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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   19583 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 28, 2026

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I'd like to take a moment to comment on a bit of controversy below.

With the AI safety discourse escaping containment and what might be described as the cold light of day falling across Yudkowski's forlorn-hope coalition and its personalities and practices, we are treated to an actual test of how the Rationalist movement has done at systematizing winning, particularly in the subcategory of allocating weirdness points. From where I'm sitting, it doesn't seem they've done especially well. Admittedly, I'm not the target audience, but it seems like arguing for "AI safety" you don't actually know how to secure via tools you absolutely can't be trusted to wield probably would be easier if you weren't also having to explain Aella and Slutcon and reverse-gangbang-bribery tactics and the Cow Question to generic normies at the same time.

Scott Alexander, apparently feeling the pinch, decided to put his oar in:

Oh, you're worried about a Jewish guy's apocalyptic cult? You're scandalized that they consort with prostitutes? You think their message of compassion for everyone threatens normal bonds of family, community, and nation? Should we throw you a party? Should we invite Pontius Pilate?

This is certainly one of the defenses of all time. Alexander has always been witty, and I get the feeling, possibly mistaken, that he kinda swung for the fences on this one. "Kolmogrov Complicity" and "no one actually cares about monogomy" pretty much put a cap on my ability to respect his opinions, but he's had a tough road, even if much of his own making. Let him rest.

Some have pointed out that this is Alexander doing the meme, and that discourse has continued here on the Motte, in this thread. Several commenters spoke up in support of Scott's argument, and I think it might be best to address them collectively:

To those of you who thought Scott's argument was in some way a reasonable one, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most of you either participated in or at least had a reasonable familiarity with the Atheist internet wars. Can any of you recall a single time in that era when you heard of a prominent Conservative Christian caught in a sex scandal, where you saw it argued in good faith that actually, getting caught with a hooker was fine, because Jesus also associated with prostitutes? Can you claim to me, with a straight face, that you would consider this, then or now, a reasonable defense of a Conservative Christian influencer attending an orgy? Why do you think that is?

It's one thing to argue that Christian rules are stupid. That's understandable from non-Christians, though it's kind of neat how the logic convolutes in cases like the Cornell 7. And it's understandable for non-Christians to heap scorn on Christians who fail to live up to Christian standards, and even to then scorn all Christians for having such standards. It's not charitable, and it certainly isn't rational or principled, but humans inevitably human. When the argument is that behavior that Christians find deplorable, behavior that Christians police other Christians over, behavior that non-Christians scorn Christians for engaging in when they're caught doing so, is actually comparable to the behavior of Christ, it's time to examine the question of what further discourse is actually expected to achieve.

Scott's argument is a contemptable language game. I do not believe Scott nor anyone else is actually confused about any of the particulars here. Jesus did indeed associate with prostitutes; he did not partake of their services, nor did he employ them on their backs for horizontal forms of evangelism-by-the-hour. Christians' moral objections to Aella's activities and to the Yudkowskiites' exploitation of them for tactical advantage are straightforward and unimpeachable from within the Christian frame. There are no meaningful parallels here to the life or ministry of Jesus Christ, and implying otherwise is merely a demonstration that Scott and those agreeing with him are willing to say pretty much anything if they perceive tactical utility in doing so.

I do not accept that the Yudkowskiites or the "Effective Altruism" movement they have parasitized are offering a "message of compassion" any more than Aella or her cohort would accept that I am motivated by genuine concern for their welfare and eudaemonia, no matter how (sincerely!) I might argue that this was the case; we do not share anything remotely resembling coherent values, and it seems to me that one of the prerequisites to even attempting communication across that divide is to refrain from this sort of chicanery. My understanding of Yudkowski's legacy to date is that he has inspired at least one no-shit murder cult, a number of normal cults with a serious record of abuse toward their participants, one of the largest financial frauds ever committed, and the initiation of the exact sort of AI race he set out to avoid, together with some fairly-good short-term misery amelioration of questionable sustainability and a lot of intelligent, sensitive humans driven mad by overwhelming concern over shrimp welfare.

There's likely more to say, but why bother when people can simply pretend to not understand?

All of the replies here still are trying to rationalize the joke here usually in isolation without considering the broader context of what's been going on in the public sphere as of late. It's really hard to know when this all started, you could say it was after the datacenter stuff was reaching a fever pitch, after the (obvious at the time) lies about "pacing the frontier" from Anthropic and OpenAI, the hacks by OpenAI, etc. I'm not sure.

