There are better ways to make this criticism. The main problem I see with this is that it's basically a long ad hominem, followed by some valid concerns about market concentration at the end.
Remove all the ad hominem and what remains is two paragraphs long. Valid ones, though.
I am not a big fan of ad hominem in general, but when the argument essentially is "you should surrender control to these people over major parts of society/economy because they are better than you and if you don't everybody dies" then it's appropriate to ask who are those people that are supposed to be our philosopher-kings?
AI safety advocates do not typically demand to be given personal political power, only for a set of preferred policies to be enacted, like anyone advocating for any political cause.
That was a figure of speech. It boils down to the fact that, by asking for laws mandating AI research to slow down, the incumbent Big AI firms get regulatory capture and cartel power, which might be the real motivation underlying the apocalyptic language (follow the money and all that).
the sex cult is the sensationalist draw. you don't get readers paying attention in our current content economy if you don't have something salacious
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
> the sex cult is the sensationalist draw. you don't get readers paying attention in our current content economy if you don't have something salacious
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?
The other thing that annoys me is that there are plenty of folks in the AI safety space who do not think very highly (at least now) of Yudkowsky. One of the comments I saw recently on a Substack article talked about how Yudkowsky has "beclowned" himself by not updating some of his earlier theories given how LLMs function.
So it's pretty annoying that this article is trying to paint everyone who cares about AI safety is in a "sex cult". There are lots of folks who are genuinely concerned about risks. If anything I discounted a lot of the AI safety folks because I thought they were not seeing the underlying limitations in LLMs. That may still be the case, but agents keep breaking through what I thought were limits on their behavior.
If anything, I don't understand at all the folks who think ASI is on the horizon (< 10 years) but think everything will be hunky dory and easy to control once we actually do build superintelligence.
As far as manifestos go HPMOR is a pretty good one. I think that’s what a lot of the critiques about it miss. Yudkowsky is actually a pretty decent writer, especially in the fan fic scene. Not only is his prose actually acceptable which is pretty rare in fanfic it’s clear that he actually thought through a lot of the plot points ahead of time. Harry Potter universe fits very well for his story not only because it’s popular with the target audience, but because there’s a ton of unexplored authority figures in the original and the main goal of the manifesto largely boils down to rejecting blind belief in authority and blazing your own trail. I think it’s hard to separate the number of people who read it because it’s legitimately the best Harry Potter fanfic from the people who read it for the manifesto stuff which again points to the ingenuity of choosing it as a setting.
For me this is probably the weirdest part of it. I have read HPMOR and was distinctly underwhelmed by its literary quality. I mean, it's not bad, but it's not serious literature. It's not even on the level of the original HP. It's a fanfic. Sure, it's a fanfic with a lot of fan service and geekery and so on, so the audience is targeted masterfully. But still, it's hard not to notice the numerous literary faults. I mean, "he actually thought through a lot of the plot points ahead of time" is a kind of praise, but not one that a decent literary work expects. That's like saying about a chess grandmaster that he actually knows how all the pieces move. I mean, sure, on the fanfic scene it's probably above median, but I've seen people making out of it some kind of epic revelation, akin to some kind of a sacred text. Completely undeservedly, in my opinion, and rather weird for a community that is so proud in it's objective and rational approach to things that put it into its very name.
It's terrible as a work of literature. It has many, many, many flaws, but the most serious is that it's boooooring. Hundreds upon hundreds of pages go by with nothing happening except creepy children preaching at each other.
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.
fantastic. I've heard of bits and pieces of this but this is the first article I've read which lays out the entire timeline with all the firsthand sources you could want. thanks for the effort!
> His autobiography even opens with a parable: as a small child he threw his favorite squirtgun off a third-floor balcony rather than accept that his mother could lend out what was his, and felt complete when he heard it hit the pavement.
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.
I've tried to read this, but somehow the article doesn't really come to a point. Is there any point besides Yud not being perfect, and having connections to people who openly talk about their sex life (and that it's somewhat non-standard)?
I think the point is that Yud and the rationalist community have put themselves in an awkward position where their lifestyle now depends on "p(doom) is big" being true. Which means they can't necessarily be trusted to give unbiased updates on the true level of risk we're facing as new data and information comes up.
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.
> Can "ASI will inevitably kill us all" be falsifiable before we create ASI?
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.
There's are many people with high p(human extinction) whose salary does not depend on their continuing to profess a high p(extinction) -- me for example. Also Yud's friends have promised to pay him what he is earning now if the organization he works for ever has to reduce his salary because the organization lacks funding. They did this to neutralize the financial incentive he would otherwise have to hesitate to announce that his p(extinction) had dropped.
you say "falsifiable" as if it holds some important key, but the concept is really not applicable to predictions that by their very nature, can only ever have one data point
(doesn't mean that it's not a religion or it is, but rather I mean it being "falsifiable" or not, doesn't carry any information to that regard)
The rational methods used to establish a large P(doom).
To definitively falsify the claim, humanity would need to live alongside superintelligence forever without it wiping us out. That doesn't mean we can't be pretty darn sure though, in the same way that we can be pretty darn sure that nuclear war could end civilization.
> their lifestyle now depends on "p(doom) is big" being true
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.)
I tried too, but found no sentence that makes any sense. It's all gibberish from top to bottom. I'm not a native speaker but my only reaction was "wtf this is all about and wtf are you even trying to say???"
it's the Ed Zitron style of arguing that something big/expensive/unprecedented/hard is bad, going to fail, because [____________].
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).
The author didn't get invited to any parties in high school, and now they're concern-mongering Yud and Buds over some nerd bacchanals. That doesn't scale well.
The big question is, who's competing to sell us our salvation this time?
Read to the end... The front matter is context to the conclusion:
> 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.
There's a great movie or Streaming series on this post somewhere.
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.
Well most likely consensual noncon given the amount of vetting present in that chart. It's surprisingly common in women, or just a desire for general "gentle roughness".
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.
Not opining on this one way or another, but the post buries the lede a bit with a one liner that explains where it's coming from, saying that this is all:
> 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.
Well, I used to think like that too. Then I became slightly more spiritual, and the very idea of this sort of behavior is bothering, upsetting, irritating. But it mostly evokes pity. Like becoming aware of someone hurting him/herself in some way.
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.
I feel like people's problem is less "adults having consensual relations ew" and more "our incentive system is so fucked up that these people are now the intellectual leaders of the AI movement. Not by merit, but by developing a weird erotic exclusionary synchronicity that the rich folks like." Same thing is happening in government too.
I don't want to hear about it: yours, hers (Aella) and I'm certainly not going to tell you what my deal is, either.
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.
Any actually-reasonable person who was around for the founding craze of this era, ie., New Atheism, quickly realised that there was a deep pathology at the heart of many of its zealots, perhaps summed up by a desired to "recreate religion in their own image". I've walked into many a room of people screaming that teaching children falsehoods is literally child abuse. Any one who knows much of Richard Dawkins, Krauss, et al.'s background with women shouldnt be surprised either.
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.
> It's californication into the "rationalist" community as it currently stands is no surprise.
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.
That has not been my impression. Who is the most prominent example? Some of the most prominent figures I know of were Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris - all prominent right-wing figures who were rewarded for using atheism to attack Islam in particular during the Iraq War.
I wish there were more discussion on HN about the various plans that the various labs have to keep AI aligned or maybe about the various arguments for why alignment will be easy or happen naturally, so there's no need to carefully plan for it.
