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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   25280 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?

I'm not sure we can fairly attribute the SBF shenanigans to Yud.

The rest seems on point, though I don't really care about the cults and the shrimp supremacists. Any group that explicitly is about a radical reconsideration of norms and thought will run into that error mode if it builds a somewhat broad community. E.g. Protestantism has some pretty wild subgroups. If Motte-thought somehow spread widely throughout society, you'd have tons of weird offshoots, if it doesn't already.

Yud's most damning trait isn't any of that, but that he's the single most accelerationist figure in history. At least a thousand times more so than Beff Jezos or Andreessen, plausibly a million. Since working to avoid AI doom is not just his core principle but the foundation of his personality and claim to fame, he deserves to be hit hard on that, and I don't think he has ever really grappled with it or how he went wrong.

Misallocation of weirdness points is probably a distant second after that.

I'm not sure we can fairly attribute the SBF shenanigans to Yud.

Will MacAskill. That was the name thrown all over the place in the (immortal) Sequoia Capital article, with Peter Singer in second place, and not even a sniff of a mention of Big Yud:

Not long before interning at Jane Street, SBF had a meeting with Will MacAskill, a young Oxford-educated philosopher who was then just completing his PhD. Over lunch at the Au Bon Pain outside Harvard Square, MacAskill laid out the principles of effective altruism (EA). The math, MacAskill argued, means that if one’s goal is to optimize one’s life for doing good, often most good can be done by choosing to make the most money possible—in order to give it all away. “Earn to give,” urged MacAskill.

EA traces its roots to philosopher Peter Singer, who reasons from the utilitarian point of view that the purpose of life is to maximize the well-being of others. Singer, in his eighth decade, may well be the most-read living philosopher. In the 1970s, Singer almost single-handedly created the animal rights movement, popularizing veganism as an ethical solution to the moral horror of meat. Today he’s best known for the drowning-child thought experiment. (What would you do if you came across a young child drowning in a pond?) Singer states the obvious—and then universalizes the underlying principle: “Few could stand by and watch a child drown; many can ignore the avoidable deaths of children in Africa or India. The question, however, is not what we usually do, but what we ought to do.” In a nutshell, Singer argues that it’s a moral imperative of the world’s well-off to give as much as possible—10, 20, even 50 percent of all income—to better the lives of the world’s poor.

MacAskill’s contribution is to combine Singer’s moral logic with the logic of finance and investment. One not only has an obligation to give a significant percentage of income away, MacAskill argues, but to give it away as efficiently as possible. And, since every charity claiming to save lives has a budget, they can all be ranked by cost-effectiveness. So, how much does it cost for a charity to save a single life? The data says that controlling the spread of malaria and worms has the biggest bang for the buck, with a life saved per every $2,000 invested. Effective altruism prioritizes this low-hanging fruit—these are the drowning children we’re morally obligated to save first.

I do think it's amazing that MacAskill has managed to wiggle out of any association with SBF and seems to have come unscathed out of being FTX's house philosopher 🤣

I'm not sure we can fairly attribute the SBF shenanigans to Yud.

Very much agreed. Will MacAskill recruited SBF as an EA back when SBF was an undergraduate, long before "EA" moved into AI safety as a cause area. That move was paid for with Dustin Moskovitz's money, not SBF's. And the subnetwork within EA that did FTX was built around Jane Street alumni in NYC, not "rationalists" in Bezerkely.

"How do we make sure people are taking us seriously and do not just think we're a bunch of deluded nutcase hippies?" - "Oh, I know! Let us compare ourselves to Jesus! I mean, literally! Let us seriously claim we are the modern day Jesus and if you ever been Christian you must do what we say!".

I'm not going to claim that the rationalists have ever been very good at spending their weirdness points, but I think what this post is seeing is not about spending weirdness points poorly, but about the sudden shift in the target audience from the Bay Area tech culture to the general public.

I looked for an original summary of the weirdness points concept in EA and found this post from 2014. Of all the examples of being weird in that post, only "a guy wearing a dress in public" would be applicable to not offending social conservatives, but it's only used to argue against spending weirdness points fighting "lookism" as hinted at by the caveat "in public". Being a polycule member who occasionally partakes in orgies is not mentioned as a problem, because the original target audience didn't really care.

Being a polycule member who occasionally partakes in orgies is not mentioned as a problem, because the original target audience didn't really care.

Scott also thinks, or thought at some point back when we were still on reddit- 2018ish, maybe?- that other meaningful audiences wouldn't care.

It was one of my few direct interactions with him, after one of the many rounds of Poly Discourse in the community, where I suggested something along the lines of "if you want to influence public morality more broadly re: EA/AI, reducing the visibility of this will save you weirdness points with a lot of the public." His response- this is paraphrase is probably slightly more negative than the original, colored by time as it is- was something like "no, it's the people that suggest that are a worse expense of weirdness among populations we want to reach."

Eliezer Yudkowsky posts a follow-up:

Not the comparison I'd draw. (My version below.)

Eliezer: So I wrote a decision theory paper, and somehow, I have no idea how, it sparked off this weird vegan murder cult.
Yeshua: Uh-huh.
Eliezer: There's a giant rich organization that stole some of my ideas, ignored everything I said about what not to do, and are going around telling people I made them do it.
Yeshua: Uh-huh.
Eliezer: Many of them can't spell or pronounce my name correctly.
Yeshua: Uh-huh. Where is this going?
Eliezer: So I thought I'd tell you, as one of relatively few fellow humans who had experienced something distantly similar, that I can guess exactly how little you knew or intended that anything would play out that exact way. And it's strange, because I can see it so clearly in your own case, and can't quite believe it about mine, but maybe it helps you anyway, to hear me say: It wasn't your fault, Yeshua.
Yeshua: It helps me no more to hear that from you than it would help you to hear it from me. I need to hear it from God.
Eliezer: Yeah, same.