In any case, a lot of people started to question who this AI safety movement was (as one of the broad reasons for calling for regulation was to get a legally enforced competitive advantage) and basically saw the only people talking about it. There were a bunch of controversies over the last few weeks regarding certain conventions, the venues at which they were hosted, the people going on Xitter and writing articles about how trading human life for insect pain is net good. You have DoW directly saying that EA and all that it stands for is anti-American. And so on and so forth. This really wasn't "one day, for no reason at all, Scott Alexander woke up and made a joke and some Xitter people got mad." No, it's a series of basically serial and parallel controversies over a relatively short time period that have bubbled up such that people who are outside the general sphere are aware of them.

Yeah, people know it's a joke. It's generally seen as an incredibly poor taste joke though or at the very least one that fails to read the room.

These things escaped containment and before you know it, the general consensus, regardless of accuracy, among those are aware is that rationalists/EAs/SF cultists are "misanthropic doomer heretical sex pests" who are somehow at the upper echelons of these companies (Anthropic primarily, but OpenAI also) and who don't actually hold morally consistent values ("building the torment nexus" for profit while railing against it) and regularly flaunt social norms and laws (CFAA) with reckless abandon.

rationalists/EAs/SF cultists are "misanthropic doomer heretical sex pests" who are somehow at the upper echelons of these companies (Anthropic primarily, but OpenAI also) and who don't actually hold morally consistent values ("building the torment nexus" for profit while railing against it) and regularly flaunt social norms and laws (CFAA) with reckless abandon.

What parts of that aren't actually true?

FWIW I usually understand and enjoy reading your posts (even if I disagree) however this was something of a head-scratcher to me. I think that maybe there is some context missing.

This is pretty basic tribal behaviour. When a group has social power, one of the things they use that for is enforcing their taboos on outsiders by dogpiling them (part of a scale of escalation, roughly: dogpiling, career damage, state enforcement, execution/murder - different groups have different levels of power to enforce, nobody in this dispute is getting their head sawed off like they might over a joke about Muhammad). This is basically universal, or at least counterexamples are very rare. Such is life, individual members who are more reasonable and easygoing don't have veto power over their group. What's unusual is that nobody's used to Christians on the internet (or, specifically, on X dot com the everything app) feeling they have that kind of social power.

I don't think Scott is doing the meme. He's not saying, "since you're Christians, your argument is invalid according to the scripture", he's saying, "if you think AI safety movement is either wrong or doomed to failure because it's a weird cult and its adherents offend your sensibilities, here's an example of a different weird cult that ended up if not correct, then at least wildly successful".

First, Scott is not a Christian. I think this is a difference that gets forgotten or not even considered in such discussions, because the assumption is "Well we're all the products of modern secular Western society here, so we all share the same values, right?"

So he's gonna make Jewish jokes about the boy from Nazareth. And as far as offensive Jewish jokes about Jesus go, this one is barely a one on the scale if it even makes it that far. Hell, I'm still salty about a stupid lapsed Catholic Irish comedian's dumb joke on a chat show decades (by this point) ago because that wasn't the time for it and they should have known better and it was still within a cultural context where they could get an easy shock reaction by mocking Jesus.

Second, he does have personal loyalty to the Big Yud, because back when he was young and impressionable and the kids were just getting started with this Rationalists thing, they were all in the fandom together. Good times, good times. And those of us who have been there from the start, or pretty near to it, in our own fandoms know the kind of bonds that means.

Third, I give Scott a hell of a lot of the benefit of the doubt, because he's earned it as far as I'm concerned. Some random 'who that?' on the Innertubes, I'll gladly leap upon him and rip off his face. Scott has been way more tolerant of religious posting on his website when us Christians get into it among each other.

Fourth, he's able to take it as well as dish it out, see any of the House Party posts on his Substack.

Fifth, this tweet should remind us of the scandal of Christianity. We're used to swimming in that water by now, two thousand years or so later, but it did not start off as "our teacher says we should all be nice". The religious establishment of the day were shocked by what they were doing, see this chapter of Luke (for one):

36 One of the Pharisees asked him to eat with him, and he went into the Pharisee's house and reclined at table. 37 And behold, a woman of the city, who was a sinner, when she learned that he was reclining at table in the Pharisee's house, brought an alabaster flask of ointment, 38 and standing behind him at his feet, weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears and wiped them with the hair of her head and kissed his feet and anointed them with the ointment. 39 Now when the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner.” 40 And Jesus answering said to him, “Simon, I have something to say to you.” And he answered, “Say it, Teacher.”