But what HN has instead is extensive discussion about whether people who oppose the continuation of AI research are morally degenerate in one way or another (or weird or ridiculous)—in other words, attempts to cancel them (or laugh them out of the room) before the listener hears their arguments.
Also, if you're going to talk about the corrupting or biasing effects of a flow of money (like the OP does) you should at least mention the absolutely huge flow of money going (from investors and users) to the people building AI—or or the $140 million that has been donated to the "Leading the Future" Network (a pro-AI political action committee) or the $3.5 million OpenAI has spent on federal lobbying or the $3.1 million Anthropic has spent.
I don't really get why people go on about Yudkowsky in this regard. I mean serious thinking about AI goes back at least to Turing in 1950 with his test and prediction computers would get there in about 50 years and presumably keep improving. And people have worried about it since then.
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?
Regardless of anything I would have more respect for anyone who didn't explicitly optimize the atomic bombs on Japan for civilian casualties like Neumann did.
Yudkowski is being derided because he wrote some weird fanfic which may or may not be problematic (I didn't read it, I dislike HP too much). And apparently "is considered a bit of a crank".
Neumann actually fucking did it, his calculations for maximum civilian casualties make him quite directly responsible.
I don't think you need to compare Turing, Wiener or Yudkowsky to that mass murderer.
I do get some cult-like vibes from the Yudkowsky part of the rationalist community, but I think calling it a "sex cult" is going way too far unless there's some hard evidence. It's a community that has many polyamorous and kinky people in it, and many people who have been or are doing communal living, whether because they want to or because of Bay Area rents. That doesn't make it a sex cult. I've never seen any evidence that Yudkowsky, for example, is exploiting his status in the community and his minor degree of fame in order to obtain sex any more than the average person who has a bit of status and fame uses it to obtain sex. I'm not aware of any evidence of coercion or brainwashing. There have been some allegations of sexual abuse in that community, but from what I can tell no more than would be expected for any community of that size.
In case the author is reading this: I’m getting a Cloudflare worker exception when accessing the page using one of my uplinks, possibly because of IPv6.
TLDR: awareness of the SV "rationalist" polycule has breached containment and normies are reading about it now. [0]
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.
> 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")
I was invited to a few orgies with them; I politely declined, they were very respectful of my decision and I wasn’t asked again (which in retrospect must have been partly due to deliberate coordination - fairly advanced social technology, imo). This didn’t affect my standing or acceptance with them. It may well be a sex cult, but if it is, my experience is that it so thoroughly behaves like a regular community in so many aspects that it at least calls into question the predictive usefulness, if not the accuracy, of the label “sex cult”.
The ad hominems are tiresome. You think the people who are explicitly trying to replace all humans are any less weird and problematic?
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.
i read AI 2027 at the time and thought it was nonsensical. however i was not aware of the conflict of interest running through the philosophy itself, the safety institutes "independently" monitoring ai, and the former public benefit orgs like openai and anthropic creating ai (now de facto fairly evil for profit companies).
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.
sure, yeah, I've seen how the sausage is made on some of this stuff, and its not pretty.
However this only claims that they are not good at creating effective and trustworthy orgs, it does not address their claim that it is not possible to crate powerful, aligned, and controllable AI. Both things be true.
I mean, this is a rather fun article to read but I'm not entirely sure about the thesis.
> 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.
Because they don't get enough votes to control the military. If they put a convincing pitch in for why they should then they can. Being a cult doesn't rule them out.
> 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?
Having a crying session every 5 days doesn't seem very healthy to me, but showering once every 2 weeks might be fine. I've gone many days without showering many times in my life and nothing bad ever happened to me as a result. I'd usually shower before going out and interacting with people, but when sitting at home there just never seemed to be any point to it. And Aella's showering habits haven't stopped her from reaching her goals, so it doesn't really matter.
It's actually unhealthy that you think it's unhealthy to cry regularly. Perhaps you have trouble processing your emotions and just bottle them up instead, causing them to leak out in other situations or lead to outbursts?
A lot of the "AI Alignment" and "rationalism" talk really feels like it echos a lot of alt-right "race realist" talking points, but towards software rather than people from a different region or walk of life. "Ah, my mistake, clearly the outcome was obvious if we let them exist among us."
Granted there's obviously very different impacts between the implied out-groups being software plus those who enable LLMs, versus general populaces or marginalized demographics.
Still, it concerns me especially as it's not too far a stretch for those socially invested in Effective Outrage to turn the other heel when it suits them, it'd be only rational to be.
There’s more overlap between those camps than many would want to admit.
Neoreaction, “HBD,” and similar movements emerged from some of the same forums. I consider them at least adjacent.
It’s not that I think AI is all upside. We were naive about the net that way and we shouldn’t repeat the mistake. But it’s a technology and all tech is two sided and dual use. If you make a better hammer most people will build with it but some people will bash people’s heads in with it.
I think the biggest single problem I have with the AI safety crowd (other than what I consider dodgy reasoning and magical thinking) is that they put all the emphasis on sci-fi scenarios that are at least very unlikely (if not impossible) while ignoring much more likely and even currently real negative uses of AI.
The AI risks we should be talking about are things like mass manipulation, AI being used to supercharge addiction, a “zero entry level positions” economy that leads to mass unemployment, and monopolization of powerful AI by small numbers of people.
The last scenario is one the safety crowd is working to make more likely. Closing off AI research, outlawing open models, forcing all new innovations and models through gates, those are the things that will lead to the most powerful AI being kept back and only made available to the mega rich and governments.
I’m not sure rule by immortal trillionaire god-kings wielding superintelligence (while outlawing access to it for the rest) is that preferable to the rise of an “un-aligned” independent superintelligence. It might be worse. I’ll take the bear.
in the sense that both are about uncomfortable truths, things we don't want to be true but are true anyway.
most people care more about their social standing than about truth, so they just lie (including to themselves), no biggie.
the "AI alignment" people are for example far more open to granting personhood to sufficiently advanced AI systems than are AI risk denialists. it's not hate of AI that drives the alignment discourse, it's a deeper understanding of our shared reality.
for simpler minds, understanding the risks posed by a superhuman AI is akin to hate, and understanding the degrees of inheritability of various traits is akin to discrimination. simpler minds need the lies in order to not hate, need the lies in order to not discriminate.
I used to read a lot of LessWrong, Yudkowsky, SlateStarCodex. Rationalism is really just another religion, with the faith parts carefully tucked away underneath concepts like priors or how one chooses to construct a model or assign/“update” probabilities. Their god is ASI. Their beliefs have no more fundamental basis in truth than any other faith.
There’s also a fundamental problem with the idea of using models and probabilities for decision making in that one has to choose a model before deducing any facts, and this leads to all sorts of post hoc rationalization. It’s basically just a culture of people with weird preferences coming up with mathy rationalizations for them.
It seems unfair to conflate the rationalism of Berkeley, Locke, Russell and Hitchens who hold critical thinking in the highest regard, to AI maximalists, who seem to be using rationalidm mainly as a cover for their own pet ideas on social reengineering.
The former is mainly about being true to the scientific process of evidence-led discovery, while the latter is... whatever it is (but rational it is not). From a critical thinking perspective, there is no evidence to suggest the current form of AI could achieve superintelligence, and mechanisms that could enable ASI have not been discovered yet. Their perspective, on the other hand, is far more activist.
