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.
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."
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.
So how they enjoy their sex lives is dependant on continuing to preach AI catastrophism? I don't buy it. Lots of poly folks out here that probably don't care much about AI one way or another.
Heh, if you think this post buries the lede, have you ever read anything by the community in question? They seem incapable of saying anything without five part Roman-numbered novel length blog posts.
I think this article kind of misses a crucial point. They weren't always AI doomers, that's a thing they picked up along the way. Their core beliefs are 1. That they are the smartest, and 2. That this makes them morally superior because consequentialism (This sort of follows. If you believe in consequentialism, leaving all your decisions to the superior consequence predictor is surely the moral thing to do)
Maybe one day they will stop believing in AI doom, but they will never, ever stop believing they belong to the intellectually and thus morally elect. The day any of them do that they have either broken with the cult or died.
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.
That's the solution the parent commenter had! And the gay furry (self identified) complained about! If you have a problem with his announcing the solution (to stop reading) then maybe you should just not read his comment, or my comment, or...
It's not about their sex life. It's about how sex connects a community of barely legible AI doomerism.
If you don't understand human social interactions very well, or otherwise assume you live in a "world of ideas", then this may not seem salient. However, it is.
Because what we have to explain is why there's a community of people in northern california who deliver unargued prophecies about the end of human civilisation as-if their prophetic ability is a given.
The answer, unsuprisingly, is sex. This is not an unusual answer in the world of "prophetic communication". What, in the end, is prophecy as a social practice? It is some ideological Leader with followers who impart to that leader a 'charismatic power' of foreknowledge based on their attachement to that leader.
What is the mechanism of this attachemnt? In otherwords: how is this style of prophecy spreading around the AI doomer community, if not by plain argument and evidence? Sex.
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 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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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)?
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.
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 east 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.
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”
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.
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?
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”.
We'll definitely need some safety with AI sex bots
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.
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.
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...
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."
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.
This would be a _Fascinating_ citation.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19085605/
First hit in a Kagi search.
Indeed. This feels like it's just slut shaming.
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:
So how they enjoy their sex lives is dependant on continuing to preach AI catastrophism? I don't buy it. Lots of poly folks out here that probably don't care much about AI one way or another.
Yeah it is. If they stop preaching AI doomerism then they're out of the cult and won't get invited to orgies anymore.
Are you implying that every rationalist that preaches AI doomerism gets invited to orgies?
Heh, if you think this post buries the lede, have you ever read anything by the community in question? They seem incapable of saying anything without five part Roman-numbered novel length blog posts.
I think this article kind of misses a crucial point. They weren't always AI doomers, that's a thing they picked up along the way. Their core beliefs are 1. That they are the smartest, and 2. That this makes them morally superior because consequentialism (This sort of follows. If you believe in consequentialism, leaving all your decisions to the superior consequence predictor is surely the moral thing to do)
Maybe one day they will stop believing in AI doom, but they will never, ever stop believing they belong to the intellectually and thus morally elect. The day any of them do that they have either broken with the cult or died.
Maybe that’s why they’re so pissed, ChatGPT’s useless verbosity is threatening to put them out of a job.
I'm tempted to say "You're absolutely right" :)
yeah, it's no coincidence that AIs sound a bit like them -- a lot of the people doing the instruction tuning are affiliated with these people.
And it's also a profound self-identity threat to them if that kind of intelligence is nothing special.
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.
Why is that a problem? Just don't read her stuff if you're not interested.
There are lots of people talking all the time about stuff I'm not interested in.
That's the solution the parent commenter had! And the gay furry (self identified) complained about! If you have a problem with his announcing the solution (to stop reading) then maybe you should just not read his comment, or my comment, or...
The sankey chart refers to her birthday:
https://aella.substack.com/p/my-birthday-gangbang
(reedited to shorten)
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.
It's not about their sex life. It's about how sex connects a community of barely legible AI doomerism.
If you don't understand human social interactions very well, or otherwise assume you live in a "world of ideas", then this may not seem salient. However, it is.
Because what we have to explain is why there's a community of people in northern california who deliver unargued prophecies about the end of human civilisation as-if their prophetic ability is a given.
The answer, unsuprisingly, is sex. This is not an unusual answer in the world of "prophetic communication". What, in the end, is prophecy as a social practice? It is some ideological Leader with followers who impart to that leader a 'charismatic power' of foreknowledge based on their attachement to that leader.
What is the mechanism of this attachemnt? In otherwords: how is this style of prophecy spreading around the AI doomer community, if not by plain argument and evidence? Sex.
he was hiding in plain sight all along
Y'all need to cut the sex pest before we do it for you, mate.
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 mean, this is a rather fun article to read but I'm not entirely sure about the thesis.
One of the learnings from things like the whole Epstein saga has been there are a lot of sex cults in the policy making world and, yes, the people making policy generally shouldn't be. But I'm not sure this article actually comes up with a good explanation of why these particular people shouldn't be making policy. People having active sex lives isn't a disqualifying trait. Being in a cult doesn't disqualify people from being in politics. It is routine and expected that fields will have a lot of similar people in them (as I recall the overlap between security researchers and the furry community is unusual too, and that is hardly more important than justifying a passing comment).
It is more routine than the article writer seems to think for all the people in a small field to know each other and get on really well.
Let's survey the American voters
You don't need to survey them because they already voted. US congress is 95%+ religious people
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.
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?
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.
More like the worst porn film ever made.
I’m literally speechless. I just can’t.
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.
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?
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.
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.
skills issue.
Glad he's at least admitting it as a possibility.
Also: you know, you don't need to rely on lossy proxies like how much or how little sex do the arguments' proponents have. You can just read the arguments!
If 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)?
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.
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 east 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.
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”
And by all you mean 1-2 big names and a bunch of unknowns, with all other big names having no connection to this.
Also covered by nypost: https://nypost.com/2026/09/16/business/ai-doomsayers-wild-li...
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.
Why bother talking about ideas when you can just insult people
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?
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.
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”.