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

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.

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.

This got flagged immediately - but why? There’s nothing I saw in there that wasn’t true?

https://x.com/Aella_Girl/status/1874676723910098955

24 showers and 71 crying sessions in a year. That lifestyle doesn't seem particularly healthy...

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.

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.

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.

AI safety is not the same as all the Yudkowsky weirdness.

> 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?

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746654

[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.