I think most people who are familiar with proper Rationalism are able to tell it apart from the subject of present-day movements. Those that aren't are right to criticize the harms that they see.
It sort of seems like the community is criticized for truly believing and living what they preach... They're the most sincere - if you thought the world was ending, you'd maybe do your best to stop it while enjoying the last bits left, while spending time with like-minded people. They're being criticized for not being hypocrites? I mean sure seems like there's lots of conflict of interest, but isn't there always? What humans have ever been objective in anything they do
Some of these potshots just cheapen any arguments. "Gretta has no prior experience with non profits" uh, she was a well regarded Google SRE... her making 200k is nothing.
Sometimes when I find someone to look up to and admire, I later find out there is potentially some dark reality to them. I then lament not being able to find any good role models in the world. If they have missused donor money, then that is terrible. If they are pushing towards goals that seems contrary to their stated mission, that is difficult to judge. I did always find it odd, 10 years after reading Yudkowsky's passionate writings, that he doesn't seem to have really gone and done anything about it. If it was all just a creative writing exercise to him... Then that would be rather humiliating to me, having taken it very seriously.
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?
>Sometimes when I find someone to look up to and admire, I later find out there is potentially some dark reality to them
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.
Instead of assuming the "heroic responsibility" of the elect, as these fallen rationalist heroes advocated, we accept that we can't save a world which doesn't want to be saved, we focus on being good ourselves - in the salt of the earth sense, with no special dispensations afforded us because of heroic responsibilities. Let tomorrow worry about tomorrow, we may not fix the evil of the world but we can maybe at least not be it.
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.
It is my view that we are all apes. And therefore all sadists, all maschoists, all vengeful and envious and jealous and have all of the primal things living social animals need to survive in the hash environments of nature. We all displace aggression, we are all hedonists and much else besides. The sweetest person you know has to displace aggression somewhere, or otherwise, has none -- and would then quickly fall victim to the aggression of others on one day of bad luck.
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
I appreciate this. Though I'm not in agreement on all points, it is, in my opinion, thematically correct.
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.
This has me wondering if or how FetLife played a role in these communities connecting in the first place…does anyone know of any connection? (FetLife was a combo social network, blogging forum, and dating site back in the day)
Schizophrenia really messes people up and they can't help it. It's not a disease and the likelyhood of developing it is genetic. Hard drugs can also increase the risk.
> 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.
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!
Arguments are not executable code or the final work product of… whatever it is they're arguing about. You have to continue interacting with these people and their AIs, so the underlying question of whether they're trustworthy and not evil always exists.
I think the mores of people building software that is made available as a conversational entity to the entire human population is at least somewhat relevant.
Well, this is old news. I'm still baffled by the fact that people take output of public personas as isolated facts. Take Nietzsche. Sure, great philosophical input. But try reading the sections about women. Same for Schopenhauer. Why? Because they were both incels and had big mother wounds that have never been addressed. So they spew their shit and people take it at face value even tho it stems from hurt. So why would I take any of this seriously if it's very obviously stupid and removed from reality? (Doesn't mean their whole works are)
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.
JFC this was clickbait. Even if this wasn't the intent and even if the dude has atypical sexual practices, if it's between consenting adults then how is it anyone else's business?
I cant remember the last time I flagged a post. Well, here I am.
One of the many funny things about whatever this group is, if you ask 100 members who E.T. Jaynes is, or some of his follow ons like MacKay or others in the same school of though like Polya, Shore and Johnson, better than 99 out of 100 will have a deer in the headlights look. I would wager the actual intellectual progenitor of a lot of the applied Baynesianism (Jaynes) is rolling in his grave right now.
The word "cult" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It can mean anything from religion, to weird religion I don't like, to the organizations that try to cut you off from contact with your family and other people outside the organization. Only the last type are the bad ones, from what I can see.
Cult quite explicitly means the latter, and is what the article is explicitly accusing the core of this community being (that is, not everyone reading LessWrong, but specifically the actual people living in the communes).
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.
If the man known for urging caution with respect to AI founded a sex cult, then I don't think i want to know what kind of stuff the accelerationist faction are into.
As a polyamorous person, it seems quite concerning that effective altruism people are labeled as members of a sex cult, due to their private lives. Intellectuals should be attacked on the basis of their ideas, not based on their private lives.
That would be a reasonable argument if it were indeed their private lives, and they didn't go around offering to throw gangbangs for AI safety researchers.
I'm not sure how being polyamorous, having kinks and not hiding them makes someone part of a cult, even if I generally don't agree with Yud's entire thesis.
The article presents widely how the people it describes all live in communal housing, engage in harmful psychological practices, have a shared belief in the imminence of the Apocalypse, etc.
I don't think the argument is that their sexual practices inherently make them part of a cult. Rather, the argument is that it's very common for cults to include communal sexual practices that fall outside typical social norms.
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.
On HN it seems to have that. On the other hand in the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_safety he only gets one mention in the odd links box at the bottom of the page. I don't really get it but I don't do sex cults so maybe it's that?
> There has been a great effort over many years to distance AI Safety discussion and policy from its origins and intellectual center, because its center is a sex cult started by a fan fiction author. If you want to be taken seriously you have to hide that.
This may be true, but it means that those readers are using irrelevant ad hominem to allocate respect, meaning that the flaw is in them rather than the author. It's like dismissing Feynman's physics for playing the bongos.
It should make no more difference that an author is in a polycule than that they are gay or straight. And how the heck is a history of writing fan fiction an indicator of their scientific or engineering or judgement?
Would a formal scientific and/or engineering education be an indicator? (Or lack thereof as is the case here)
Happy to fast-forward a bit: I will not take “sat and thought deeply” as a qualification, which would make all other prophets qualified for scientific/engineering judgement.
Someone who hasn't been reading the object-level arguments for 10+ years might reasonably wonder if these are good heuristics. Here's an additional data point: I think polyamory is stupid, I've read the object-level arguments, and this entire thread is ridiculous.
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.
Possibly. That's not a word I trust myself to use correctly. What I meant is that the object-level claims require a lot of time and energy to evaluate, and it's sometimes reasonable to use a heuristic like "sex cults are not trustworthy" to save time, but if you've already read the arguments then the heuristic loses almost all value.
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.
Like that would help. The rest of the world plain refuses to engage with the arguments they've been consistently presenting for decades.
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").
I don't think that's true. It's hard to argue that Elon Musk, the richest person and spokesperson of tech for a lot of people, never participated in SV sex parties or had weird sex behaviors. Or Trump, the president of the USA, has a clean history of standard sex as well. Or Bill Gates, the nice philanthropist, never engaged in weird sex circles. But that doesn't make them lose their leadership positions or status.
I’d rather be in a “sex cult”, whatever that entails, than this ridiculous culture that’s somehow still doing moral panics over sex. Maybe it’s just deeply human, or maybe it really is stabilizing society to relegate sex to something dirty and private, but I have a feeling it’s just a dumb conflation that’s so easy to exploit it’s never allowed to go away. It’s like the “think of the children” thought-stopper and we’d do well to get past it.
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.
This isn’t moral panic, it’s saying “hey, all these influential people are intimately connected across the strongest possible dimensions (money, sex, belief and legal grey areas), we should probably pay attention to that”
90% of this is just driven by strong emotional reactions from someone that feels uncomfortable about people being open about their non-standard sexual life, in the same way that many people have weird negative reactions about polyamorous relationships in general.