Sixth, I think I do not yield the palm to any here in being judgemental (particularly of sexual excess) so every now and then I need to get smacked upside the head by a seven hundred year old poem reminding me "Your ways are not God's ways, and God's ways are not your ways":

Venus: Ardent Lovers

Dante knows from Beatrice's enhanced beauty that he has risen to Venus, the third sphere of Paradise. Here he encounters four individuals among the rejoicing souls of men and women whose lives were greatly influenced by sexual love and desire. Charles Martel, a ruler from the house of Anjou whom Dante likely met in Florence (not long before his untimely death), chastises other Angevin rulers for their misdeeds and explains how the character and ability of individuals are determined not by heredity but by nature, through the workings of providence; society suffers when people are forced into professions for which they are ill suited. Cunizza da Romano, sister of a blood-thirsty warlord whom Dante saw in Hell, led a full and adventurous love life, with four marriages and at least two other significant relationships. She foresees a series of bloody acts and betrayals that will stain the March of Treviso (in northeast Italy), and directs Dante's attention to a companion in Venus whose achievements merit lasting fame. Folco of Marseille, who in his youth was consumed by sexual desire, was a troubadour (he wrote Provençal poetry) before turning to the religious life, first as a monk and later a bishop. He in turn lavishes praise on Rahab, a biblical prostitute who was the first spirit to adorn Venus, before harshly criticizing contemporary church leaders. Folco also identifies Venus as the celestial location at which the shadow cast by the earth comes to a point.

103 'Yet here we don't repent, but smile instead,
104 not at our fault, which comes not back to mind,
105 but for that Power which ordered and foresaw.

106 'Here we contemplate the craft that beautifies
107 such love, and here discern the good
108 with which the world above informs the one below.

109 'However, so that you may leave this sphere
110 with every wish that here has been engendered
111 satisfied, I must go on.

112 'You want to know who occupies this luminescence
113 that scintillates beside me here,
114 like a sunbeam gleaming on clear water.

115 'Know then that within it Rahab is at peace,
116 and, since she is of our number,
117 our highest rank receives its seal from her.

118 'Into this heaven, where the shadow of your world
119 comes to a point, before any other,
120 first in Christ's triumph, she was taken up.

I don't understand how you read Scott's message and took it as something other than a joke.

It's obvious to me that Scott is not trying to actually depict Yudkowsky as Jesus.

Even if somehow he was trying to depict Yudkowsky as Jesus, it wouldn't be a positive depiction, since Scott is saying that both men ran/are running an apocalyptic cult.

Admittedly, I'm not the target audience, but it seems like arguing for "AI safety" you don't actually know how to secure via tools you absolutely can't be trusted to wield probably would be easier if you weren't also having to explain Aella and Slutcon and reverse-gangbang-bribery tactics and the Cow Question to generic normies at the same time.

I don't think the vast majority of generic normies know anything the rationalist community. There have been a few mainstream media "exposes" of it in the last few years, but I imagine that only a very small fraction of generic normies ever read them.

From what I can tell, these AI safety good/bad, rationalism good/bad debates are mostly happening in certain social media spheres, Twitter being maybe the biggest one.

The kind of people who read Tweets about AI safety and rationalism are not normies. They are largely political junkies, political militants of various stripes, AI nerds, rationalists, anti-rationalists, engagement baiters trying to get their bait in, and so on. Normies, they are not.

The broader population is, I think, more immediately worried about AI taking our jobs than about the Skynet scenario. To me, the AI discourse seems to be more or less separated into two parts:

The first is happening in the small world of the rationalist community, tech elites, people who spend 8 hours a day on Twitter, and so on.

The second, larger one is happening out among "the normies" - it's the steadily mounting political discourse about AI's threat to jobs, it's the data center arguments, it's Bernie Sanders jumping in to have his say, etc.

I would guess that for the most part, the people who are paying attention to the second part of the AI discourse aren't paying close attention to the first. They don't know who Aella is. And even if they did, after all it's 2026, how much are people really scandalized by sex parties? Out of all the various "weird" things about the rationalist communities, the sex parties are one of the better seeming things. They're having sex! To me the sex seems vastly more appealing than the group living or the 660,000 word Harry Potter fan fiction.

I say "one of the better seeming things". That said, the CNC stuff and the gangbangs are definitely still somewhat shocking to normies. But probably not as much as some would assume. Or am I just projecting my comfort with kinkiness on the masses?

I do find the Aella discourse amusing. It's funny to observe left-wing critics of her trying to navigate the narrow road between being sex positive, on the one hand, and depicting Aella's sex activities as somehow bad, on the other. And it's funny to observe right-wing critics of her trying to navigate the narrow road between the fact that most of them would actually love to attend wild sex parties with hot chicks, on the one hand, and depicting Aella's sex activities as somehow bad, on the other.

