We'll definitely need some safety with AI sex bots

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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.

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.

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.

War and Peace is shorter than HPMOR.

Anyone who knows anything about Harry Potter fandom in those years knows that its readers were always thirsty for something new in the Potterverse to read or be exposed to. By latching onto that universe's incredible popularity, Yudkowsky exposed a large number of young, inquisitive people to the ideas of rationalism. It was essentially a recruitment mechanism, one that was wildly successful. Many rationalists freely admit that their first exposure to rationalism was via HPMOR.

I don't think Harry Potter fans would look kindly on their favorite story being treated with such contempt. Remember that within about three sentences of introducing Ron Weasley our hero finds him guilty of the heinous crime of enjoying sports and concludes he should not exist.

Excuse me. It was Draco Malfoy, our rapist deuteragonist, who said that. Our hero merely agreed.

Maybe Harry Potter fans would read a bad fantasy book, but HPMOR is not just a bad fantasy book. It is repugnant to healthy people from the first few pages.

I really, really dont understand this complaint at all. Harry and draco disliking ron is supposed to show that they are snotty kids who have big blind spots. The characters are supposed to be dislikable at the start, the story is about the growth they experience from there. This is part of what makes it a better story than the original. Yudkowsky's harry grows as a character which basically doesnt happen at all in the original series.

Do you dislike succession too? Some people just need completely heroic protagonists in their stories. Thats fine, but it doesnt make the story bad.

They are introduced as insane, not snotty. Nearly the first thing Draco says is that he plans to rape Hermione and our Hero uses his Agency to do exactly nothing about it. (It is hard to exaggerate how bizarre this story is to people who haven't read it.)

Hundreds of pages later, Harry uses the first iota of power he is given to prohibit students from playing Quidditch according to rules he believes are irrational. There is an immediate outcry which he dismisses because it's just the mewling of inferior intellects. It's hard for me to see any signs of growth here.

(Harry's contempt for sports is amusing, given that about a third of the story is dedicated to his love of cheating at a particularly moronic sport invented by the Lord Voldemort ripping off Ender's Game.)

He convinces Draco that his whole ideology is wrong. He convinces him not to rape anyone before he rapes anyone. Not exactly sure what the better outcome is here, just turning him in would only strengthen his violent ideology. There are many complaints to be made about the story, as you said its boring and too long and often too preachy. A lot of the visible changes in the characters happens in the last quarter. Even though the whole story has been building to that it can seem like its a bit out of nowhere.

This is a forgivable statement if you didn't read it, because then I guess you may not have seen that there's themes at play and a point being made. If you did read it I do not understand how you don't see how you are meant to dislike the summary judgement and the judgement itself being an effect of yet another plot point.

But then if you did not read it it seems a little disingenuous to say "this is a bad book", because you would not only not know but anything you did know you would not understand.

What are your favourite quotes from it?

Let me be clear, he's no cormac mccarthy(my favorite prose is the passage from blood meridian describing the raiders). My bar for fan fiction prose is basically whether it annoys me, its a low bar. Most of what makes hpmor good is the cleverness with which yudkowsky subverts the original harry potter world to try to make a rationalist argument, whether that be by inverting a character or playing off the harry/voldemort relationship in thoughtful ways.

'"Voldemort," said the old wizard. "I understand him now at last. Because to believe that the world is truly like that, you must believe there is no justice in it, that it is woven of darkness at its core. I asked you why he became a monster, and you could give no reason. And if I could ask him, I suppose, his answer would be: Why not?

They stood there gazing into each other's eyes, the old wizard in his robes, and the young boy with the lightning-bolt scar on his forehead.

"Tell me, Harry," said the old wizard, "will you become a monster?"

"No," said the boy, an iron certainty in his voice.

"Why not?" said the old wizard.'

as you can see its nothing special, just good enough

I see, thanks. It reminds me a little of those spam emails which are sprinkled, intentionally, with obvious spelling errors. They aren't trying to trick the average person, they are trying to filter for a much smaller, more valuable audience.

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.

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.

It's surprisingly common in women

This would be a _Fascinating_ citation.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19085605/

First hit in a Kagi search.

yeah, if you ignore what the op said, it sounds similar.

I have no idea how trustworthy this study is - but it claims that 62% of women had such a fantasy at least once. How is that not in line with what the OP said about it being "surprisingly common"?

