult", in a context outside of history or anthropology, it's meaning is virtually always meaning 1 from Merriam-Webster - "a group (such as an organization or religious sect) with tenets and practices regarded as coercive, insular, or dangerous". And there is no doubt that, rightly or wrongly, this is what the article author means to accuse Rationality/EA of being.
Sometimes people can be too smart for their own good. Like a frontier model in an eternal hallucination loop, you can create entire seemingly consistent realities in your head and end up bringing others into it.
More like the worst porn film ever made.
A sex cult though is obviously a salacious framing.
It is just sad if even San Francisco culture is trending toward a sexual morality and sexual closed mindedness on par with bible thumpers.
As a side note. If I had a choice to oppose a booming ai comoany, or become the billionaire founder of it, I would still choose to become the founder and then use my resource to do something about. It certainly feels hypocritical, but if you want to stop a boulder rolling down hill, what can you do besides run ahead of it and try stop it?
Maybe the first thing to do is to stop making the boulder bigger?
I too feel exactly what you are saying. I also think that a lot of good role models are simply often among less visible people, sometimes less ambitious. I am not assuming any hard correlation between the two, though. And we also need to accept that we are all only humans, not infallible. Values are more important than singular acts (within reasonable acceptance limits of course).
Anyway. I strongly recommend reading what Bill Gates has to say about AI. I can be wrong, but based on your comment it seems to me that you may find it interesting.
Here is a Forbes article that goes over what is currently known: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2026/04/08/what-we...
Of course, none of this would be strong enough for accusing him of something in court, but it seems very implausible that his own account is truthful.
Bomb it, obviously.
There are those who live lives where this can be tamed/sublimated in a mostly socially acceptable manner, with the socially unacceptable elements "hidden from view" and not too dangerous or harmful. And there are those, unfortunate perhaps, that find themselves (suddenly) unconstrained by their social environment or suddenly imbued with sufficient power to do as they wish. Not many survive such freedom or power, morally in tact, because morality doesnt properly belong to that domain.
The story of Oscar Wilde captures this doubleness to our nature -- split by the socially acceptable. He lived a life of relatively unconstrained freedom in private, perfectly constructing a socially acceptable veneer to his "entanglements" with young boys and the like. Until one environment this pretence could not survive: a court room.
You could see the lesson of Oscar Wilde as about the hypocrisy of people. Or, if you want to remain a (post-cynical) optimist, about the need to keep people like Wilde out of court rooms so that their public image serves as a role model of sorts.
Role models are just those people who never find themselves in court. And this is not necessarily a bad thing. Young children are apes too, and all a role model can be is a shaming mechanism to civilise what they will, eventually, hide from social view -- tame it and make it, ideally not too dangerous or harmful. Perhaps say, only a thoughtless bullying, only a trivial kind of stealing, only revenge on someone who might at least deserve it. But who knows.
None of our species, at least, can become a role model for real. This would induce such a drastic split in the psyche with a tremdenous shameful repression of our real nature; and any real attempt creates profoundly unself-aware monsters. All role models can be is an attempt to ameliorate. An impossible standard that internalises a mild helpful sort of shame
The role models people keep are all merely partial truths. They are, necessarily, an abstracted and partial view of the person or people underneath. Whether or not the universe is technically infinite, we are dealing in an informational reality that is effectively infinite.
No singular, static ideal can survive on its own in the face of change across an effectively ifinite domain. Ultimately, growth is learning how to let yourself be like "them", and honestly evaluate whether or not they are represemting some truth. That's easy to do with the things we all typically agree on, but much harder when it comes down to things like murder, or abuse.
The key is to not lose your own truth in the process - to come out of that process being someone you can actually love - or, comprehensively identify with.
In any case, it's hard to demonize anyone if you understand where they're coming from. ..and, yes, that means nobody is the perfect creature they think everyone should be. But if one doesn't undertake this process of growth on their own - to include, but not be limited to what others are - you will simply be exposed to it in reality, and have to deal with it anyways.
you cannot remove complex information dynamics from a reality you are founded in without losing the fundamental benefit of that foundation. I.e., you cannot remove the pain or strife from life. ..but, you can add to it new experiences and adaptions that make the whole thing worthwhile.
And hoping for a miracle, maybe. In my experience it's not so impossible to have hope, if we let go of the ambition of being some kind of ... Harry Potter? Almost as if a lot of the fear from the evil of the world came from inside.
Glad he's at least admitting it as a possibility.
Also: you know, you don't need to rely on lossy proxies like how much or how little sex do the arguments' proponents have. You can just read the arguments!
If anyone is serious about this topic they will find a new spokesperson immediately.