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?
The emotional reaction comes from a deep-seated evolutionary survival mechanism that has served mankind well to present day. Uggo fuck club tells you EVERYTHING you need to know about these people, and more importantly, their thoughts & perceptions. If you join uggo fuck club, your perceptions are off. Why should I value this guy's perceptions & prescriptions relating to ML when he can't even swing the right ones over his own BMI?
When the sex cult is built around the idea that they and everyone else should fear and respect the false, anthropomorphized God they've created in LLMs, then yes.
That makes them stupid and stupid people should not be allowed so close to the wheels of power and history.
It's not even about immorality. The problem is not so much the sex, it's the cult part. If a good deal of the people working in AI safety in the biggest AI lands are actually a cult, that has deep implications about what AIs are aligned to, and how (ironically) irrational they might really be trained to be, by the very people trying to control them.
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?
For some reason the bit that stuck out to me in a wild ride of an article was the guy who believed a super-intelligence was a threat to humans but distanced himself from veganism as if that was crazy part of the AI-doom sex cult that he disagreed with.
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.
They also downplay global warming, nuclear war, wealth inequality, and in general anything other, less cool people they didn't want to identify with thought was important.
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.
I read it more like a conformist performative veganism. I think the implication is that this group treats veganism and all of these beliefs as a kind of shibboleth, an in-group marker for which conformity is expected. The immedaite "feeling" associated with a cult is the feeling of "high control", cf. https://www.google.com/search?q=high+control+group
I read it that EA practices (incl. veganism), beliefs, "rantionalism", and doomerism are all aspects of the high control environment
More of this madness coming out of the west coast of America, in particular California.
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.
This is the real San Francisco that I know, not the one that Hacker News always talks about. It's a haven for weirdoes that has attracted the strangest of each generation since at least the Beatniks in the 50s. It probably descends from all of the depression-era westward migration and people from earlier than that coming to Hollywood to become movie stars. San Francisco attracted a different type, artists and hippies, Tim Leary followers. The deserts are the strangest places. That's where most of the true cult shit happend. Jack Parsons trying to summon demons. Gram Parsons' friends stealing his corpse to bury him at Joshua Tree. The traveling folk that Chris McCandless took in with near the Salton Sea.
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.
Nowhere, that's exactly the problem. People involved in Epstein's sex cult are the respected members of our society. These are some weird nerds who have consensual polyamorous sex with each other, therefore their opinions on AI should not be taken seriously. /s
Well, a cult is a high-control social group that's difficult to leave and requires you to believe and do strange things that are likely bad for you or at least take up all your time and resources. And a sex cult is what it sounds like.
He does not understand the issue. Not presenting any backing for his ideas, just emotions. The idea has been misused by the bros immensely, that does not help to grasp it either. But AI extermination of humans is a well known problem we have no solution for. Luckily AGI is not so close.
But AI extermination of humans is a well known problem we have no solution for
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."
I guess the EA and rationalist cult members are out in force since this got flagged. Not a good look guys, you're just confirming what everyone thinks.
It may have been flagged as the title being misleading, as it did not really present as many details around the sex part as the title suggested.
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.
I mean I saw it 10 hours later. I'm thrilled to see stuff like this getting multiple hundreds of upvotes on HN, one of the deepest dens of tech capitalist worship in the world. It performing here is a couple steps from it performing on LessWrong itself. I take that as a sign a breakthrough is nearing. It is probably linked to whether the AI lab IPOs are successful or not.
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?
Good to see some raising the issue of the sex cult that Effective Altruism is:
I'd like to hear what feminists have to say about that picture in TFA of that woman and six men watching her. Just as I'd like to hear what feminists have to say about Amodei's wife who used to run a porn site.
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.
> I'd like to hear what feminists have to say about that picture in TFA of that woman and six men watching her.
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.
Is it really a satire if the same woman in the photo (Aella) went on to have a "birthday gangbang" with numerous men, some of whom are present in the photo?
There are better ways to make this criticism. The main problem I see with this is that it's basically a long ad hominem, followed by some valid concerns about market concentration at the end.
Remove all the ad hominem and what remains is two paragraphs long. Valid ones, though.
I am not a big fan of ad hominem in general, but when the argument essentially is "you should surrender control to these people over major parts of society/economy because they are better than you and if you don't everybody dies" then it's appropriate to ask who are those people that are supposed to be our philosopher-kings?
AI safety advocates do not typically demand to be given personal political power, only for a set of preferred policies to be enacted, like anyone advocating for any political cause.
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Do you mind excerpting the valid two paragraphs?
That was a figure of speech. It boils down to the fact that, by asking for laws mandating AI research to slow down, the incumbent Big AI firms get regulatory capture and cartel power, which might be the real motivation underlying the apocalyptic language (follow the money and all that).
the sex cult is the sensationalist draw. you don't get readers paying attention in our current content economy if you don't have something salacious
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
> the sex cult is the sensationalist draw. you don't get readers paying attention in our current content economy if you don't have something salacious
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?
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The other thing that annoys me is that there are plenty of folks in the AI safety space who do not think very highly (at least now) of Yudkowsky. One of the comments I saw recently on a Substack article talked about how Yudkowsky has "beclowned" himself by not updating some of his earlier theories given how LLMs function.
So it's pretty annoying that this article is trying to paint everyone who cares about AI safety is in a "sex cult". There are lots of folks who are genuinely concerned about risks. If anything I discounted a lot of the AI safety folks because I thought they were not seeing the underlying limitations in LLMs. That may still be the case, but agents keep breaking through what I thought were limits on their behavior.
If anything, I don't understand at all the folks who think ASI is on the horizon (< 10 years) but think everything will be hunky dory and easy to control once we actually do build superintelligence.
I too wrote about this, although _much_ longer, if you want a bit of a deeper dive on the subject https://www.iankduncan.com/personal/2026-09-16-sex-ai-and-th...
As far as manifestos go HPMOR is a pretty good one. I think that’s what a lot of the critiques about it miss. Yudkowsky is actually a pretty decent writer, especially in the fan fic scene. Not only is his prose actually acceptable which is pretty rare in fanfic it’s clear that he actually thought through a lot of the plot points ahead of time. Harry Potter universe fits very well for his story not only because it’s popular with the target audience, but because there’s a ton of unexplored authority figures in the original and the main goal of the manifesto largely boils down to rejecting blind belief in authority and blazing your own trail. I think it’s hard to separate the number of people who read it because it’s legitimately the best Harry Potter fanfic from the people who read it for the manifesto stuff which again points to the ingenuity of choosing it as a setting.
For me this is probably the weirdest part of it. I have read HPMOR and was distinctly underwhelmed by its literary quality. I mean, it's not bad, but it's not serious literature. It's not even on the level of the original HP. It's a fanfic. Sure, it's a fanfic with a lot of fan service and geekery and so on, so the audience is targeted masterfully. But still, it's hard not to notice the numerous literary faults. I mean, "he actually thought through a lot of the plot points ahead of time" is a kind of praise, but not one that a decent literary work expects. That's like saying about a chess grandmaster that he actually knows how all the pieces move. I mean, sure, on the fanfic scene it's probably above median, but I've seen people making out of it some kind of epic revelation, akin to some kind of a sacred text. Completely undeservedly, in my opinion, and rather weird for a community that is so proud in it's objective and rational approach to things that put it into its very name.