Yeshua is a rabbi who personally went up against the Roman Empire, thought he might be able to fulfill the prophetic conditions for messiah, seems to have treated the people around him with compassion and humility nonetheless, told his followers to leave matters more to him and God and less to direct attacks on the Romans; and finally was crucified, in his capacity as an ordinary human being with no backup. Years afterward, along came Paul, on whose shoulders a lot of the blame should fall for everything that happened after that.

Yeshua is noteworthy among us mortal human beings primarily for how much happened as a result of his existence that he did not plan for and was not his fault. If you think it's terribly aggrandizing to compare oneself to him, you're part of the problem from the perspective of actual Yeshua the human being if he could see it. Or so I conjecture, being willing to try to put myself in that real person's shoes at all, and have empathy for him at all, and what he'd think if he could see it.

Eh, that's the kind of conventional answer I'd expect from someone culturally Jewish. "He wasn't the Messiah, he was just some guy". And of course, the ever-popular (amongst liberal Christians as well) "it was Paul who invented Christianity as we have it!"

That Paul himself was Jewish gets washed away somehow, and it's all his fault that Christianity has hangups around (insert popular sin of your choice: sex in general, gay sex, women, what have you).

If you believe Jesus was God, then nope Yud is nothing like. If you believe Yeshua bar-Yosef was another itinerant wisdom teacher, well heck what a startling resemblance.

Why do they not realize that this is bad messaging? Or do they not care? A lot of people will refuse to take them seriously when they see these posts. If Yud wants his ideology to grow in influence, he should familiarize himself with the basic values of half the country. It’s an honest signal of one’s knowledge or wisdom to not misunderstand the basic plot of the biggest religion. There is a double signal of incompetence here, because his ignorance signals a lack of interest in altruism (don’t we all know about Buddha?), and secondly it signals an ineffectiveness in knowing how to promote a message. This is problematic for someone trying to promote “effective altruism”.

It's more important for him to identify what sort of people he can milk money from versus what sort he can't and concentrate his powers of griftery on the former even if it costs him with the latter. That's just good business sense. And all these internet pundits and icons and influencers are the dopamine controlled proxies of engagement farming algorithms, anyways.

Yud's distinct writing style, though I sometimes find it verbose and hard to read, at least insulates him from Twitter's obnoxiousness and lack of nuance.

Oh, wow. This is just writing "I think all Christians are heretic morons" on a big banner and waving it about, isn't it? Credit for the balls but I see why the coalition assembly isn't going so well.

tb"f" i would assume that's the standard jewish view, and while yud isn't the most orthodox now iirc he was raised more Orthodox than 95+% of secular jews in this social orbit.

that is, of all the people i'd expect to wave that flag, this one should be suprising.

I mean, it's marginally better that the Talmudic POV that Jesus is suffering in hell by being boiled in feces.

Also that Jesus's dad was a Roman soldier named Pantera who cuckolded Joseph.

I get the orthodox Jews of the day being extremely pissed-off about the association with yet another rabble-rousing itinerant preacher stirring up trouble among the masses after the Romans just finished stomping on the previous rabble-rouser, so they very much wanted to make it crystal clear to the Emperor that "these guys are nothing to do with us".

It's the liberal Christians I do not understand. Why not just say "We're too smart and modern to believe in the Virgin Birth, Mary was just some dumb broad" instead of torturing meaning into nonsense by "Now the reason people talked about the Virgin Mary was, and we all know virgins don't get pregnant without sex, is that she was a girl who was raped. That's how she got pregnant by a guy not her betrothed, without being a slut. And the villagers used to refer to her as "Mary the virgin who was raped", and eventually that just turned into "Mary the virgin" and then "the Virgin Mary". You see the simple explanation that doesn't require us to turn off our brains and believe in pregnancy without sex? Evidence for this? It, uh, came to me in a dream?"

I swear, this is a real liberal denomination example I read online years back. One of those "we cosplay by dressing up in the vestments and using the historical language, but we don't really believe all that stuff, except about niceness. We believe in niceness" mainline churches. I may mock Pastorette Babs in Talarico's Presbyterian church, but she is at least upfront and honest about what she does not believe.

The Romans would have loved to have a Hellenized version of Judaism develop which extolled political quietism, the dutiful paying of taxes, a comical level of non-violence and the acceptance of foreigners into the fold. To have the Son of God tell the powerful Roman military captain “you have more faith in God than any Jew”, to have John the Baptist tell the Roman soldier “you’re doing perfect, just be happy with your pay and don’t be corrupt”, paraphrasing, this would be the Roman dream.

We can be pretty sure why Jesus was killed because the Christian sources and the Jewish sources converge on a key point: He was a threat to the Pharisee’s power, ie the proto-rabbinical stranglehold over Jewish culture. And so we read in Rambam that he “cause[d] difficulty to the Jews and sway[ed] the people away from God” and thus deserved to die, and we read in Justin Martyr’s Dialogue from 150ad that the Jews had a curse on Christians in their synagogal prayers. This later developed into the Birkat ha-Minim still prayed daily by Orthodox Jews: “Let the Christians (notzrim) and the heretics perish as in a moment. Let them be wiped out of the book of life, and with the righteous let them not be written”. This term is what Paul is called the the Jews in Acts 24:5: a Nazarene stirring up dissension / trouble among Jews. Obviously this is embarrassing for Orthodox Jews, so they try to whitewash the term and claim a false etymology, because praying every day for Christians to immediately all die is insane. But the mass of evidence points to this and even today “notzrim” is a term used by Israelis for Christians.

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.

This seems to be an extremely hostile summary of EY's impact.

First off, LW+offshoots is the most interesting collection of thinkers I have encountered on the internet. A lot of people thought likewise, which is why the ratsphere enjoys some popularity. It attracted a lot of weird smart people, and obviously some of them turned murderous or financially irresponsible later on. But if Eliezer wrote a sequence called be trans and murder people, I must have missed it, likewise with the one about Forget Kelly: always bet the future of mankind at even odds.