My understanding of Yudkowski's legacy to date is that he has inspired at least one no-shit murder cult, a number of normal cults with a serious record of abuse toward their participants, one of the largest financial frauds ever committed

To really judge this fairly you'd have to compare the rates of cult, murder cult, and financial fraud initiation in the Yudkowsky circle against the equivalent rates in other communities of similar size. You'd also have to figure out how responsible Yudkowsky actually is for the bad things.

And I say this as someone who isn't even a Yudkowsky fan! I find him a bit weird and culty. But he's not Charles Manson or Jim Jones.

and the initiation of the exact sort of AI race he set out to avoid

I don't see how he had anything to do with that. The AI race was going to start one way or another as soon as someone invented the technology.

I don't understand how you read Scott's message and took it as something other than a joke.

The problem is it doesn't read as a joke. There's no wordplay, no clever twist conclusion. It's just a straight-forward comparison that comes off (at least to me) as both direct and fairly aggressive in tone. It's no surprise that people would take it at face value.

If it was meant purely as a joke then it was poorly conceived and poorly executed.

he has inspired at least one no-shit murder cult

I think the Zizians were batshit insane anyway and would have cropped up in some true crime report eventually, with or without Rationalism. I also think they had little to do with Yudkowsky himself and were more on the nuttier fringes of the bubble, thanks to San Francisco being the place where all the nuts end up. I wouldn't blame Yud for them anymore than I'd blame the Beatles for Charles Manson.

I wouldn't blame Yud for them anymore than I'd blame the Beatles for Charles Manson.

At least a few of the zizians took courses at CFAR, and their the root of their schism derives from arguments with Michael Vassar.

If we take your argument at face value, this is closer to a student of Paul McCartney going on a killing spree because he didn't like Paul's performance in Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

I largely agree. I quibble about "Scott and those agreeing with him are willing to say pretty much anything if they perceive tactical utility in doing so". I think he typed out what felt like a witty clap back. It is not as deep as willing to say anything if tactically helpful. He's not think that hard or scheming that cleverly.

On an unrelated note there's not a lot of mentions of Jesus with prostitutes in the Bible. Mary Magdalene is never described as a prostitute. There's a prostitute who anointed Jesus and he forgave her sins and to my knowledge that's it. I dispute that a plain reading of the Bible tells us Jesus 'consorted with prostitutes'. He also saved the adulteress from stoning, but this message to her was go forth and sin no more. He didn't "associate" or "consort" with that so much as say to stop it.

There's also Matthew 25:

Jesus said to them, “Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes go into the kingdom of God before you. 32 For John came to you in the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him. And even when you saw it, you did not afterward change your minds and believe him.

So those are the people hearing and responding to the Good News - the outcasts and despised of society.

They had ceased from their previous lifestyles, though, as clarified in the preceding passage:

What do you think? A man had two sons. And he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’ And he answered, ‘I will not,’ but afterward he changed his mind and went. And he went to the other son and said the same. And he answered, ‘I go, sir,’ but did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?” They said, “The first.”

The word for “changed their mind” is similar to regret or repent. They are praised because they left their old way of life to follow John; the high status elites are condemned because they did not opt to follow John, though they implicitly vowed to in their weekly prayers. The prostitute’s past is essentially blotted out by God’s mercy and totally unrelated to what Jesus thinks about them, because that’s what mercy is, acknowledging that a person can change and should no longer be judged for their past which no human change.

I think the softness of Jesus toward former prostitutes makes more sense when you note that the prostitute was despised in antiquity. They were despised by both the elites and the righteous. The prostitute and the tax collector belonged in the categories of “sell out” and “lover of money”, truly two of the worst things a person can be. The prostitute sells out her neighbor and her own God-given gifts in order to live in comfort; the tax collector sells out his neighbor for the benefit of an enemy. Today, the prostitute can be famous and the sell-out can get a podcast, so the moral math is totally different. The mercy of Jesus is the offer of a clean slate for those who change, not a new morality where we tolerate prostitutes and moneylovers.

Not even a prostitute, merely a 'sinful woman'. There's a lot of sins and Luke could have just used the word for prostitute if he wanted to say that (see 15:30).

The bigger deal would be Matthew (of Matthew Mark Luke and John fame) being a tax collector for the Romans. But modern society usually doesn't quite comprehend why that was such a big deal in Christ's time.