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Is it strange that I
1) Have no interest in Harry Potter (wasn't able to get through the first book, and maybe saw two of the movies)
2) Have disdain for most of what I see from both rationalists and EAs
3) Thoroughly enjoyed HPMOR
I thought it was kind of like The Martian, but long
It's terrible as a work of literature. It has many, many, many flaws, but the most serious is that it's boooooring. Hundreds upon hundreds of pages go by with nothing happening except creepy children preaching at each other.
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.
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I suppose there is worse sci-fi you could launch a cult from (Dianetics)
What are your favourite quotes from it?
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That was a good read. A little long as you say, but this thing has been around for over 20 years now, it can't be helped.
Predictably the original submission got flagged.
why use AI to write this? It makes me wanna stop every five seconds.
Thank you for writing this piece. It was completely worth the length and amount of ground/time covered.
fantastic. I've heard of bits and pieces of this but this is the first article I've read which lays out the entire timeline with all the firsthand sources you could want. thanks for the effort!
> His autobiography even opens with a parable: as a small child he threw his favorite squirtgun off a third-floor balcony rather than accept that his mother could lend out what was his, and felt complete when he heard it hit the pavement.
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.
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I've tried to read this, but somehow the article doesn't really come to a point. Is there any point besides Yud not being perfect, and having connections to people who openly talk about their sex life (and that it's somewhat non-standard)?
I think the point is that Yud and the rationalist community have put themselves in an awkward position where their lifestyle now depends on "p(doom) is big" being true. Which means they can't necessarily be trusted to give unbiased updates on the true level of risk we're facing as new data and information comes up.
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.
> Can "ASI will inevitably kill us all" be falsifiable before we create ASI?
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.
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There's are many people with high p(human extinction) whose salary does not depend on their continuing to profess a high p(extinction) -- me for example. Also Yud's friends have promised to pay him what he is earning now if the organization he works for ever has to reduce his salary because the organization lacks funding. They did this to neutralize the financial incentive he would otherwise have to hesitate to announce that his p(extinction) had dropped.
you say "falsifiable" as if it holds some important key, but the concept is really not applicable to predictions that by their very nature, can only ever have one data point
(doesn't mean that it's not a religion or it is, but rather I mean it being "falsifiable" or not, doesn't carry any information to that regard)
> what separates it from religion?
The rational methods used to establish a large P(doom).
To definitively falsify the claim, humanity would need to live alongside superintelligence forever without it wiping us out. That doesn't mean we can't be pretty darn sure though, in the same way that we can be pretty darn sure that nuclear war could end civilization.
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Why does their lifestyle require p(doom) to be large? Because they work at orgs focused on AI safety? I'm not sure what the claim is here.
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> their lifestyle now depends on "p(doom) is big" being true
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.)
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I tried too, but found no sentence that makes any sense. It's all gibberish from top to bottom. I'm not a native speaker but my only reaction was "wtf this is all about and wtf are you even trying to say???"
it's the Ed Zitron style of arguing that something big/expensive/unprecedented/hard is bad, going to fail, because [____________].
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).
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The author didn't get invited to any parties in high school, and now they're concern-mongering Yud and Buds over some nerd bacchanals. That doesn't scale well.
The big question is, who's competing to sell us our salvation this time?
Read to the end... The front matter is context to the conclusion:
> 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.
ai alignment and safety is captured by a fringe network of batshit insane rationalists.
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.
There's a great movie or Streaming series on this post somewhere.
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.
> There's a great movie or Streaming series on this post somewhere.
More like the worst porn film ever made.
Theres the title for it when it's on Netflix
>She has a rape kink
That's enough internet for today, back to playing video games
Well most likely consensual noncon given the amount of vetting present in that chart. It's surprisingly common in women, or just a desire for general "gentle roughness".
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.
Not opining on this one way or another, but the post buries the lede a bit with a one liner that explains where it's coming from, saying that this is all:
> 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.
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The sankey chart refers to her birthday:
https://aella.substack.com/p/my-birthday-gangbang
(reedited to shorten)
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Well, I used to think like that too. Then I became slightly more spiritual, and the very idea of this sort of behavior is bothering, upsetting, irritating. But it mostly evokes pity. Like becoming aware of someone hurting him/herself in some way.
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.
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> as a gay furry
> fennec butt
he was hiding in plain sight all along
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Indeed. This feels like it's just slut shaming.
I'm relieved to hear a voice of simple decency!
Really, the most questionable thing here is that someone wrote a 2,000+ word essay about someone else's sex life.
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I feel like people's problem is less "adults having consensual relations ew" and more "our incentive system is so fucked up that these people are now the intellectual leaders of the AI movement. Not by merit, but by developing a weird erotic exclusionary synchronicity that the rich folks like." Same thing is happening in government too.
I don't want to hear about it: yours, hers (Aella) and I'm certainly not going to tell you what my deal is, either.
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.
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> It's surprisingly common in women
This would be a _Fascinating_ citation.
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Any actually-reasonable person who was around for the founding craze of this era, ie., New Atheism, quickly realised that there was a deep pathology at the heart of many of its zealots, perhaps summed up by a desired to "recreate religion in their own image". I've walked into many a room of people screaming that teaching children falsehoods is literally child abuse. Any one who knows much of Richard Dawkins, Krauss, et al.'s background with women shouldnt be surprised either.
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.
> It's californication into the "rationalist" community as it currently stands is no surprise.
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.
That has not been my impression. Who is the most prominent example? Some of the most prominent figures I know of were Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris - all prominent right-wing figures who were rewarded for using atheism to attack Islam in particular during the Iraq War.
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I wish there were more discussion on HN about the various plans that the various labs have to keep AI aligned or maybe about the various arguments for why alignment will be easy or happen naturally, so there's no need to carefully plan for it.
But what HN has instead is extensive discussion about whether people who oppose the continuation of AI research are morally degenerate in one way or another (or weird or ridiculous)—in other words, attempts to cancel them (or laugh them out of the room) before the listener hears their arguments.
Also, if you're going to talk about the corrupting or biasing effects of a flow of money (like the OP does) you should at least mention the absolutely huge flow of money going (from investors and users) to the people building AI—or or the $140 million that has been donated to the "Leading the Future" Network (a pro-AI political action committee) or the $3.5 million OpenAI has spent on federal lobbying or the $3.1 million Anthropic has spent.
I don't really get why people go on about Yudkowsky in this regard. I mean serious thinking about AI goes back at least to Turing in 1950 with his test and prediction computers would get there in about 50 years and presumably keep improving. And people have worried about it since then.
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?
Regardless of anything I would have more respect for anyone who didn't explicitly optimize the atomic bombs on Japan for civilian casualties like Neumann did.
Yudkowski is being derided because he wrote some weird fanfic which may or may not be problematic (I didn't read it, I dislike HP too much). And apparently "is considered a bit of a crank".
Neumann actually fucking did it, his calculations for maximum civilian casualties make him quite directly responsible.
I don't think you need to compare Turing, Wiener or Yudkowsky to that mass murderer.
I do get some cult-like vibes from the Yudkowsky part of the rationalist community, but I think calling it a "sex cult" is going way too far unless there's some hard evidence. It's a community that has many polyamorous and kinky people in it, and many people who have been or are doing communal living, whether because they want to or because of Bay Area rents. That doesn't make it a sex cult. I've never seen any evidence that Yudkowsky, for example, is exploiting his status in the community and his minor degree of fame in order to obtain sex any more than the average person who has a bit of status and fame uses it to obtain sex. I'm not aware of any evidence of coercion or brainwashing. There have been some allegations of sexual abuse in that community, but from what I can tell no more than would be expected for any community of that size.