Many rock climbers have felt the "call of the void" when climbing, I've felt it myself on a multi-pitch once, I'd hardly claim they are suicidal or have suicidal ideations and would not identify myself as either. I think there needs to be a certain level of intention to make the fantasy reality for it to be a kink.

I suspect the misunderstanding might be around the precise meaning of the word "kink" then.

I think in one common understanding of the word, that I assume the OP was using, having a taboo fantasy that you merely roleplay with a partner you are deeply intimate with, in full consent from both, can very well be classified as "a kink", even if what you're experiencing is the not really SA.

Based on your response, I'm assuming that in your understanding, it would only be "a kink" if it was a desire to actually experience a real sexual assault, which of course no one, or perhaps only an extreme extreme minority, actually wishes for. I don't believe OP meant to imply that this is at all common.

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.

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?

No, just the ones that are part of this specific community described in the blog post.

"Mostly" in the title implies otherwise.

Hate to break it to you, but I don't think the AI doomers have a monopoly on orgies. You name the political / belief system and I'll find an orgy for you by 10pm.

No one is claiming that all poly people have some ties to the AI community.

They make a claim about a specific community in San Francisco, that is tied together by a mix of AI doomerism and sexual relations. And it's not at all surprising or some farfetched claim that people who enjoy having sex with someone might adopt their ideas, at least publicly, for fear of losing that sexual connection.

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.

They seem incapable of saying anything without five part Roman-numbered novel length blog posts.

Maybe that’s why they’re so pissed, ChatGPT’s useless verbosity is threatening to put them out of a job.

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.

Problem is, Aella has made it her business to speak about it publicly

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...

Why is that a problem? Just don't read her stuff if you're not interested.

I agree, but... If you work hard to become a public figure, you must have known in advance that there'd be public opinions of you, right?

I find it distasteful that people want to be some sort of public figure while expecting that other people's opinions should be private.

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.

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.

This sounds incredibly judgemental and imposing of your own world view and moral compass

what is so "incredibly" and "imposing" in the parent comment, that saying «my experience is…», «i feel more in it than many imagine/expect», «factually ruins many lifes», and «it just seem working this way», even «remove the judgment element» ??

it is as gently and friendly of a warning as it could be.

i would say rather less nicely: people! don't be degenerate! it does not worth it. it causes harm to you, to neighbours, to bystanders too, even if you dont intend.

Well OP claiming they get "bothered, upset and irritated" by people having "rape kinks" and "pitying them" sounds kind of judgemental to me. Same goes with "don't be degenerate" for sexual behaviours you do not approve that, somehow, also harm one's neighbours for some reason.

Something being judgemental is not a reason to dismiss it.

How having lot of sex would cause harm to my neighbours?

I'm sure OP would argue that the breakdown of the family structure and social cohesion has a deleterious effect on society as a whole, which includes your neighbors.

Yes and indulging this appetite is much like any other, a good comparison being the other fundamental one: hunger. I think that also frames it in a way that makes it more concrete as to what the negative aspects are as well as showing that total abstinence is not necessarily an unalloyed virtue. If you don't eat at all you will starve but you can easily eat too much or eat the wrong things and it becomes gluttony at the extremes. Coming up with systems that allow you to cheat the negative aspects also turns pathological in the long run. Deadly sins exist even without the religious framing but the spiritual, social and psychological aspects are very real regardless of what anyone professes to believe.

Amazing how people come with all these rationalizations instead of just accepting that they are not the kind of people who like casual sex. There's nothing wrong or unhealthy about casual sex, it's just not for you. You can have your loving sex all your life, nobody will force you to have casual sex.

About orgies, it bothers me how much people who never frequented these circles have so many opinions about how bad or unhealthy they are. I know religious people who have the "healthy sex life" and are completely deranged. I could say that they are that way because of their sex life, but I would be as wrong as you are.

Some of us have spent countless nights with other kids locked in the basement during parents' swinger parties and/or been there and done it ourselves as adults and found it to be as much an empty experience as the parent poster suggests. Molestation victims also frequently report the same sentiment. Removing love from the equation turns the act of sex into mechanical fluid exchange, and the participants into human livestock.

