Yeah, the group sex.

He’s just an intellectual coward, he didn’t even own up to the basilisk despite his whole decision theorist phase clearly being about trying to cook up a convincing cope for it.

Apparently he has a book called Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millenium so that’s likely to have you covered. I read “How Jesus Became God” from him at some point which might have touched on this, but it was mostly about the evolution of the messiah concept itself, like how the ‘son of man’ was supposed to be it’s own specific thing and not just a euphemism for messiah, or how the term in jewish apocalyptic literature is pretty much completely separate from where the christian interpretation ended up.

Overall a very readable book, I remember liking it but it’s really been a while.

Did Christ actually talk that much about the literal end of the world

Nobody knows exactly what he talked about, but the view that he passes the bar for historicity but seems to have been more of a the-end-is-nigh witch doctor type character as the new baseline has gained a lot of ground, especially with biblical scholars like Bart Ehrman breaking into popular science writing.

Also John’s apocalypse has the whole coded anti-roman-empire screed going for it beyond the psychedelia, so it’s arguable Jesus was the more direct doom prophet, but for a more distinctly jewish flavored apocalypse.

John Wentsworth featured in the retracted S.E. Gyges essay.

Second guy from the right apparently.

It seems he won’t get the full payout:

The rationalists are starting to cancel people for exercising free speech! woke 3.0 is go I repeat woke 3.0 is go

How much of a complete fucking idiot do you have to be to publicly acknowledge the Zizians in the middle of an ongoing PR disaster about your clan being on the women like to be raped they just don’t have the balls to admit it ideological bandwagon. Hey everyone, check out how my writings caused the Zizians¹! Specifically by making them think we are ridiculous hypocrites for making huge claims about being scientifically unblackmailable and then paying a bunch of hush money to sexual assault victims who threatened to make a fuss. Yeah, the part where we where trying to cover up systematic abuse didn’t help either.

1. Just like Jesus caused the crusades! !

Siskind goes viral with a Schrödinger’s joke on twitter:

currently top post on other sneerclub

uncovered downside risk

This is a novel and interesting way to euphemise rape, and because it’s an EA I can’t even tell if it’s supposed to be tongue in cheek.

EA/rationalism and redpill fit like yin and yang. Akin to how EA is an optimization of altruism with “suboptimal” human tendencies like morality and empathy stripped from it, red pill is an optimized sexual strategy with the humanity of women stripped from it.

Really well said.

Despite this culture, EA as a philosophy has a lot of good in it and they should fix this bug with some introspection

sigh

Anthropic was $42B in the hole for 2025, reuters reports. Apparently this puts their $-spent-to-$-earned ratio slightly over the one calculated by Zitron for OpenAI, making Anthropic in fact the shittier business.

For comparison, the GDP of Cyprus for 2025 was $41B.

I lean towards things being unfathomably worse that they appear a the surface, there’s just so much smoke, except I think the problem is structural and not the result of deliberate machinations by evil genius pedophiles.

The nazi bar analogy works for more than ideology, and the burgeoning CNC scene they got going seems to be exacerbating the if-you-build-it-they-will-come aspect of the whole thing, because good luck trying to explain to authorities how you got real raped at the fake rape party you are supposed to have willingly attended.

This is all third hand at best, but I live on the other side of the world so whatever. As far as personal experiences go @ivyastrix just posted a new blog about her victimization at rationalist events where she describes some of the systemic pathologies in rationalist organisations trying to deal with SA allegations, and it’s basically the same principles that make them believe that vertical workplace romance is not a minefield of power imbalance and coercion but actually fine and ethical when the right people are doing it, just fundamentally unserious people biting off more than they can chew and acting defensive and victim blaming and trying to pass it off as drama when it blows up in their faces.

It goes off the speculative rails for most of the second half, but I have to admit the rate at which Αela compliments people on her socials on being good rapists could be the most off-putting thing I’ve ever encountered in relation to rationalism.

From the more out there claims I thought the part where he advocates that Irregular (the people with rat/EA ties who made the swiss cheese LLM sandboxes) where employing weaponized incompetence in order to let a big incident happen that would force the government to go through with pausing AI research was interesting. though obviously of dubious likelihood. The whole doomer rationalists sabotaging slightly less doomer EAs in a low key sort of civil war over pausing vs slowing down AI research wasn’t very convincing in general.