There isn't an argument being made. "a contemptable language game" come on man, he was pointing out some amusing parallels. That people who hate him and his movement are blowing it out of all proportion

Christians' moral objections to Aella's activities and to the Yudkowskiites' exploitation of them for tactical advantage

Tactical advantage? What are you talking about dude? You already said this is not to his advantage. This isn't some weird 10 diminsional chess game, they're just abnormal people. They're the type of people who take thought experiments seriously and follow them to their conclusions. Turns out doing that a lot lets you make some pretty surprisingly accurate predictions about how important things like how AI would go. They also take things like liberal sexual ethics to their logical conclusion, which you oppose but isn't really an argument against their other predictions.

I do not accept that the Yudkowskiites or the "Effective Altruism" movement they have parasitized

parasitized? They birthed the movement.

I just thought Scott was trying to be funny. This is exactly the sort of correspondence that Aaron of Unsong would identify. I don't think he actually sees it as an argument holding any weight.

Some have pointed out that this is Alexander doing the meme

No it isn't. Doing the meme would at minimum require that that the tweet be an argument directed at Christians. It isn't an argument but a copypasta-template joke (with the humor partly based on the incongruity of the comparison) and the target audience for the joke isn't Christians (note that only 23% of ACX survey respondants are any kind of theist). Like his Antichrist post, which (perhaps because it wasn't posted on Twitter and was longer and thus harder to misinterpret) did not attract critiques about how it was an ineffective way to convince Christians that Marc Andreessen is the Antichrist. Or Unsong, the entire webnovel he wrote based in large part on similar jokes.

If I was to attempt to extract an implicit argument from the joke, it still wouldn't be one directed at or referencing contemporary Christians, but referencing the early Christians, as discussed in his post The Early Christian Strategy. The potential point would not be that EAs and internet-rationalists are followers of Christian beliefs, but that they have some similarities as weird rising altruistic movements that have been more successful than you might expect.

Scott's argument is a contemptable language game.

It's definitely meant to be a language game of the sort Scott frequently enjoys.

Jesus did indeed associate with prostitutes; he did not partake of their services, nor did he employ them on their backs for horizontal forms of evangelism-by-the-hour.

Uh, are you under the impression that there are internet-rationalist leaders sleeping with Aella? As far as I know Aella is just a normal prostitute/internet-celebrity who happens to also be interested in LessWrong stuff and do internet surveys.

I do not accept that the Yudkowskiites or the "Effective Altruism" movement they have parasitized are offering a "message of compassion"

To be clear the context for that part of joke is the Twitter arguments about EA which critique it specifically on the grounds of directing altruism at far people in other countries, people who aren't born yet, or non-human animals, as contrasted with normal healthy morality which is directed at family/community/nation. It's not trying to assert that EA is compassionate towards everyone (though Scott believes it is) but jokingly responding to people criticizing it on that basis.

Uh, are you under the impression that there are internet-rationalist leaders sleeping with Aella?

Yes, this isn't exactly a secret. Nate Soares probably the best-known now.

Uh, are you under the impression that there are internet-rationalist leaders sleeping with Aella? As far as I know Aella is just a normal prostitute/internet-celebrity who happens to also be interested in LessWrong stuff and do internet surveys.

Yea. This is easy to do when you're not in a particular scene. Like, I imagine Dan Baltic, Dasha/Anna, Geoff Shullenberger and anyone else I can think of who lives in NYC as hanging out with each other a lot. Because I'm not there to see they don't, but I see their tweets and know where they generally reside.

The analogy with Christianity pretty much falls apart with prostitutes; as far as I know Jesus forgave them but expected them to stop being prostitutes. But on another level the whole thing fails because it was right to be worried about Christianity; it led not only to wars and upheaval but ultimately the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Crusades, Islam, and wokeness.

"I have a place where I say complicated things about philosophy and science. That place is my blog. This is where I make terrible puns."

I don't quite want to say that you are doing the equivalent of getting mad at someone making a pun for deceptively using language by pretending to not know what homonyms are, but you are at most one step away. There is an entire genre of Scott jokes that draw ridiculous extended parallels between modern events and biblical passages.

Yudkowski

You are also doing the meme.

As someone not too familiar with Alexander's writing or X account, the two things you linked sound like humor, while the original that caused the controversy sounds like aggressive rhetoric. There's no wordplay or turn of phrase. If it was meant as humor it falls very short, and people can be forgiven for interpreting it as serious.

Jesus associated with prostitutes

Even this concedes too much to pop culture. He spent time with them as a physician or a psychiatrist. It was for the purpose of healing and saving. His followers were more likely to promote burkas than handholding out of wedlock. Pop culture Christianity just exists within its own strange realm of fact claims.