That his attempt to argue for the danger of AI x-risk was mostly successful at arguing that higher AI capabilities are possible is true enough. Still, I would not give him credit/blame for the LLMs too much, he might have pushed capabilities ahead a few months by trying to get Musk interested in the topic, but he hardly invented the transformer architecture single-handedly.

Blaming him for "humans driven mad by overwhelming concern over shrimp welfare" is even more indirect. AI x-risk aside, EY does not seem to be very involved in EA, though obviously there is some overlap between these wider movements. At this point, you are not even blaming Jesus for medieval witch burnings, but blaming Plato for them. Also, do you have a list of these people driven "mad"? Are we talking psychosis or bipolar or some other form of "madness"? Is there even the flimsiest psychiatric study supporting your claims?

Nor do I think that the lifestyle choices of the center of LW matter much. For the longest time, Scott Alexander was to me just an entity which generated text over at LW and SSC. My respect for him is entirely based on his writing. If I had learned (before he was outed) that actually, he was in a polycule, a trans-man, a devout Hindu, into fucking donkeys, an LLM, super into NASCAR, had spent a decade in juvenile for manslaughter, that would not have mattered to me. (By contrast, if I had learned he did not have a medicine degree or actually spent most of his surplus income on torturing small mammals, that would have been disappointing.)

The reason why a priest having a mistress is generally considered a scandal is because the priest spent a lot of time denouncing that lifestyle. By contrast, the grey tribe is generally liberal in their position on sex. Aella and the polycule culture seem like a minor side note to the ratsphere than the centerpiece.

I suppose that you strongly disapprove of grey tribe sexual norms, but from where I stand, they are not affecting the credibility of LW much. If every poster on LW was married with 2.5 kids and went to church on Sunday, this would not affect Trump's stance on AI alignment at all. The Christian right would still find plenty of other reasons to hate us, just as the woke left finds plenty of reasons despite agreeing with us on most matters of sex.

Now, if the ratsphere was pushing for poly relationships as a method of alignment, you would have some reason to be concerned regarding the culture war. In fact, they do no such thing. I see Eliezer mentioned more frequently in the mainstream press these days, but his sexuality is neither pushed in the foreground by himself nor by journalists.

Aella using her area of exertise to try to help on AI alignment is not more surprising than if Scott was offering free psychotherapy to important AI researchers. Neither seems especially newsworthy.

Aella using her area of exertise to try to help on AI alignment

lol. lmao even. what a polite turn of phrase. you win.

edit:

Nor do I think that the lifestyle choices of the center of LW matter much

"this group has insane and bad moral preferences" does not mesh well with "this group believes they are likely to be setting the morality of the light cone."

You laugh, but this was a technique used by at least one organisation calling itself a Christian church: flirty fishing. The 70s, my friend, were weird and wonderful.

Yeah, they were a cult.

fascinating! til

While Scott is a blogger that writes thoughtful and occasionally entertaining blog posts, I certainly couldn't care less about where he stands in relationship to donkeys, NASCAR or juvenile justice, unless he chooses do discuss one of these topics on the blog. HOWEVER, if he comes forward as a part of a movement that claims them - or people selected by them, or people selected by the process influenced by them - need to receive extraordinary powers which will possibly control the destiny of humanity for millennia forward - and while I don't know if it's true or not, they certainly claim it is true - I think I am entitled to apply strict scrutiny here. Weird deviant blogger is not a threat to me, and I am fine with having dozens of them around without feeling the least bit unsafe. Weird deviant cult vying for absolute control over one of the most important technologies in the history of humanity - hey, that's maybe not what I am fine with. And if they proclaim they can align the AI, maybe it's time for me to ask - align AI with what exactly, and do I really want the AI to be aligned with that?

Is anyone arguing for "give Eliezer and Scott full exclusive access to prompting the first ASI instead of Sam or Dario"?

Last time I was checking, they were mostly pushing for pausing the training of bigger models. Their take is not "we have solved alignment, here is the perfect list of preferences to give AI", but "alignment seems really hard, we should not build ASI until we have solved it".

Perhaps Eliezer believes in his heart of hearts that the best outcome is a society which uses the tools of totalitarianism to crack down on any AI development, but he is not in the position to do that and will never be.

If we manage to coordinate and build aligned ASI, then we will not simply put Eliezer's value system into it, because quite frankly Eliezer is not a critical stakeholder with whom one needs to coordinate. Likely the USG would get 30%, Anthropic and OpenAI would get 10% each, the Chinese would get another 30%, the rest of the world would get another 10% and LW would end up with less sway than the Catholic Church.

Is anyone arguing for "give Eliezer and Scott full exclusive access to prompting the first ASI instead of Sam or Dario"?

It's not personally Scott and Eliezer. It's the Oversight Committee (there's always a committee). But who do you think will influence forming the committee and who do you think the members of the committee would look for guidance when faced with tough decisions? Wouldn't it be the folks that convinced the government that the committee is needed in the first place? Or at least folks aligned with them?

but he is not in the position to do that and will never be.

He personally may be not. But some more savvy, slick and energetic politician taking cues from him might be. Marx or Gramsci did not personally take power.

Eliezer is not a critical stakeholder with whom one needs to coordinate.

If Eliezer does not matter, then it doesn't matter who says what about him. I am fine with this outcome, where whatever he says and does is immaterial and he has no influence on the outcome of things. I am afraid however it's not entirely the case, as a lot of people who are very knowledgeable in the industry and are at least adjacent to its control levers are significantly influenced by him (either personally or by the ideology he embodies). Maybe I am worrying for nothing, I'd be happy with that outcome too.