In case the author is reading this: I’m getting a Cloudflare worker exception when accessing the page using one of my uplinks, possibly because of IPv6.
TLDR: awareness of the SV "rationalist" polycule has breached containment and normies are reading about it now. [0]
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...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aella_(writer)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalist_community
Some more feedback for author, if reading this.
> 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!
I did too, but it went away after some refreshes.
I was invited to a few orgies with them; I politely declined, they were very respectful of my decision and I wasn’t asked again (which in retrospect must have been partly due to deliberate coordination - fairly advanced social technology, imo). This didn’t affect my standing or acceptance with them. It may well be a sex cult, but if it is, my experience is that it so thoroughly behaves like a regular community in so many aspects that it at least calls into question the predictive usefulness, if not the accuracy, of the label “sex cult”.
The ad hominems are tiresome. You think the people who are explicitly trying to replace all humans are any less weird and problematic?
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.
i read AI 2027 at the time and thought it was nonsensical. however i was not aware of the conflict of interest running through the philosophy itself, the safety institutes "independently" monitoring ai, and the former public benefit orgs like openai and anthropic creating ai (now de facto fairly evil for profit companies).
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.
sure, yeah, I've seen how the sausage is made on some of this stuff, and its not pretty.
However this only claims that they are not good at creating effective and trustworthy orgs, it does not address their claim that it is not possible to crate powerful, aligned, and controllable AI. Both things be true.
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I mean, this is a rather fun article to read but I'm not entirely sure about the thesis.
> 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.
> Being in a cult doesn't disqualify people from being in politics
Let's survey the American voters
You don't need to survey them because they already voted. US congress is 95%+ religious people
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You do understand what a cult is? There’s a reason why we don’t let the Scientologists run the military no?
Because they don't get enough votes to control the military. If they put a convincing pitch in for why they should then they can. Being a cult doesn't rule them out.
> 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?
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https://x.com/Aella_Girl/status/1874676723910098955
24 showers and 71 crying sessions in a year. That lifestyle doesn't seem particularly healthy...
What's the intent of this comment?
Edit: I.e. are you implying something about the submitted writeup? Or just demeaning her? Or something else?
She looks depressed.
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Having a crying session every 5 days doesn't seem very healthy to me, but showering once every 2 weeks might be fine. I've gone many days without showering many times in my life and nothing bad ever happened to me as a result. I'd usually shower before going out and interacting with people, but when sitting at home there just never seemed to be any point to it. And Aella's showering habits haven't stopped her from reaching her goals, so it doesn't really matter.
It's actually unhealthy that you think it's unhealthy to cry regularly. Perhaps you have trouble processing your emotions and just bottle them up instead, causing them to leak out in other situations or lead to outbursts?
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Also covered by nypost: https://nypost.com/2026/09/16/business/ai-doomsayers-wild-li...
A lot of the "AI Alignment" and "rationalism" talk really feels like it echos a lot of alt-right "race realist" talking points, but towards software rather than people from a different region or walk of life. "Ah, my mistake, clearly the outcome was obvious if we let them exist among us."
Granted there's obviously very different impacts between the implied out-groups being software plus those who enable LLMs, versus general populaces or marginalized demographics.
Still, it concerns me especially as it's not too far a stretch for those socially invested in Effective Outrage to turn the other heel when it suits them, it'd be only rational to be.
There’s more overlap between those camps than many would want to admit.
Neoreaction, “HBD,” and similar movements emerged from some of the same forums. I consider them at least adjacent.
It’s not that I think AI is all upside. We were naive about the net that way and we shouldn’t repeat the mistake. But it’s a technology and all tech is two sided and dual use. If you make a better hammer most people will build with it but some people will bash people’s heads in with it.
I think the biggest single problem I have with the AI safety crowd (other than what I consider dodgy reasoning and magical thinking) is that they put all the emphasis on sci-fi scenarios that are at least very unlikely (if not impossible) while ignoring much more likely and even currently real negative uses of AI.
The AI risks we should be talking about are things like mass manipulation, AI being used to supercharge addiction, a “zero entry level positions” economy that leads to mass unemployment, and monopolization of powerful AI by small numbers of people.
The last scenario is one the safety crowd is working to make more likely. Closing off AI research, outlawing open models, forcing all new innovations and models through gates, those are the things that will lead to the most powerful AI being kept back and only made available to the mega rich and governments.
I’m not sure rule by immortal trillionaire god-kings wielding superintelligence (while outlawing access to it for the rest) is that preferable to the rise of an “un-aligned” independent superintelligence. It might be worse. I’ll take the bear.
in the sense that both are about uncomfortable truths, things we don't want to be true but are true anyway.
most people care more about their social standing than about truth, so they just lie (including to themselves), no biggie.
the "AI alignment" people are for example far more open to granting personhood to sufficiently advanced AI systems than are AI risk denialists. it's not hate of AI that drives the alignment discourse, it's a deeper understanding of our shared reality.
for simpler minds, understanding the risks posed by a superhuman AI is akin to hate, and understanding the degrees of inheritability of various traits is akin to discrimination. simpler minds need the lies in order to not hate, need the lies in order to not discriminate.
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I used to read a lot of LessWrong, Yudkowsky, SlateStarCodex. Rationalism is really just another religion, with the faith parts carefully tucked away underneath concepts like priors or how one chooses to construct a model or assign/“update” probabilities. Their god is ASI. Their beliefs have no more fundamental basis in truth than any other faith.
There’s also a fundamental problem with the idea of using models and probabilities for decision making in that one has to choose a model before deducing any facts, and this leads to all sorts of post hoc rationalization. It’s basically just a culture of people with weird preferences coming up with mathy rationalizations for them.
It seems unfair to conflate the rationalism of Berkeley, Locke, Russell and Hitchens who hold critical thinking in the highest regard, to AI maximalists, who seem to be using rationalidm mainly as a cover for their own pet ideas on social reengineering.
The former is mainly about being true to the scientific process of evidence-led discovery, while the latter is... whatever it is (but rational it is not). From a critical thinking perspective, there is no evidence to suggest the current form of AI could achieve superintelligence, and mechanisms that could enable ASI have not been discovered yet. Their perspective, on the other hand, is far more activist.
I think most people who are familiar with proper Rationalism are able to tell it apart from the subject of present-day movements. Those that aren't are right to criticize the harms that they see.
I meant the modern community, I think they adopt the same “Rationalism” name. Basically the LessWrong community but HN is also pretty adjacent.
It sort of seems like the community is criticized for truly believing and living what they preach... They're the most sincere - if you thought the world was ending, you'd maybe do your best to stop it while enjoying the last bits left, while spending time with like-minded people. They're being criticized for not being hypocrites? I mean sure seems like there's lots of conflict of interest, but isn't there always? What humans have ever been objective in anything they do
Some of these potshots just cheapen any arguments. "Gretta has no prior experience with non profits" uh, she was a well regarded Google SRE... her making 200k is nothing.