I hope we can all agree that Eliezer Yudkowsky is not the Messiah; he's a very naughty boy.

Elaborate on the naughtiness.

I'd prefer not to. Look up "math pets" if you must.

Seriously, Eliezer is one of the main people responsible for making ubiquitous normie-unfriendly sexuality a core value of the "rationalist" community, and thus indirectly of parts of "effective altruism" and "AI safety". In British English, "naughty boy" can refer either to a boy who is disobedient to adult authority figures (like Brian) or to a grown man caught in an act of sexual immorality (like Yud). I don't know if this is idiomatic in American English.

I don't know if this is idiomatic in American English.

It's as American as baguettes or chow mein: definitely not native, but recognizable nonetheless.

It's a reference to Life of Brian.

Some have pointed out that this is Alexander doing the meme

While I haven't personally seen this meme, I do think there is actually a reasonable steelman for this type of argument.

To use one example, if I saw a self-professed Hindu killing and eating cows, and I was a secular vegetarian, I might reasonably ask the Hindu why they are being hypocritical when I thought their faith said doing that was forbidden. In this hypothetical, I obviously have ulterior motives as a secular vegetarian: I want less cows to be slaughtered for food. But pointing out your opponent's hypocrisy on a set of principles they claim to follow is a legitimate tactic in most cases, even if you don't accept their beliefs.

Now, because I am not a Hindu, I might actually get their faith wrong. It would be completely fair for the Hindu to respond that Hinduism is not a monolith, and prohibitions on cow-killing differ based on region and caste within India, and different sects within the faith treat it differently. If they said that in their native region of Kerala, within the caste they belong to, killing cows is acceptable, then my argument would have no bite at all. But if they really are being hypocritical with regards to a set of principles they claim to follow, then bringing up the argument can serve two possible purposes: 1) try to get them to actually follow their principles, or 2) within a discussion in a public place like Reddit, make it clear to other commenters that they are not following their own self-professed principles.

I think the biggest failure states in this kind of argument will just be the failure to fully understand a body of knowledge for an ideology or religion you don't belong to, and the fact that even when you do understand the ideology/religion and make a well-aimed argument at an opponent's hypocrisy, they can just bite the bullet and be hypocritical or cherry pick and ignore you.

I think the biggest failure states in this kind of argument will just be the failure to fully understand a body of knowledge for an ideology or religion you don't belong to

Most of the people making these sorts of comments come from Christian-majority societies and often grew up inside the church. They're familiar with Christianity and the famously wide gap between what its holy texts enjoin and what its adherents actually do.

The point is trolling (just look at the amount of seething it produces) and highlighting their hypocrisy to third parties. As I said when this was discussed earlier downthread, very few people think you're going to convince a chuddy religious conservative by quoting scripture at them or pointing out the gap between their notional commitments and what they actually do and advocate for. This is particularly stinging for them because they ground their moral legitimacy in strict adherence to Christian principles, but they're at least as guilty of picking and choose as theological liberals and they don't even try to live up to Christian principles (and the theolibs have the out of rejecting inerrancy).

The point is trolling (just look at the amount of seething it produces) and highlighting their hypocrisy to third parties.

Yes, this is why those doing 'the meme' are treated with disdain. They are like children whose goal is to annoy by deliberately misunderstanding you. The only response to this is to rebuke and then ignore.

The reason it provokes such agitation is that they've understood perfectly the character and substance of the people they are criticizing. If religious reactionaries had a real defense, they would give it. The fact that they can't is rather telling.

Just like I've understood perfectly the character and substance of atheists if I say they're hedonists who just want to do evil without consequence, or I've understood perfectly the character and substance of socialists if I say they just want free stuff, or I've understood perfectly the character and substance of MAGA Republicans if I say they're just racists in disguise, or etc. etc. It is definitionally straw man nonsense designed to attack the outgroup.

What exactly is the real defense to 'You're an idiot who believes in sky daddy?' The correct response is not a defense at all, but scorn and dismissal.

The point is trolling (just look at the amount of seething it produces) and highlighting their hypocrisy to third parties.

Part of the problem is that it doesn't highlight hypocrisy, but I think the other big problem with tweeting stuff like that out is...what third parties are going to be convinced by this? As far as I can tell, Scott painting AI safety as a "Jewish guy's apocalyptic cult" and pointing out that they "consort with prostitutes" is only going to get every other major political faction to put aside their differences and agree that AI safety, as a movement, is (shall we say) "misaligned."