"We should not build AI to..." involves putting pressure on companies and legislators, and can easily lead to a situation where users don't get to control their own computers. "Ai should refuse to do X" is ultimately an attempt to DRM AI in the same way that media and video games are already DRMed.

If the experience with gun control or drug control teaches us something, it's how hard is to prevent people from doing something they want to do. And how much control does it require to have even a limited degree of success in it. Imagine a world where only ISIS and the Sinaloa cartel has the true AI... And the CIA/NSA of course but we don't talk about it. OTOH the regular citizens ae required to have government monitoring software on any device smarter than a thermostat.

I alluded to this in a prior post but then deleted my subsequent reply and turned it into a DM because I felt that I might have been overstepping certain boundaries by naming names.

That said, in 2014 - 2015 LessWrong saw a purge of long time commentors and contributors for their refusal to get on board with Wild Animal suffering or all the trans/poly stuff. If you were to ask me, I would tell you that this purge was a significant contributing factor to the decline of LessWrong 1.0 and the subsequent relaunch of LW 2.0 as a more explicitly MIRI-oriented activist space.

That said, if I were to compile a list of people EY banned from LessWrong for being "moral mutants" that list would include David Friedman, Peter Thiel, Trae Stephens. JD Vance, Sam Hughes, Jared Issacman, at least two co-authors of Attention Is All You Need, and a sitting member of the US Senate armed services committee.

Point being that if EY's goal was to gain influence he may very well have done the opposite by pissing off people of real influence and authority to curry favor with characters like Aella and Ozzy.

This is especially egregious when viewed in the context of CFAR's relationship with SBF and the Zizians, IE there is an impression amongst those observing from the outside that speaking out against men in women's sports will get you canceled in rationalist spaces but outright commissions of murder and fraud will not.

That said, in 2014 - 2015 LessWrong saw a purge of long time commentors and contributors for their refusal to get on board with Wild Animal suffering or all the trans/poly stuff. If you were to ask me, I would tell you that this purge was a significant contributing factor to the decline of LessWrong 1.0 and the subsequent relaunch of LW 2.0 as a more explicitly MIRI-oriented activist space.

I don't remember anything like this. If they were long time commentors, you can surely name some of them.

Aside from Friedman himself, Baaj, Barnaby, QNTM, and Paniookah are the names that immediately come to mind.

Basically there was a whole circle of people who'd been around the Bay Area rationalist community since the Livejournal days that either got banned or were quietly pushed out during that EA transition period.

You were talking about a LessWrong purge, but I can't find these people's LW accounts that have gone quiet. David Friedman has an active one that advertises meetups and doesn't seem to have ever participated in comments. He's been a regular commenter over at slatestarcodex and seems to always have been received well there. I don't know who Baaj, Barnaby or Paniookah are and google didn't find any comments by these names in LessWrong or SSC. I'm not aware of QNTM ever interacting much directly with the LessWrong sphere.

Where and why was qntm banned? I’m not aware of any controversies surrounding him, even in very left-leaning forums he’s only praised.

The original thread appears lost to time, if it still exists I have failed to find it, but QNTM got into it with EY over his so-called "containment experiments" where he effectively accused EY of being a fraud and "not a real AI researcher", a few days later he ate a ban for some unrelated bullshit where he got a accused of hate-speech against vegans or something.

I can not prove that EY was looking for a pretext to get rid of people who did not share his views, but that was the impression that I came away with.

If this happened, it wasn't at LessWrong. EY got frustrated with LWs moderation capabilities and culture in the early 2010s, decamped to Facebook and Twitter where he could freely block anyone who annoyed him and never really returned to LessWrong for anything other than occasional drive-by comments. Meanwhile LessWrong generally doesn't delete the publicly visible user accounts when someone is banned, and there's no user account page for qntm.

I've posted on LW against wild animal suffering, against saving unlimited drowning children, against trans (can't find one, you'll have to trust me on this), and against AI restrictions and haven't been banned for it. And I've been on LW since 2013.

That said, if I were to compile a list of people EY banned from LessWrong for being "moral mutants" that list would include David Friedman, Peter Thiel, Trae Stephens. JD Vance, Sam Hughes, Jared Issacman

I was curious about this, so I asked Claude. Sadly, it did not find any evidence of EY using the "moral mutant" framing and banning these people. I also asked it if there is any public recording of qntm having publicly complained about being banned, and it could not find that either.

But LW 1.0 is well archived, and thus it should not be difficult to back up your claims with evidence instead of just linking to the WP articles.

Wait, are you saying you're confident not only that JD Vance was on Less Wrong, but that he actually commented?

I've heard people speculate that he moved in those circles, but never anything more concrete than that.

Wait, are you saying you're confident not only that JD Vance was on Less Wrong, but that he actually commented?

Yes

The reason why a priest having a mistress is generally considered a scandal is because the priest spent a lot of time denouncing that lifestyle. By contrast, the grey tribe is generally liberal in their position on sex

I somewhat disagree with this take: These folks label themselves "rationalist", but some of their most prominent public opinions are "give in to base sexual urges". It may be my traditional upbringing, but I suspect most people would agree that topics around sex are some of those people generally tend to be least rational about. I would have expected more explicit rejection of flawed human irrationality: are the Shakers and such irrational in adopting complete celibacy?

some of their most prominent public opinions are "give in to base sexual urges"

Are you sure this is in the sequences? Planecrash is unlikely to be the first place someone starts reading on rationality. If Scott is regularly organizing CNC orgy meetups worldwide, I must have missed that.

You can of course argue that the sequences being silent on sex is itself a moral stance. It seems fair to say that Eliezer probably thought that politics is a larger impediment to his style of rationality than having sex out of wedlock, which is why we have no sequence sex is the mind-killer.

But a liberal stance on sexuality (roughly "what consenting adults do in their bedrooms is their business") is not unique to the ratsphere, it is a widely accepted norm encompassing both the blue and the majority of the red tribe.

