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.
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?
I should clarify. I don't think it's unhealthy to cry every 5 days. I think it might be unhealthy to have the sort of mental state that makes you want to cry every 5 days. It's the underlying psychological situation that might be unhealthy, not the outlet of crying.
Not necessarily. Lots of variable factors play into how often a person might need to shower. Temperature, humidity, how prone you are to sweating in general, diet, hormonal balance, skin microbiome. Some months during a dry winter where I'm not doing much, I won't need to shower more than once a week to look and smell decent. When I spent a July in Cambodia, it was multiple times per day. When I was a kid, I barely sweat and once went nearly a month before I or anyone else noticed. As an adult, that is no longer possible.
There's a guy who discovered a bacterial culture that works better than any deoderant, and for him eliminated the need to use soap on the hair or body. He still showers and uses soap on his hands, but reported that his hair and skin have been so happy and healthy that soap no longer made any sense. Dig into A2-Biome if you're curious.
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.
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.
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.
This seemed like it might have a point in there somewhere but it was hard to be sure when it was posted two days ago via a site that turns social media sequences of posts into more normal looking articles [1].
The original social media form does not improve the situation.
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 just went for a walk, sorry it took me so long to reply.
But yeah, I've seen a TON of stuff that seems brigaded or astroturfed or otherwise like it's manipulation? The EA / TESCREAL stuff maybe is just the latest weird one? I don't know, but generally, I wish there were a lot more hopeful views of the world.
Like, we can live in a badass robot powered solar punk utopia if we decide to, but everyone I guess would rather daydream about skynet.
> Like, we can live in a badass robot powered solar punk utopia if we decide to, but everyone I guess would rather daydream about skynet.
Agree!
- there's a newer cozy game called "solar punk" if you need an escape
- the badass version is where non-Western countries are largely at, it's the West and its dysfunctional media ecosystems are stuck in a doomer loop we have to endure here
That's what I'm trying to build, at least my Alaskan version of it. Off grid cabin, robots zipping around, and solar lol. We'll see how it works out? I don't know, also, building stuff is tough, but I'm learning.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I should clarify. I don't think it's unhealthy to cry every 5 days. I think it might be unhealthy to have the sort of mental state that makes you want to cry every 5 days. It's the underlying psychological situation that might be unhealthy, not the outlet of crying.
I haven't cried in years and no outbursts... What makes you cry so often?
Here, I was going to say it's actually unhealthy to shower twice a month. This is some super-power nose blindness.
Not necessarily. Lots of variable factors play into how often a person might need to shower. Temperature, humidity, how prone you are to sweating in general, diet, hormonal balance, skin microbiome. Some months during a dry winter where I'm not doing much, I won't need to shower more than once a week to look and smell decent. When I spent a July in Cambodia, it was multiple times per day. When I was a kid, I barely sweat and once went nearly a month before I or anyone else noticed. As an adult, that is no longer possible.
There's a guy who discovered a bacterial culture that works better than any deoderant, and for him eliminated the need to use soap on the hair or body. He still showers and uses soap on his hands, but reported that his hair and skin have been so happy and healthy that soap no longer made any sense. Dig into A2-Biome if you're curious.
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.
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.
[dead]
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.
This seemed like it might have a point in there somewhere but it was hard to be sure when it was posted two days ago via a site that turns social media sequences of posts into more normal looking articles [1].
The original social media form does not improve the situation.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49737985
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.
This got flagged immediately - but why? There’s nothing I saw in there that wasn’t true?
It's a dupe and was a story last week.
How about the title?
1. it's a dupe post, there are other commenters who've shared links to prior submissions with more comments (and not flagged)
2. some of that group hangs around HN, there is an amount of (likely uncoordinated) voting/flagging patterns
2 seems more relevant here, IMO.
HN has been kind of wild with influence campaigns over the last 6 months or so?
there has always been an amount, I notice it more with Trump related comments since 2.0, but inconsistent
EA is a newer in frequency topic on HN, so unclear thus far, but the other submissions remain unflagged
I just went for a walk, sorry it took me so long to reply.
But yeah, I've seen a TON of stuff that seems brigaded or astroturfed or otherwise like it's manipulation? The EA / TESCREAL stuff maybe is just the latest weird one? I don't know, but generally, I wish there were a lot more hopeful views of the world.
Like, we can live in a badass robot powered solar punk utopia if we decide to, but everyone I guess would rather daydream about skynet.
> Like, we can live in a badass robot powered solar punk utopia if we decide to, but everyone I guess would rather daydream about skynet.
Agree!
- there's a newer cozy game called "solar punk" if you need an escape
- the badass version is where non-Western countries are largely at, it's the West and its dysfunctional media ecosystems are stuck in a doomer loop we have to endure here
That's what I'm trying to build, at least my Alaskan version of it. Off grid cabin, robots zipping around, and solar lol. We'll see how it works out? I don't know, also, building stuff is tough, but I'm learning.
I'll try the game out, thanks for the rec.
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.
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?
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?
> 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.
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.
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746654
1785992697 | I Went to a 'Torture Party' with Polyamorous Bay Area Rationalists | https://archive.ph/CdYKX | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49192673 | 0 comments
1789634197 | AI safety is mostly a sex cult | https://skywriter.blue/@segyges.bsky.social/3mvom4b4dn22q | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49737985 | 284 comments
1789641808 | Music subreddit exposes Yudkowsky and the "AI safety" sex cult before SE Gyges | https://www.reddit.com/r/grimezs/comments/1tuzmpo/grimes_mir... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49738867 | 0 comments
1789642158 | Grimes, Aella, and the Bay Area "AI safety" sex cult | https://www.reddit.com/r/grimezs/comments/1tuzmpo/grimes_mir... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49738929 | 0 comments
1789742785 | Cult of Anthropic Insiders Rumored to Be Worshipping Claude as a God | https://futurism.com/future-society/cult-anthropic-insiders-... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49755168 | 0 comments
1789829846 | The Doomsday Cult Inside OpenAI Patrick Boyle [video] | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luXnftoxCaM | 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.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49737985
This was a stupid waste of time the first time it was posted here.
The hubris is probably more damning than the fact it's a sex cult. Or at least an incestuous clique.