Sometimes when I find someone to look up to and admire, I later find out there is potentially some dark reality to them. I then lament not being able to find any good role models in the world. If they have missused donor money, then that is terrible. If they are pushing towards goals that seems contrary to their stated mission, that is difficult to judge. I did always find it odd, 10 years after reading Yudkowsky's passionate writings, that he doesn't seem to have really gone and done anything about it. If it was all just a creative writing exercise to him... Then that would be rather humiliating to me, having taken it very seriously.
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?
> 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?
Gavin: I don't want to live in a world where anyone makes a bigger boulder than Hooli does.
> if you want to stop a boulder rolling down hill, what can you do besides run ahead of it and try stop it?
Bomb it, obviously.
Just nuke everything in front of the boulder in order to prevent it.
>Sometimes when I find someone to look up to and admire, I later find out there is potentially some dark reality to them
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.
Bringing up known Epstein associate Bill Gates, whose own wife divorced him because of this association, in this context seems very weird.
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Instead of assuming the "heroic responsibility" of the elect, as these fallen rationalist heroes advocated, we accept that we can't save a world which doesn't want to be saved, we focus on being good ourselves - in the salt of the earth sense, with no special dispensations afforded us because of heroic responsibilities. Let tomorrow worry about tomorrow, we may not fix the evil of the world but we can maybe at least not be it.
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.
It is my view that we are all apes. And therefore all sadists, all maschoists, all vengeful and envious and jealous and have all of the primal things living social animals need to survive in the hash environments of nature. We all displace aggression, we are all hedonists and much else besides. The sweetest person you know has to displace aggression somewhere, or otherwise, has none -- and would then quickly fall victim to the aggression of others on one day of bad luck.
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
I appreciate this. Though I'm not in agreement on all points, it is, in my opinion, thematically correct.
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.
This has me wondering if or how FetLife played a role in these communities connecting in the first place…does anyone know of any connection? (FetLife was a combo social network, blogging forum, and dating site back in the day)
I think it's still around and turned into some right-wing thing. Or that's the impression I got somewhere...
Schizophrenia really messes people up and they can't help it. It's not a disease and the likelyhood of developing it is genetic. Hard drugs can also increase the risk.
> 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.
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!
Arguments are not executable code or the final work product of… whatever it is they're arguing about. You have to continue interacting with these people and their AIs, so the underlying question of whether they're trustworthy and not evil always exists.
I think the mores of people building software that is made available as a conversational entity to the entire human population is at least somewhat relevant.
Well, this is old news. I'm still baffled by the fact that people take output of public personas as isolated facts. Take Nietzsche. Sure, great philosophical input. But try reading the sections about women. Same for Schopenhauer. Why? Because they were both incels and had big mother wounds that have never been addressed. So they spew their shit and people take it at face value even tho it stems from hurt. So why would I take any of this seriously if it's very obviously stupid and removed from reality? (Doesn't mean their whole works are)
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.
Nina Hartley has got to have some of the craziest stories. I'd love to see her talk about all the weird stuff she's seen/been involved with.
JFC this was clickbait. Even if this wasn't the intent and even if the dude has atypical sexual practices, if it's between consenting adults then how is it anyone else's business?
I cant remember the last time I flagged a post. Well, here I am.
One of the many funny things about whatever this group is, if you ask 100 members who E.T. Jaynes is, or some of his follow ons like MacKay or others in the same school of though like Polya, Shore and Johnson, better than 99 out of 100 will have a deer in the headlights look. I would wager the actual intellectual progenitor of a lot of the applied Baynesianism (Jaynes) is rolling in his grave right now.
You don't know what this group is, but you confidently spew statistics about it?
The word "cult" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It can mean anything from religion, to weird religion I don't like, to the organizations that try to cut you off from contact with your family and other people outside the organization. Only the last type are the bad ones, from what I can see.
Cult quite explicitly means the latter, and is what the article is explicitly accusing the core of this community being (that is, not everyone reading LessWrong, but specifically the actual people living in the communes).
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.
I am a native English speaker. Here is a popular dictionary link: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cult
See especially definitions 3 and 4.
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If the man known for urging caution with respect to AI founded a sex cult, then I don't think i want to know what kind of stuff the accelerationist faction are into.
As a polyamorous person, it seems quite concerning that effective altruism people are labeled as members of a sex cult, due to their private lives. Intellectuals should be attacked on the basis of their ideas, not based on their private lives.
That would be a reasonable argument if it were indeed their private lives, and they didn't go around offering to throw gangbangs for AI safety researchers.
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FYI if you're getting a Worker Exception, using Cloudflare Warp / 1.1.1.1 can get the article
Oh boy, Yudkowsky is a geek rock star.
This was a stupid waste of time the first time it was posted here.
I'm not sure how being polyamorous, having kinks and not hiding them makes someone part of a cult, even if I generally don't agree with Yud's entire thesis.
The article presents widely how the people it describes all live in communal housing, engage in harmful psychological practices, have a shared belief in the imminence of the Apocalypse, etc.
Can you confidently list which names specifically live together and the specific harmful psychological practices?
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I don't think the argument is that their sexual practices inherently make them part of a cult. Rather, the argument is that it's very common for cults to include communal sexual practices that fall outside typical social norms.
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.
AI safety is not the same as all the Yudkowsky weirdness.
The Venn diagram has huge overlap.
On HN it seems to have that. On the other hand in the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_safety he only gets one mention in the odd links box at the bottom of the page. I don't really get it but I don't do sex cults so maybe it's that?
Why bother talking about ideas when you can just insult people
Why debate bro when I can hate bros?
Am I crazy to think all this AI safety stuff is ridiculous marketing and that Roko’s Basilisk is equally dumb?
Roko’s Basilisk is Pascal's wager but with a robot. It's a fucking creepypasta.
It would be hilarious if people weren't actually killing over it.
We'll definitely need some safety with AI sex bots
[Orgasmatron 3K - Starting up!]
No no you can use me all you want
> There has been a great effort over many years to distance AI Safety discussion and policy from its origins and intellectual center, because its center is a sex cult started by a fan fiction author. If you want to be taken seriously you have to hide that.
This may be true, but it means that those readers are using irrelevant ad hominem to allocate respect, meaning that the flaw is in them rather than the author. It's like dismissing Feynman's physics for playing the bongos.
It should make no more difference that an author is in a polycule than that they are gay or straight. And how the heck is a history of writing fan fiction an indicator of their scientific or engineering or judgement?
Would a formal scientific and/or engineering education be an indicator? (Or lack thereof as is the case here)
Happy to fast-forward a bit: I will not take “sat and thought deeply” as a qualification, which would make all other prophets qualified for scientific/engineering judgement.
> Would a formal scientific and/or engineering education be an indicator?
It's a lot more relevant than their sex or fiction writing preferences.
I tried to read Map and Territory, it just isn't that good if expecting Nietzsche or Heidegger.
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.
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746654
1785992697 | I Went to a 'Torture Party' with Polyamorous Bay Area Rationalists | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49767080 | 0 comments
Interesting how little interaction there is with these....
Try bringing up Scientology in Hollywood.
I think you can now but there was a time when saying anything bad about that cult would get you blackballed from the industry. It’s still powerful.
Why can't detractors of rationalism and AI-doom ever just lay out an argument for why they're wrong
It's always "yudkowsky is a weird guy" or "they had an orgie once" but who gives a fuck?
I just want someone to lay out, in impersonal terms, the flaws of their reasoning and why I shouldn't agree with them.
My problem is with the whole genre of article rather than this one specifically.