I am not part of the inner circle of the Bay Area ratsphere, but would be somewhat surprised if the top 1000 rationalists all had had sex with each other (gender attraction permitting). Instead, I would assume that some of them are asexual, monogamous or even celibate.

are the Shakers and such irrational in adopting complete celibacy?

I think as an individual moral decision, it is fine.

Personally, when I wanted to lose weight, I did not try dieting, I simply started injecting Chinese GLP-1 agonists. If I wanted to embrace celibacy, I would probably reach for T blockers rather than trying to spend my limited willpower on resisting the urge to jerk off.

However, I also do not feel that my sexuality is what is holding me back from being a better rationalist. If I spend half an hour on average per day watching porn, that is not a cause area where I can reach huge gains by turning myself into a straw vulcan.

I mean, there is probably some former sex-crazed maniac out there for whom embracing celibacy was exactly the right decision, but it hardly seems like something which would generally improve humanity.

But a liberal stance on sexuality (roughly "what consenting adults do in their bedrooms is their business")

That is a liberal stance on sexuality; it is not the predominant sexual stance of American liberals. Edit: to clarify, "consent" is a godforsaken shitshow and what people are allowed to do in their bedrooms depends heavily on the identity, age (gap), specific behaviors, whether the woman changes her mind weeks or months later, whether the behavior affects the treatment of other women (this here is why SlutCon and the CNC thing generated so much outrage, despite all being theoretically- ha- consenting adults), etc etc.

the top 1000 rationalists all had had sex with each other (gender attraction permitting).

I find it fascinating that everyone reaches for big numbers here, or say things like "the vast majority of EAs aren't (sexual weirdos)." 950 of the top 1000 don't matter, and that remaining 50 are all married, in poly relationships, work together, live together, hire each other or their family members' for each others' boards, etc.

Instead, I would assume that some of them are asexual, monogamous or even celibate.

Scott used to identify as asexual but he has two kids. I don't think it's accidental though that there likely is disproportionate numbers of asexual and poly.

I will however deduct points for, after having written "if you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy", deciding that the response to men-who-really-really-wish-they-were-women in the community was not a gentle-but-firm "I'm sorry, but you just aren't. That's not how this works."

But the rationalists combine sexual urges with UMC constraint. It's "calculated intemperance." Rational license.

what further discourse is actually expected to achieve.

Victory, I assume? The problem is just that Scott is autistic, so he's very bad at it. Hence "Complicity" and all the other "smashing the power of the coalition I expect to save me" stuff he's flailed at over the years. He's dancing on moving ground and expecting the floor to stay put.

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.

You have DoW directly saying that EA and all that it stands for is anti-American

Are they wrong? I mean, I don't know if there's a pure-rational EA-based case for patriotism and American exceptionalism, but I certainly didn't notice a lot of people in EA circles looking for one and trying to build one up. I suspect if somebody seriously and earnestly did so, they'd be expelled from a lot of EA spaces. I mean, I understand there could be a very different view about what "American" is about, but if we talk about what a middle ground conservative working for DoW understands about it, how much the EA movement is his friend and how much it is his enemy? I am not asking who is right and wrong between them, but if we stand on the position of DoW, what would be the correct evaluation of EA from their side?

AI-risk-concerned EAs are, if nothing else, generally very keen that America achieve a certain pivotal technological discovery before China does. If you can't bond with the DoW over being paranoid about China, what can you bond with them about?

Are they paranoid about China or is their only problem with China that they think they can control the US government easier than they can control the CCP? Imagine if CCP told them "you know what, we decided you are right and we're pausing our AI research, but we are kind of concerned the US would gain unfair advantage. So we need you to, you know, sabotage US a little - not a lot, just to maintain parity, nobody is going to get hurt and everybody wins!" Would they take the deal? I know a lot of their ideological predecessors took the similar deal with the USSR and the nukes...

Well, really I was kind of joking here - it's just a fun empirical fact that if someone online is very worried about China in some way, I can tell you with absolute certainty that they are either a right-wing patriot or deep in the weeds of AI safety. It's not a very deep observation, though I do think it counts for something.

Regardless, I wasn't thinking of the recent "pause AI" efforts so much as the historical focus among the ratsphere on the necessity of cracking aligned AGI in the West lest China succeed first and turn the lightcone into a CCP boot stamping into a human face forever. Strong anticommunism, and indeed positive enthusiasm about capitalism, remain mainstream within the Grey Tribe in a way they long ceased to be within the Blue Tribe, to whatever extent they ever were.

it's just a fun empirical fact that if someone online is very worried about China in some way, I can tell you with absolute certainty that they are either a right-wing patriot or deep in the weeds of AI safety.

Or they read the Maritime Executive at lunch and keep an eye on the South China Sea shenanigans.

as one of the broad reasons for calling for regulation was to get a legally enforced competitive advantage

This being entirely untrue must have been explained to you before, why spread the lie?

Because you can't 'explain' away an opinion. You can only disagree with it, which you do. The case rests on factors that you consider non-salient, deductions which you consider to be false, and intuitions you don't share.

You can look up the proposed bills, it's simply not the case that they give the labs asking for them a competitive advantage. It is not an opinion. It is untrue. It is a lie.

  • -11

The vote difference with no actual rebuttal is pretty funny. People you trust are lying to you. You should not trust them. These are lies cooked up by A16z type people because they want to be able to produce their slop gambling porn simulators more cheaply. That's the faction who's lies you're swallowing and you're getting mad at people for pointing it out.

Are you arguing that people who "want to be able to produce their slop gambling porn simulators more cheaply" would be negatively financially impacted by the proposed regulations and then at the same time that these same proposed regulations don't create a competitive advantage for frontier labs with deeper pockets? How do you figure that?