There’s also a bit where he thinks the EAs have infiltrated all levels of government and are planning to eliminate the competition (non rationalist controlled AI) via a ‘pivotal act’ that involves bioweapons. Basically doing the rationalist rhetorical staple of smuggling an extreme position as a given and then just piling on the speculation.

Dedicating a paragraph and a half to the fact that the usually unspoken second part of the pause AI doomer project is to just do eugenics for a few generations until we get an upper class of genetically engineered naturally galaxy brained people that can finally do AI properly isn’t nothing, but at some point you need to segue into how siskind rolled out a red carpet for every semi-literate blood and soil gutter fascist and spurned nice guy to make a home in the ratsphere, you wrote the scott alexander email explainer ffs.

There’s also a weirdly grandstanding section where he writes like he’ll get the rationalists like FBI got Capone for tax-evasion, except it’s Lighthaven committing massive fraud against its investors and donors by knowingly funding events that lead to solicited sex acts in the compound’s premises, which is by far the least objectionable sex related issue in a writeup that’s leading up to the claim that the rationalism in incidental and the real goal is funneling vulnerable minors to sfba based pedophiles.

What the actual fuck? Imagine if Hermann Göring defended himself at Nuremberg by saying, “At least I had fun and got rich and worked on ‘cool tech’ with friends.”

Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down, that’s not my department says Wernher von Braun.

Ooh cryonics, classy.

Wish how the american AI industry is thoroughly permeated by Yud’s views on AI, and how Yud knows fuck all about how AI or computers work beyond as a sci-fi plot device, would also catch on.

Turns out the centrist subscribes to transhumanism (hipster edition)

the overtone window can’t be that fucked, can it?

Had to google Kurzweilian h+, apparently h+ is kurzweil’s brand of transhumanism.

This is very anticlimactic.

if the doomers were really trying to win, they should be looking at the party that at least has a chance of agreeing to more regulations.

It’s possible for a gaggle of self important dollar store machiavellis to land on Trump being the surer bet because he openly takes bribes and they have money, forgetting that when he takes the money their leverage ends because they are not the mafia.

People have been calling them a cult incubator for ages, not sure who said it first.

Entryism in the sneersphere

Absolutely stealing this.

51-post long thread on why rats are a cult,

Jjust finished reading it.

woke:

Everyone is polyamorous, everyone attends the same events, everyone lives in group homes together, everyone venerates the same few authors, and everyone is very worried about AI doom. They are all very contrarian together.

Rationalism as a whole is a religious movement. Not everyone takes marching orders. The core people who mostly live together and attend events and especially orgies in Berkeley are a sex cult, and the ones that aren’t having any sex are part of the wider movement and are its recruiting funnel.

Any time you get more than a few people who are deeply concerned with AI doom together, it seems like their natural form of organization looks like a cult; rationalism as a whole is less of a cult than it is a cult factory. Some of these cults have gone very badly. One of them is the Zizians.

broke:

I feel about [CEOs talking about AI progress slowdown] roughly the same way I would feel about all the pharmaceutical companies getting together to say they wanted to waive anti-trust laws so they could form a cartel to ban medical research:

these people are the enemies of humanity.

Also: Much of AI research IS medical research. They are very literally proposing to stop a pretty good chunk of medical research in its tracks so that they don’t have to fear the paperclipper.

It’s possible he has a similar affliction to Doctorow, where he thinks this tech is neutral on its own and can be sufficiently decoupled from its hypercapitalist pushers who would much prefer democracy be swapped for modernised feudalism, or who at least think it’s fine to collapse global systems of knowledge transfer for a quick buck.

Still, attributing medical research to AI without discriminating between LLMs and vintage orthodox machine learning that doesn’t actually need infinity GPUs inside a climate regulated warehouse the size of the Peloponnese that also needs to be powered by two active volcanos to work is very TESCREAL coded, LLMs doing Great Things Worth Ruining The World Over in medical research only works under the assumption of some singularity type event being just around the corner. And also the part where he thinks it’s normal to declare people who fuck with AI as enemies of humanity.

Basically segyges feels like controlled opposition, just not by EAs, perhaps other people who don’t mind that he never brings up the pervasive eugenics angle? He certainly posts (including in LessWrong) like it’s his day job.

Or maybe he just really wants the basilisk to like him.