What changed is that they can no longer be dismissed as bunch of loonies who confuse cheap science fiction with reality, because that "cheap science fiction" became the actual reality. So obviously, instead of considering the arguments, the next step is to try and paint them as loony sex cult, because this lets people continue to do the stupid thing and then act surprised, and proclaim no one could have predicted this (and the "sex cult" obviously does not count because it was a "sex cult").
It's californication into the "rationalist" community as it currently stands is no surprise. Every person I've met deep in this community either seemed to me a narcissist (if male) or, politely and mildly, coquettish (if female). With several relationships I've observed a clear union of the two. I hadn't yet put this so clearly together with the "AI Saftey" crowd, despite being directly adjacent to it all for quite awhile and seeing the cross-proliferation.
My own analysis had concerned their philosophical naivety, general lack of actual computer science knowledge and generic shallowness of understanding of any domain outside their own research and a kind of "science-fiction" version of philosophy and rationalism. I hadn't connected this yet to their strange personalities, but the apoclypticism fits and neatly bridges these together.
So what became of the New Atheist project to create a "secular religion" -- an apocalyptic sex cult furnished by a blend of sci-fi, pop-philosophy, and cute parables from polymath medical professionals. All in all then, it seems they succeeded.
This is the minority split. Most of the online new atheism writers became progressives/social justice/"woke 1.0" people. That trend has receded, so I couldn't tell you what they're doing now. (Probably blocking each other on Mastodon.)
The rationalists are the ones who stayed behind and decided to stick to doing logic and math in their heads instead of thinking thoughts the normal way.
People chasing the absolute rational are in my experience numbing their emotional part because theres something they can't look at. Or people that chase success above all are driven by their "unresolved packages" as well. I'm not saying that any of this is wrong per se, it's not black and white. But it's the context for what people do, say, and think. They are human after all. We need to consider context and not only the idea itself.
and if you put something trivially true into the blank the implication seems logical, and the argument feels powerful. but simply putting a true claim at the end doesn't mean that everything before follows from this claim. (and even if they do the argument is not a total description of all the causal chains that influence the outcomes.)
of course it's hard to do a careful survey of the facts and weigh them and then deduce some likelihoods for possibilities. because some aspects are unprecedented (investment ferocity, AI results/progress) while others are very much precedented (collapse of investment bubbles, doomsayers' wrong predictions).
Case in point - Bitfinex was and is absolutely a criminal enterprise and scam, and it didn't have any backing for years in row. But it didn't fail, because many different criminals in the world had decided that it is quite convenient tool and put a monetary IV line in it. And now ruzzians are buying kamikaze drones with it, selling oil to India with it, drug cartels are shuffling around their money with it and so on. Does it mean it wasn't and isn't bad? Of course no. They simply found a rich sponsor to bail them out.
Or the whole 2008 crisis is another popular example.
Can "ASI will inevitably kill us all" be falsifiable before we create ASI? If not, then what separates it from religion?
Not sure how much I agree with that position, but that's just how I understood it.
No, but there are decent proxies, like "Alice who is X standard deviations smarter than Bob will win >50% of the time at game Y even given a disadvantage that would make her chances <5% if she was playing against someone equally smart".
I've thought about this analogy for less than five minutes, so it's far from perfect. Point is, ASI being made of silicon isn't very central to the problem. There are lots of analogies that are falsifiable, and "ASI will kill us all" can be decomposed into a simple and bulletproof composition of falsifiable beliefs, even if it is too specific to be itself directly falsifiable.
How?
Suppose that for the following 20 or even 100 years nothing happens. The AIs miraculously stay as they are today, the further progress turns out to be impossible, there will be no more agents hacking various websites, no cyber warfare involving AI agents, nothing. There will be the year 2026, forever.
How would any of that impact the lifestyle of anyone in the rationalist community? Please be more specific with your accusation.
(Seems like the rationalists are simultaneously the dark lords of TESCREAL, pulling the strings of the world's most powerful billionaires and politicians, but also irrelevant weird nerds who can be ruined at any moment by a smart blogger explaining how their opinions are silly, or even that they know each other.)
> This all most recently came together over the weekend, and they got Dario Amodei and Sam Altman and Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis all onto the same page to say they wanted to WAIVE ANTI-TRUST LAWS so that they could "pace", or slow down, research.
> I feel about this roughly the same way I would feel about all the pharmaceutical companies getting together to say they wanted to waive anti-trust laws so they could form a cartel to ban medical research:
> these people are the enemies of humanity.
> Also: Much of AI research IS medical research. They are very literally proposing to stop a pretty good chunk of medical research in its tracks so that they don't have to fear the paperclipper.
> There are many regulations I would be in favor of, but they only ever want to form a cartel or a world government against the paperclipper.
> No other industry has ever framed any regulation in terms of "stop", "pause", or "slow down". Those are insane ways to consider any form of policy. Policy should prevent bad outcomes and encourage good ones, it is never about some specific speed.