They don't want any regulation ever or for things to slow down, more broadly they hate the frontier labs in general. There are a few groups in this category, some are angry that they passed on investing in the labs early on in favor of crypto. Broadly their preferred future looks something like the labs burning the money of other investors to produce powerful models that chinese labs are allowed to distill and then they can run them locally to power their anti-social revenue extracting products. They see themselves as the "application layer" that Huang often talks about. They have very little vision about the future of AI and broadly only care about what makes their low effort wrapper start up more money.

Can you explain the alternative view? Can you point to a regulation proposed by any of the labs that would actually hurt the little guys more than the frontier labs? Or at all?

Can you point to a regulation proposed by any of the labs that would actually hurt the little guys more than the frontier labs? Or at all?

As per our discussion last month, it seems pretty clear that Anthropic's proposed regulations would hit "little guys" like Mistral, and their regulations impose a burden on small companies, burdens are costly, cost hurts, ergo is seems pretty clear that the regulations would hurt little guys. (This does not necessarily mean that regulations are bad.)

With that being said, I'm still not clear on your argument. If your position is that the regulations wouldn't hurt the little guys, or would hurt the frontier labs (whom you say they hate) more so than the little guys, improving the competitive position of the little guys, then why are the little guys against the regulations?

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what is an a16z type person?

More generally, I have a fairly embedded prior that the AI companies are in fact actively attempting to secure a regulatory moat, wherein they are the only companies legally permitted to provide AI services. Actions they've taken, particularly the "rogue" hacks, appear to me to fit this model quite well.

Am I being lied to? which bills are supposed to disprove this prior, and why?

what is an a16z type person?

Andreessen Horowitz circle, I outline the perspective here.

More generally, I have a fairly embedded prior that the AI companies are in fact actively attempting to secure a regulatory moat, wherein they are the only companies legally permitted to provide AI services. Actions they've taken, particularly the "rogue" hacks, appear to me to fit this model quite well.

Am I being lied to? which bills are supposed to disprove this prior, and why?

From which bills did the priors originate from? Openai and Anthropic have both published blueprint suggestions that explicitly exempt anyone doing training runs below 10^25 FLOP earn less than $500M in AI revenue or spend less than $1B a year on AI R&D. If the worry is that the regulations would create a moat we could actually talk about the regulations and demand they be written such that a moat wouldn't be created. But the people pushing this point have not read any of the proposals and do not care about the moat argument besides its use as a soldier.

How much do OpenAI and Anthropic spend/earn/train?

As I understand it the moat argument is that OpenAI and Anthropic want to create a regulation cartel to shut out any other upcoming competitors. If the exemptions are low enough that any competitor exempted wouldn't be able to reach anywhere close to the quality OpenAI/Anthropic provide (and thus can't actually compete) while being too regulation-choked to compete if they try to rise any higher, then it sounds like a moat.

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From which bills did the priors originate from?

They didn't originate from bills, but from my understanding of AI safety discourse, the version of that discourse being presented by the lab leadership, their calls for regulation, their market position, and the general way they've been generating "scary" AI incidents that don't seem organic and do seem to bolster their calls for "regulation".

Openai and Anthropic have both published blueprint suggestions that explicitly exempt anyone doing training runs below 10^25 FLOP earn less than $500M in AI revenue or spend less than $1B a year on AI R&D.

...how is this not a moat?

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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.

It's particularly dumb because there's plausible reason to think Vance at least had read Scott back in the day. I feel like 2014 Scott would have noticed the opportunity, and taken advantage of the audience to make a reasoned, decently-targeted pitch. But modern Scott would lose his polycule if he published "An Open Letter to Whichever of You Fuckers Is JD Vance", so, alas.

I think https://ai-2027.com/slowdown#slowdown-2028-03-31 might be that pitch. It pretty much openly promises Vance the crown if he joins the movement. The real power will belong to the Oversight Committee, of course, but he can have whatever is left of the remainder of the earthly power, after all, somebody needs to keep the lights on.

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?

For the rationalists, particularly Yud, Scott Alexander, Scott Aaronson, gwern, even Aella:

  • Misanthropic: AFAIK not at all. The Scotts wrote anti-feminist screeds but they seem to target “radical feminists” (i.e. man haters) and explicitly don’t regard women any lower than men. Aella projects her sex drive onto other women, I think her claims overgeneralize but aren’t critical.

  • Doomers: yes

  • Sex pests: they have weird sexuality but seem to respect consent and don’t seem to bother people outside broadcasting themselves, so I don’t see how they’d be “pests”

  • Upper echelons of AI companies: moreso than average, but none of the aforementioned rationalist leaders control the big companies, or are anywhere near the top

  • Morally consistent values: again, Anthropic employees may not have them, but not all rationalists work on Anthropic, and the aforementioned seem to be of the few people who actually at least try to be consistent

  • Social norms: yes. Laws: no AFAIK

Don’t get me wrong, the rationalists are imperfect. But the naive public mixes them up with incels and Zizians who are different. My opinion is they are friendly, pacifist, and logic “smart”, but somewhat insane, very weird, and (like all smart people) tend to self-deceive into missing the obvious.

“Effective altruists” the idea is OK, but I won’t defend the official movement after they re-hired Caroline Ellison. And “SF cultists” can by definition fit whatever, depending on what vague cult you’re referring to.

Misanthropic: AFAIK not at all. The Scotts wrote anti-feminist screeds but they seem to target “radical feminists” (i.e. man haters) and explicitly don’t regard women any lower than men. Aella projects her sex drive onto other women, I think her claims overgeneralize but aren’t critical.

I think you got "misanthropic" and "misogynistic" mixed up.

Yes

Still, they aren’t hateful either. Their lack of socialization is from shyness and autism.

“Effective altruists” the idea is OK, but I won’t defend the official movement after they re-hired Caroline Ellison.