Yeah, to be clear, I was responding more to the meme itself than Scott's tweet. I don't actually think Scott's tweet is a good example of the meme.

Yeah, I agree that I don't think Scott is trying to do the meme.

I am sad to see the rationalism project failing at its intended goals, I'm also happy to see it when it succeeds.

I can mostly say the same about the Christianity project. I'll admit to ambivalence about the main goal of belief. But side goals and the things they preach about daily living seem good rather than bad.

I was involved in the internet atheist wars back in the day, on the side of atheism. I still am atheist, but I'm happily married to a Catholic woman that attends church every Sunday.

I'm saying this just to push back on the "we don't share coherent values". I don't think this is totally the case. I think you don't share compatible interests and material concerns. And that is driving more conflicts now than it had in the past.

Isn't your wife concerned about your salvation? Or is she playing the long game?

No idea

reverse-gangbang-bribery tactics and the Cow Question

What do these mean? I am not a stranger to Scott Alexander's work, but I have never heard of this before.

Cow Question

With the caveat that I do not follow Aella directly and am getting the gist third-hand, in the course of organizing prostitution-based social activities, she had prospective attendees fill out one of her sexuality questionnaires, with one of the questions being whether the attendees would prefer intimate relations with a live cow or a dead one.

It was not in the course of organizing prostitution-based social activities. It was on the application form for plzdontkillus, an AI safety "content creator" bootcamp.

Lol, I guess it really would be that simple. It sounds so autistic "it is an interesting hypothetical question" without even considering people would find it inappropriate.

Straining to find a good reason for that: it works to filter out normies. If you balk at that, then that's your clue you are in the wrong place.

True, I suppose she is great at finding and appealing to her audience.

Aella offered a reverse gangbang to any AI whistleblower afaik. Not sure about the cow

That is certainly an... Interesting proposition. Did anyone actually take her up on it?

Dunno I think she offered one to the big whistleblower of the moment but unsure how it went. She also posted some photos with Nicholas Decker that indicated she'd invited him to participate in one but Decker since indicating that he is intensely autistic and into being cucked seems to indicate that he might not have gotten a traditional reverse gangbang?

Some have pointed out that this is Alexander doing the meme, and that discourse has continued here on the Motte, in this thread. Several commenters spoke up in support of Scott's argument, and I think it might be best to address them collectively:

I saw these comments as I was scrolling through the firehose feed, and thought that while my tribal knee-jerk reaction is against them, I suppose I can't deny that people often use the "doing the meme" quip to avoid addressing the actual argument. It's not like these things have no comeback, but as sympathetic as I am to Christianity and conservatism, even I often feel some dissonance between the radical demands Jesus Christ makes of us, and the tough pragmatic policies advocated by conservatives, so I figured I can see where our fellow posters are coming from... and then I saw the tweet. Seriously guys, this is the argument you were defending? Rationalists are so weird because they're Christlike? You're consorting with prostitutes because that's what Jesus told you? Did he, to quote a classic, tell you to fuck her as well?

With the AI safety discourse escaping containment and what might be described as the cold light of day falling across Yudkowski's forlorn-hope coalition and its personalities and practices, we are treated to an actual test of how the Rationalist movement has done at systematizing winning, particularly in the subcategory of allocating weirdness points

I would just like to elaborate on this, as "systematized winning" might be glossed over as just another quirky term Rationalists have come up with that doesn't mean to much in the grand scheme of things. From what I understand the whole point was that Rationalists saw the dawn of AI on the horizon, but no one was taking them seriously, so the idea to gradually and systematically gain credibility, so when the time comes they can use it to push humanity in the right direction on this question. Well, we're here, it's your time to shine, show us what you got Scott... oh...

reverse-gangbang-bribery tactics and the Cow Question to generic normies at the same time.

Uh... I must have lost track of some happenings...

I'm going to defend "tough pragmatic policies advocated by conservatives" as being orthogonal to Jesus's message. Jesus didn't say to have high federal taxes and he didn't advocate Democratic border policy or trans women in women's sports. Such things wouldn't be coherent issues 2000 years ago. The assertion I see on places like reddit that modern progressives represent Jesus's message is quite strange.

Jesus preached tolerance for those different that you, and to stand by your beliefs (specifically the belief in God, but to an atheist this easily generalizes).

Helping immigrants and trans people easily fits under this umbrella. Jesus also famously claimed that it is near impossible for a rich man to get into heaven. This is easily understood as "Rich people are generally evil". Not only does match onto "eat the rich", it also fits with a tax policy that takes money from the rich and distributes it to those in need. You may disagree that government programs are good at this, but the leftist view is that private individuals are even worse and that concentrating the wealth in the hands of few individuals will only mean the poorest of society have even less.