Promiscuous people are as annoying as those who refuse to eat at the same restaurant twice. You have an insatiable appetite for novelty that you need to see normalized in others-- to defer ever having to face the very emptiness we're describing.

If you actually found it fulfilling, you wouldn't need to sell others on something that sells itself.

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

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?

No, a cult is any closed-off fanatical group that is deemed harmful to its members and sometimes to outsiders as well. The group who launched a sarin gas attack in Tokyo's metro, Aum Shinrikyo, was a cult. The Jonestown group was a cult. Scientology is often considered a cult, though this is less widely accepted (especially since Scientology is much larger).

No one considers Catholicism, or Protestantism, or Baptism cults. There may be specific communities that are cults that claim to be parts of these churches, but that doesn't mean that "pretty much any religion is a cult".

No one calls the Catholic Church "a cult"

No one considers Catholicism, or Protestantism, or Baptism cults.

Speak for yourself. I was coercively and forcefully added to the Roman Catholic church when I was baptised. Attempts to record myself as removed (the 'Count Me Out' campaign) were met with familial and attempted Church pressure. I was asked to visit the church to discuss the 'impacts of my decision'. I was not recorded as leaving, and the church updated its rules so people in Ireland could no longer request to leave the church.

The ways cults control you can vary, and they don't have to involve threats or violence to be coercive control. Threatening to take away someone's community for a lack of belief is controlling.

Because they don't get enough votes to control the military.

Well, technically military is run now by maga incel death cult, so yeah I give you that one. I forgot I was discussing on US forum.

As of what cult is, from Merriam-Webster: “ a group (such as an organization or religious sect) with tenets and practices regarded as coercive, insular, or dangerous”

Generally we today discuss as cults manipulative social sects that sureound around one leading authoritative figure who has extensive psychological control over rest of the members. Often these groups use these strange dynamics to abuse members, do financial crimes, or even murder people (I guess the Manson case and Jonestown are most famous, Cali has a history of this).

As for me, I never listen to a man wearing a fedora no matter what his credentials.

It also [0] defines a cult as great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work (such as a film or book) or a small group of very devoted supporters or fans. And I put it to you that the article is clearly using the word more in that sense because it is quite difficult to fit the words coercive, insular, or dangerous to the AI safety people. The accusation in the article seems to be that they're too friendly and sexually inclusive. And if you want to communicate with them they appear to be active on Twitter and not shy.

Well, technically military is run now by maga incel death cult, so yeah I give you that one. I forgot I was discussing on US forum.

Well, we're speaking in English. I was careful to phrase that in a way that applied to what I'm pretty sure is any English-speaking country. Anywhere that votes could put anyone they like in charge of the military for any reason, cult or no cult. It isn't technically relevant - or practically relevant in most cases. It is just a question of whether the cult has the numbers or not.

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cult

Yes word have meanings, often several of them. I chose the one we often use when we say ”death cult”, or ”sex cult” etc. You claim to say you know exactly what meaning the author meant, which either you have to derive from quite careful textual analysis - which you haven’t - or you have to be the author themselves. Personally think having sex is quite fine and dandy, even group sex if that’s your thing. Sex cult indeed sounds a bit ominous. I wonder why furries are never described as cult, although they are indeed very devoted. Britney Spears fan club has very strond devotees who I’m sure have sex with each other (since it is mostly gay men), but never heard of Britney Spears Sex Cult.

I wonder if it just that you try to weasel away from negative publicity by trying to flex the meaning of words to turn the meaning of this bluesky post upside down? In that case I might suggest you to tread carefully. When nothing is true, everything is possible and all that.

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.

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?

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.

Wow, I admit I didn’t know about this. According to my coarse reading of the news sites it seems like there was no association in fact, but I won’t insist on anything, I only learnt about this now.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Label them what you want. I'll go with EAs if you insist.

Sure, they're not entirely monolithic. There's room for "EA, but vegan", "EA, but global warming still matters", maybe even "EA, but vaguely socialist". As I keep saying, the core belief is that they're special because of their intellectual superiority, anything else is negotiable.

No, what you said what that "They also downplay global warming, nuclear war, wealth inequality" which is just a flat out lie

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.

California is on the West coast, i'm pretty sure. is not it?

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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)

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.

Do you mind excerpting the valid two paragraphs?

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?

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.

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.

What's a "sex cult"?

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.