Effective Altruism and the Rationalist movement are so intertwined that it's hard to separate them out, and the Rationalist bubble has/had a lot of their own specific problems. To be fair to them, they all started off being maximally open-minded and tolerant, which meant that of course every scammer, grifter, and sociopath immediately zoomed in on them as pigeons for the plucking. Remember the case a while back of the sex pest guy grooming a runaway fifteen year old (though she probably wasn't fifteen when he got his paws on her EDIT: seems the victims were nineteen) and getting everyone else who knew of them to keep their scruples to themselves by threatening to commit suicide* whenever anyone said "Dude, this is maybe not 100% consensual"? And because he was so popular in the movement and had successfully inserted himself into a lot of the groups and movements as "genuine original thinker with amazing ideas that can radically change society for the better" plus presented himself as a neurodivergent victim of oppression due to his unconventional sexuality, they all held their tongues where normal bigots like myself would immediately have booted him out as a rapist and called the cops. He weaponised empathy and successfully guilt-tripped them all, until someone eventually grew a backbone and did something about it. And still nobody called the cops because that's not the done thing.

That's the dark flip-side of "we don't judge anyone on age or ability or mental stability or unconventional lifestyle, we accept you as you are and if you say you're mature enough then chronological age is just a calendar date" acceptance. A lot (the majority?) suffered from maybe mild bullying or at least standing out as the nerdy, geeky, awkward weirdo at school and in their private lives, so they bent over backwards not to be like that once they were building their ideal society. And that is blood in the water for the sharks. See how good ol' Brent, for example, used all the jargon of the sub-culture and brainwashed the nice people around him into the mindset of "well we're discussing this rationally not emotionally so we are Doing The Work and not being normies and so his conclusions must be correct and reasonable, because just being squicked by what is going on is the disgust response which is Conservative and we are not Republicans!" Extraordinarily easy to manipulate people into doing what you want and agreeing with you if you just use the right words in the accepted manner.

And in every context, this is how you get "Good old Bob/Tim/Sam/Jason, they're a vital part of the organisation, I can't believe these accusations because he's not that kind of guy, there must be a reasonable explanation and the accuser must be motivated by bad things".

*I would have called his bluff re: the suicide if I were there by marching into the kitchen, grabbing the sharpest knife I could find, marching back out, and slapping it on the table before him with "there you are, be my guest, go right ahead". But I'm not a nice person or a quokka.

… immediately zoomed in on them as pigeons for the plucking.

I resent this derogatory mention of my species! I’ll have you know that we pigeons pass the mirror test and can recognise words!

This is true: the problem with an organization formerly of nice but naive people is that it doesn't reject sociopaths, and now it's an organization with sociopaths. And violent schizophrenics, and shrimp welfare-ists.

However, every large movement has a set of awful members, since anyone can say "I am part of X". And I think the big rationalist organizations are getting better at finding, excluding, and if stuff happens denouncing their awful members. By now Brent is well-known as a sex pest, and while I unfortunately expect future abuser revelations, they seem less common. The EA leaders are parodying themselves by maintaining Caroline Ellison, but while the rationalist leaders share the EA ideas, I think they've stopped associating with their people.

By now Brent is well-known as a sex pest, and while I unfortunately expect future abuser revelations, they seem less common.

Brent, and Worst Boyfriend Ever, edit: John Wenworth is on the outs though that seems to be more for writing than behavior /endedit, and how many others that are less famous and just kept on a member's-only list of missing stairs?

The EA leaders are parodying themselves by maintaining Caroline Ellison

Felons have fewer options so she can be paid less, ergo, more effective per dollar. Classic EA!

I think they've stopped associating with their people.

Isn't Scott still housemates with Kelsey, EA journalist extraordinaire?

To be fair to the EA set, it's not them in general but one guy and his organisation in particular that have rehabbed Caroline, and since this guy is also hanging on to the FTX money and refusing to hand it back (I liked all his 'I can't comment on this because our lawyers said not to but it'll be a cold day in Hell before we hand over a cent to the bankruptcy administrators despite all their suing us' replies in the general response to the reaction to him announcing her officially), I get the impression he is rather steelier in character than the general run of the EA crowd. The Sam Altman of EA, if you will 😁 ("that money MY money now, and gimme more money too!")

don’t seem to bother people outside broadcasting themselves, so I don’t see how they’d be “pests”

I've read different accusations:

  • "there's a glass ceiling for monogamists in the movement"
  • "they keep trying to have sex with you the way Eurocommission keeps submitting bills about Chat Control"

"there's a glass ceiling for monogamists in the movement"

It certainly does seem like you're frozen out to a degree if you don't put your keys in the bowl. I don't know how else to explain away Scott going so incredibly native in spite of his earlier opinions.

I doubt monogamy would make them view you any less. AFAIK Scott Aaronson is in a traditional marriage. It’s more like, if you’re in a BDSM polycule they won’t view you any less either.

Also the least-central person on that list, and not in the Bay Area.

"View you less" might be a little strong. "Consider you less open-minded and thus less trustworthy on certain dimensions" is more plausible, though I think very few would be explicit about that like John Wentworth was

Also I personally absolutely do upgrade my assessment of someone's AI alignment qualifications if I find out they go to RMN.

So... the monogamous are accustomed to privilege there being a glass ceiling for people who engage in unconventional sexual practises even if they exclusively involve mutually consenting adults, and now equality there not being such a barrier feels like oppression having the glass ceiling blocking them?

I agree with you, but it's an easy vector of attack. You just need to shout two things at once (I think that's called concern trolling):

  • hey normies, group X does Y!
  • hey X, normies will hate you if they think you do Y!

Sex pests: they have weird sexuality but seem to respect consent and don’t seem to bother people outside broadcasting themselves, so I don’t see how they’d be “pests”

Being very charitable, this may be a "suffering from success" situation. Those circles seem to take sex pest issues very seriously. Alternatively phrased, they seem frequently riven with bloodbath infighting over sex pest scandals. It is possible that, like the Boy Scouts, their sincere and well above average efforts to tackle the Sex Pest Problem means the issue appears vastly more salient than among other comparable subcultures.