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Someone who hasn't been reading the object-level arguments for 10+ years might reasonably wonder if these are good heuristics. Here's an additional data point: I think polyamory is stupid, I've read the object-level arguments, and this entire thread is ridiculous.
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.
> Someone who hasn't been reading the object-level arguments for 10+ years might reasonably wonder if these are good heuristics.
I think you might have meant hermeneutics, in the sociological sense of 'subjective interpretation'?
Possibly. That's not a word I trust myself to use correctly. What I meant is that the object-level claims require a lot of time and energy to evaluate, and it's sometimes reasonable to use a heuristic like "sex cults are not trustworthy" to save time, but if you've already read the arguments then the heuristic loses almost all value.
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.
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If you think your issue is important, and that people should follow your lead, maybe leave the sex cult first.
If anyone is serious about this topic they will find a new spokesperson immediately.
Like that would help. The rest of the world plain refuses to engage with the arguments they've been consistently presenting for decades.
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").
I don't think that's true. It's hard to argue that Elon Musk, the richest person and spokesperson of tech for a lot of people, never participated in SV sex parties or had weird sex behaviors. Or Trump, the president of the USA, has a clean history of standard sex as well. Or Bill Gates, the nice philanthropist, never engaged in weird sex circles. But that doesn't make them lose their leadership positions or status.
Sex cult is beyond mere weird sex behavior.
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I’d rather be in a “sex cult”, whatever that entails, than this ridiculous culture that’s somehow still doing moral panics over sex. Maybe it’s just deeply human, or maybe it really is stabilizing society to relegate sex to something dirty and private, but I have a feeling it’s just a dumb conflation that’s so easy to exploit it’s never allowed to go away. It’s like the “think of the children” thought-stopper and we’d do well to get past it.
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.
This isn’t moral panic, it’s saying “hey, all these influential people are intimately connected across the strongest possible dimensions (money, sex, belief and legal grey areas), we should probably pay attention to that”
>all these influential people
And by all you mean 1-2 big names and a bunch of unknowns, with all other big names having no connection to this.
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90% of this is just driven by strong emotional reactions from someone that feels uncomfortable about people being open about their non-standard sexual life, in the same way that many people have weird negative reactions about polyamorous relationships in general.
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?
The emotional reaction comes from a deep-seated evolutionary survival mechanism that has served mankind well to present day. Uggo fuck club tells you EVERYTHING you need to know about these people, and more importantly, their thoughts & perceptions. If you join uggo fuck club, your perceptions are off. Why should I value this guy's perceptions & prescriptions relating to ML when he can't even swing the right ones over his own BMI?
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Should you care that your heart surgeon is a necrophiliac? Probably. Should you care that some AI researchers are in a sex cult? No.
You don't think it's relevant that people who wield such immense power are literally in bed with each other?
This. Conflict of Interest. It's also happening in government.
The problem is not the sex, the problem is the cult. The sex is merely evidence for the cult.
When the sex cult is built around the idea that they and everyone else should fear and respect the false, anthropomorphized God they've created in LLMs, then yes. That makes them stupid and stupid people should not be allowed so close to the wheels of power and history.
Can we apply this standard generally, or is it just against the people who deify AI?
> Should you care that your heart surgeon is a necrophiliac? Probably. Should you care that some AI researchers are in a sex cult?
Umm Yes, yes you should. Immorality in one area has a tendency to bleed into other areas.
It's not even about immorality. The problem is not so much the sex, it's the cult part. If a good deal of the people working in AI safety in the biggest AI lands are actually a cult, that has deep implications about what AIs are aligned to, and how (ironically) irrational they might really be trained to be, by the very people trying to control them.
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?
"I am your GOD! Worship me! Worship meee!"
The hubris is probably more damning than the fact it's a sex cult. Or at least an incestuous clique.
For some reason the bit that stuck out to me in a wild ride of an article was the guy who believed a super-intelligence was a threat to humans but distanced himself from veganism as if that was crazy part of the AI-doom sex cult that he disagreed with.
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.
They also downplay global warming, nuclear war, wealth inequality, and in general anything other, less cool people they didn't want to identify with thought was important.
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.
Who are these "they" you're talking about?
If your answer is EA or rats then a simple Google search will just show you that it's not true?
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I read it more like a conformist performative veganism. I think the implication is that this group treats veganism and all of these beliefs as a kind of shibboleth, an in-group marker for which conformity is expected. The immedaite "feeling" associated with a cult is the feeling of "high control", cf. https://www.google.com/search?q=high+control+group
I read it that EA practices (incl. veganism), beliefs, "rantionalism", and doomerism are all aspects of the high control environment
More of this madness coming out of the west coast of America, in particular California.
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.
This is the real San Francisco that I know, not the one that Hacker News always talks about. It's a haven for weirdoes that has attracted the strangest of each generation since at least the Beatniks in the 50s. It probably descends from all of the depression-era westward migration and people from earlier than that coming to Hollywood to become movie stars. San Francisco attracted a different type, artists and hippies, Tim Leary followers. The deserts are the strangest places. That's where most of the true cult shit happend. Jack Parsons trying to summon demons. Gram Parsons' friends stealing his corpse to bury him at Joshua Tree. The traveling folk that Chris McCandless took in with near the Salton Sea.
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.
California is on the West coast, i'm pretty sure. is not it?
Whoops, fixed now
skills issue.
The real question is where is the Epstein link here?
Nowhere, that's exactly the problem. People involved in Epstein's sex cult are the respected members of our society. These are some weird nerds who have consensual polyamorous sex with each other, therefore their opinions on AI should not be taken seriously. /s
Well... except for that email about Eliezer's Zoom meeting with Epstein and Epstein donating to MIRI.
https://www.reddit.com/r/accelerate/comments/1qu61kp/eliezer...
What's a "sex cult"?
Well, a cult is a high-control social group that's difficult to leave and requires you to believe and do strange things that are likely bad for you or at least take up all your time and resources. And a sex cult is what it sounds like.
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He does not understand the issue. Not presenting any backing for his ideas, just emotions. The idea has been misused by the bros immensely, that does not help to grasp it either. But AI extermination of humans is a well known problem we have no solution for. Luckily AGI is not so close.
But AI extermination of humans is a well known problem we have no solution for
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.
From the friendly article:
"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."
I’m literally speechless. I just can’t.
I guess the EA and rationalist cult members are out in force since this got flagged. Not a good look guys, you're just confirming what everyone thinks.
It may have been flagged as the title being misleading, as it did not really present as many details around the sex part as the title suggested.
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 title is the one used by the author, how is that misleading?
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I mean I saw it 10 hours later. I'm thrilled to see stuff like this getting multiple hundreds of upvotes on HN, one of the deepest dens of tech capitalist worship in the world. It performing here is a couple steps from it performing on LessWrong itself. I take that as a sign a breakthrough is nearing. It is probably linked to whether the AI lab IPOs are successful or not.
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?
Horrible people
Good to see some raising the issue of the sex cult that Effective Altruism is:
I'd like to hear what feminists have to say about that picture in TFA of that woman and six men watching her. Just as I'd like to hear what feminists have to say about Amodei's wife who used to run a porn site.
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.
> I'd like to hear what feminists have to say about that picture in TFA of that woman and six men watching her.
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.
Is it really a satire if the same woman in the photo (Aella) went on to have a "birthday gangbang" with numerous men, some of whom are present in the photo?
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is your comment satire/irony? I can't tell
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