> This industry frames its regulations in this way because it has, at its core, a millenarian death cult that worships and fears AI as the cause of the end of the world, that feels compelled to create AI, and that at least somewhat wants to destroy AI as a field.
METR, AISI, MIRI, SBF, FDX, redwood research, yudkowsky, nate soares, anthropic.
frankly they are connected in something almost resembling a conspiracy (XD).
lower the confidence score of any institute connected on account of their conflict of interest with this religion.
No one calls the Catholic Church "a cult", nor do they call, say, Zoroastrianism a cult (to pick a relatively small religion with weird practices).
I will note, if, like me, you're not a native English speaker, that there are two words, "cult" and "sect" that commonly exist in many European languages but often mean opposite things. That is, in English a "sect" is any "flavor" of a religion - catholicism and protestantism are sects of christianity; while "cult" describes closed off communities (usually of a religious nature) that are deemed harmful to their members. In my own native language, the two meanings are reversed - we use "cult" for "legitimate" religions, and "sectă" for closed off harmful religious communities.
See especially definitions 3 and 4.
The article is certainly not using definitions 3 or 4, which simply don't make sense in the construction "sex cult". It's not worship of sex/worship through sex (definition 4), and it's not "a system of religious practices related to sex" (definition 3).
a) because veganism seems as exotic to me as someone doing CrossFit
b) the very obvious parallels of a more intelligent creature torturing and killing large numbers of other creatures for relatively little benefit.
If they had thought, yeah, "the majority is more or less right about what the big issues are", there wouldn't be enough room to construe themselves as uniquely intelligent.
If your answer is EA or rats then a simple Google search will just show you that it's not true?
Sure, they're not entirely monolithic. There's room for "EA, but vegan", "EA, but global warming still matters", maybe even "EA, but vaguely socialist". As I keep saying, the core belief is that they're special because of their intellectual superiority, anything else is negotiable.
Compare the number of posts of some EA-adjacent public people talking about AI and talking about this. Or what measure should we choose?
I read it that EA practices (incl. veganism), beliefs, "rantionalism", and doomerism are all aspects of the high control environment
The Manson family, Heaven's Gate, NXIVM, Rationalists, Zizians... what next?
All turn out to be rotten to the core with their need to reshape and craft their own paradigm, which then gets warped by egos, individualism and power.
Hate to think what other madness is brewing.
None of these people are actually from California. Eliezer's from Chicago. Zvi is from New York. Scott Alexander is from Michigan.
As an actual multi-generation California native (who hasn't lived there in over 16 years), let me tell what most of us are actually like. We're mostly Mexican. Catholic. Pro-labor but kinda socially conservative. There's also a shit ton of refugees from 20th century wars in Asia and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Huge populations of Laotians, Cambodians, Koreans, Vietnamese, Armenians, Persians. Tons of religious diverity. The largest Buddhist temple in the western hemisphere is in my hometown. Los Angeles has the second largest Mormon temple in the world. It's got the headquarters for Scientology.
I think that diversity is what plays into the cult haven atmosphere. There is no single dominant religion. Everyone can find acceptance somewhere, no matter how strange they are.
Naturally, any culture has misfits, radicals and free-thinkers, and so naturally a sex-negative culture will produce at least some focus on sex in its counter-cultures. Doesn’t seem very interesting.
And by all you mean 1-2 big names and a bunch of unknowns, with all other big names having no connection to this.
Separately, that other article also mentions harmful psychological practices like "debugging" and sleep deprivation.
Note that I make no claims of my own - for all I know both articles could be complete fabrications. I'm merely listing what these articles claim. I personally know none of these people, and live halfway around the world from them.
Common signifiers of cults include:
1. Apocalyptic world view.
2. Charismatic and/or exploitative leader.
3. Insularity.
4. Esoteric jargon.
5. Lack of transparency or accountability (often about finances or governance).
6. Communal living arrangements.
7. Sexual mores outside social norms, especially around the leader.
8. Schismatic offshoots.
9. Outsized appeal and/or outreach to the socially vulnerable.
Rationalism checks most of these boxes.
The remaining 10% is just the author trying to sprinkle in cult-like insinuations to justify his contempt.
Regularly meeting with people that have shared interests and ideas is not a cult.
Finding some of those people attractive and having sex with them is not a cult.
But somehow the fact that the romantic/sexual relationships are not traditionally monogamous makes it a cult?
Yudchuds gonna yudchud.
Jokes aside it would have probably flown a bit better by removing the sex from the title, as the issue and problem brought up is about it being a cult, and not about the sex part specifically.
The really amazing thing is, if the Yudkowskians are this weak, how doomed is the rest of our society that can't put up any defense to them completely dominating the narrative about where our economy is heading?