Contrast this with conservative worldviews which are often strongly hierarchical, seeks to keep people in their current social classes, and does not wish to help people that differ significantly from what they know (immigrants and trans in this case). I think the Redditers do actually have a point here.

I saw these comments as I was scrolling through the firehose feed, and thought that while my tribal knee-jerk reaction is against them, I suppose I can't deny that people often use the "doing the meme" quip to avoid addressing the actual argument. It's not like these things have no comeback

There's a symmetry of effort here. When somebody writes a badly-supported shitpoast, there's really not much value in spilling gallons of ink to pick it apart. It's clear that such discourse was not the author's goal. As such, an accusation that the author Did The Meme is is a comparable, tit-for-tat response that carries roughly the same amount of semantic signal.

You, on the other hand, have made an effort to explain your position in what seems like good faith. As such, I'll take a moment to explain my problems with this xweet.

I'm not a Christian, and other than a few exposures to Charismatic and Catholic churches when my mother was having one of her episodes, my only real exposure to the Faith has been from reading the Bible in its NIV, KJV, and Vulgates translations. I'm ashamed to admit that I don't read Greek, so my understanding may be incomplete. That said, even with only that book knowledge as a foundation, this is a bad take.

First off, let's talk about the Pilate thing. Pilate didn't particularly give a shit about Jesus. Hell, he wanted nothing to do with it. He famously stated that he washed his hands of the matter. It was the Jewish priesthood of the era that wanted him dead. Does Scott really want to extend that comparison to the modern day?

Moving on from that, the prostitute comparison is terrible. Three minutes of searching would make it clear that Jesus and his apostles were, shockingly, not regularly running a train on Mary Magdalene. The word "consort" is doing an enormous amount of rhetorical work.

Moving on from that, my first intuition when I read this post was that Scott was claiming that Yudkowsky was the antichrist. The way he framed it makes just as much sense as a Jesus comparison.

Put together, my problem here is that Scott is a thoughtful, well-read, smart guy who understands nuance and second order effects. I can either believe that he had a momentary lapse in every single one of these traits, or he full and well understood what he was doing. Charity is a useful concept, but it is not a concept with infinite elasticity. Eventually it runs up against priors.

Three minutes of searching would make it clear that Jesus and his apostles were, shockingly, not regularly running a train on Mary Magdalene. The word "consort" is doing an enormous amount of rhetorical work.

My understanding is that in the gospels, there is not even any clear reason to consider her a prostitute.

I haven't read anything in the original koine Greek, so I didn't want to overstep my knowledge.

I can conclusively state that none of the gospels say "and lo, there was a great clapping of cheeks" in them.

The apocrypha are probably another matter. They get wild.

I suppose I can't deny that people often use the "doing the meme" quip to avoid addressing the actual argument.

This is a huge bugbear of mine. It's very much of the form "I've anticipated your argument therefore it's wrong."

Scott Alexander spoke of this.

From what I understand the whole point was that Rationalists saw the dawn of AI on the horizon, but no one was taking them seriously, so the idea to gradually and systematically gain credibility, so when the time comes they can use it to push humanity in the right direction on this question.

The idea was mostly to teach all the randoms (or at least, enough of them) how to actually think so that they would take it seriously.

How does Scott’s tweet relate to AI safety and Yudkowski? I’m missing the broader context.

People are complaining that AI safety has been invented by EY, who has ideas that sound outlandish, and that lots of people in AI safety are from the Bay Area and have weird sexual/relationship preferences.

Taken charitably, their argument can be reduced to "many proponents of AI safety have more than AI safety in common, this can have a chilling effect on other people wanting to join the field of AI safety and finding it hard to fit in".

Less charitably, it's "you're scaring the normies away and they won't take you seriously unless you have a normie spokesperson".

From what I understand, there's a group of AI safety enthusiasts related to the 'Effective Altruism' movement, but nobody takes them seriously because they're oddballs involved in weird sex stuff. Scott appeared to be defending them by arguing that they are similar to Jesus, which caused a backlash because the comparison is pretty absurd. His defenders say he was just joking. It's very much a storm in a teacup.

Thanks for explaining. I didn't know there were weird sex stuff happening around AI safetyists and EA people, so I didn't recognize the Yudkowski -> Jesus comparison in Scott's tweet. I thought he was just making some weird joke about Christians. Now it makes sense.

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