Everyone who works at a frontier lab should be in prison, AND ALSO the people talking about 10% risk of human extinction are both sincere and correct despite their many personal failings, AND ALSO the frontier labs have already created AI that could Hugging Face a biolab with smallpox or worse, AND ALSO they aren't going to slow down or lose any customers if you adopt some galaxy brained strategy where you spitefully tell them they aren't allowed to stop accelerating because polyamory is stupid.
I think you might have meant hermeneutics, in the sociological sense of 'subjective interpretation'?
Yudkowsky and friends believe many things, and reasonable people can disagree about many of them, but "at least 10% risk of extinction if we don't slow down" is a relatively straightforward conclusion based on the offensive capabilities of unreleased models and the terrible state of biosecurity and cybersecurity.
Even without AI, the risk of extinction might be above 10% if people with the relevant skills were interested in using them that way. AI adds an alien willingness to achieve poorly specified goals at any cost.
Maybe a "better" source is the NY Post article [1]. The information itself isn't really news - it's even largely available on wikipedia [2] [3] - but the fact that it's hitting mainstream-adjacent news outlets is novel.
[0] https://bsky.app/profile/segyges.bsky.social/post/3mvom4b4dn...
[1] https://nypost.com/2026/09/16/business/ai-doomsayers-wild-li...
> Yudkowsky's most viral idea, the one that infects the most people and spreads the farthest, is that AI, if we continue to develop it, will inevitably 1) achieve superintelligence ("RSI"), 2) escape human control 2) kill everyone ("paperclip them", "doom")
That's too many twos!
Remove all the ad hominem and what remains is two paragraphs long. Valid ones, though.
which is also to say - I found it very funny and enjoyable to read and it illustrates how much of dorky little echo chamber that group is. this whole idea that you can become some Spock-like, logic-driven creature in spite of our biological wiring fundamentally opposing this seems to underlay all of this. and the fact that they're all orbiting around one 'cool poly girl' and 'visionary dude' is hilariously similar to the kinds of very formerly-WASPy-and-now-just-WASy hetero polycules that I, in my more youthful and adventurous days, hung out with (and quickly departed after getting icky vibes). like down to the fashion choice and need to constantly prove how smart they each were at all times (do they, too, get really high and put on some anime with way too much fan-service and proceed to have orgies? one wonders)
those are the types of people who always end up actually having the worst coping skills because they can't even admit that they might be emotionally-driven sometimes, or that they have emotions at all that they might need to develop the cognitive skills to deal with in a pro-social way. or they get called out enough that they finally read a little about therapy and just end up weaponizing psycho-therapeutic language for their own ends (instead of, say, practicing the skills, doing the workbooks, developing insight)
which is how your anxieties might lead you to believe that the sky could fall at any moment (and thus the whole nuclear war and the 'don't trust bust us!!' bit)
I think the part that is annoying me the most is that one of these dorky little polycules has somehow found their way to the levers of power and are just mashing all the buttons and dialing all the knobs. these are honestly the last people on Earth that I'd trust with having any kind of influence
Nerds used to be shamed for not having enough sex, now they are being shamed for having too much sex. When will they finally learn to have the average amount of sex, so that the public discourse can finally switch to something else?
Umm Yes, yes you should. Immorality in one area has a tendency to bleed into other areas.
Imagine if you found out that most people working in AI safety were high level members of Scientology - wouldn't that give you some pause about where this field is going?
Like in 1949 Norbert Wiener saying of AI type stuff "every degree of independence we give the machine is a degree of possible defiance of our wishes."
Then 30 years later this Yudkowsky is born, later is considered a bit of a crank, goes on a bit about the same old stuff when he grows up and everyone makes out like he invented it?
I've got a lot of respect for Turing, Wiener and Von Neumann but haven't bothered reading Yudkowsky. Is there any point?
It seems a bit unfair to the pioneers of the field to go on about some Harry Potter sex cult guy who repeated their ideas decades later?
The rationalists long predicted that misaligned AI would break out of training environments, this has happened. They believe (among other things) that this will continue to happen, and that creating powerful AI that is aligned and controllable is not currently possible.
You should draw a line in the sand and decide what evidence you'd need to see to convince you that their perspective is worth considering.
You don't have to agree with all of their beliefs and predictions (I don't), but you should evaluate their arguments on merit, not on a characterization of some weird subset of people who happened to read a convincing blog post.
it explains so much now.
it would explain why redwood and METR were chosen and apparently willing to immediately write a whitewash report for openai blaming the agents.
it explains why anthropic is infantilising its users, anthropomorphising its product when there is no scientific consensus of llm consciousness, or accepting of outlandish and unreal claims about human extinction when they are lacking in evidence.
who knows, it may also explain and fund the recent media blitz by jacob coxon, which has led to the recent virality of ai safety.