Being very charitable, of course. Being more realistic, autistic sex-positive dorks are going to attract sociopaths like flies to shit.

Being more realistic, autistic sex-positive dorks are going to attract sociopaths like flies to shit.

I cannot help but wonder at the prevalence of a cluster B parent in the lives of the autistic sex-positive dorks in question. I know this is my own experience talking here, but I strongly believe that having been conditioned to accept a sociopath's behavior as "normal", those dorks would naturally be more vulnerable to manipulation, hence spawning perpetual Drama.

I'm definitely autistic and (at least from my perspective, so maybe I don't know what I'm talking about): growing up, my parents were very stable, but I was still vulnerable to manipulation because my social skills were regressed, and probably moreso because I was shy and conflict avoidant. I think good parenting physically (i.e. without my input) kept me away from horrible abusers and communities I'd meet them, like the shadier parts of the internet.

I think a large group of autists unable to kick out a small group of sociopaths is different, it requires different social skills that aren't even common in neurotypicals, because I notice it happening in mostly neurotypical communities.

I want to preface this comment by restating that I am also judging primarily by my own experience here, so this is definitely a YMMV situation. Additionally, I would agree that normies aren't particularly well equipped to deal with sociopaths either, but I would nevertheless liken their comparative advantages to having bronze age tools and weapons as opposed to stone age ones, by virtue of their natural ability for nonverbal communication. If, on top of that, the autistic individual in question was raised in the classic autistic father/borderline mother pairing, then there is likely, at the least, an additional layer of cognitive distortion hampered by mother's chronic gaslighting that must be overcome, and likely a host of maladaptive coping mechanisms as well, and here I am thinking of things like Scott being totally cool with polyamory and yet tweeting about his intense jealousy in the moment, because I personally identify with that exact sort of hacking around actual feelings via thoughts and habits. I did far too much of that, to my cost, as said ability was something that steadily degraded until it broke down completely in middle age.

Beyond what @Goodguy said below, the "building the torment nexus while railing against it" thing also seems at risk of being an instance of what they seem to call the "Goomba fallacy" these days (dumb name that tells you nothing about what it is, but that's all we have). Most EAs are not in a position to contribute anything of substance to the ongoing construction of the Torment Nexus, and might even be net delaying it by sapping funds that might otherwise go towards it.

The misanthropy. To me they don't seem more misanthropic than the average person.

The doomerism. To me they seem on average to actually be more optimistic than the average person.

The heretical nature and flaunting (Edit: or flouting) of social norms and laws is somewhat true, but I don't see that as a necessarily bad thing. It really depends on the context.

The sex pest characterization. They don't seem to engage in being sex pests any more frequently than people in the general population.

And I say this as someone who is often critical of them.

Misanthropic probably means doesn't yuck it up with a random person while waiting in line for a movie, or, not as gregarious as a car salesman.

It's more the "10 shrimp matter more than a human toddler because pretend math".

I think most of them just indulge this as a thought experiment. They wouldn't actually choose 10 shrimp over one toddler if forced to make the choice in real life.

Also, they don't think of their moral position as morally valuing humans less, they view it as valuing humans the same as before, while correcting the previously incorrectly low appraisal of the moral value of shrimp.

An argument can be made that since resources are limited, morally valuing shrimp more amounts to the same thing as morally valuing humans less. However, I think that the intent matters. The EA people by and large don't seem to intend to be misanthropic. I don't even detect subconscious misanthropy from them, at least not any more than the average person has. To me, their seeming lack of the normal pro-human stance seems to be genuinely motivated by taking logical arguments to their conclusions and by unusually high degrees of empathy for beings like shrimp, not by bitterness against humanity.

That said, I don't know any people like this in "real life". So I'm just going by the impressions I get from reading a small amount of online content.

flaunt

flout

@999

Ah. Lol. Nice catch.

Both flaunting and flouting works, for different examples of the group in question.

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".

I keep getting stuck on, Scott knows rhe leader of the group he's comparing to got crucified, right? Is he sure he wants to invite this comparison as a defense?

The reason the other group was successful is the first group is firmly convinced their leader rose from the dead afterward. Lots of other 2nd temple era weird cults died out aftier their leader was killed.

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.

see this chapter of Luke

What a coincidence. I just re-read that chapter this morning to refresh my memory so I could correctly comment here about Jesus's relation to prostitutes.

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.

aggressive in tone

Because it's a copypasta template-meme. In the original the tone contrasts with the frivolity of the subject-matter, but swapping that out for a more serious-sounding subject makes that part not work as well. Both are expressing exaggerated contempt towards someone saying something unremarkable as if it's remarkable ("I only had an iced coffee to eat today" and "A Jew's weird apocalyptic cult is overly universalist and hangs out with the outcasts of society") but the second makes the exaggeration less obvious.

I think I've seen you link this image several places, and every time I don't see any connection. There's no similarity between this 'template' and what Scott says. A copypasta means you copy and paste, maybe with minor alterations.

It's largely the same wording with the subject swapped out, same as these:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/should-we-tell-everyone-should-we-throw-a-party-should-we-invite-bella-hadid

Like many of those examples it isn't completely identical, it doesn't include the "should we tell everyone", doesn't elongate the "Oh", and adds "you" to "throw a party", but it's obviously still based on the template.

Oh you [statement]? Should we throw a party? Should we invite [related figure]?

Gotcha, I see the connection better now.

It seems like a misapplication of the template though. The point of it seems to be to mock someone's enthusiasm for a topic or their willingness to share an opinion that nobody else cares about. Scott is adding in a totally different aspect with his comparison between EA and Christianity. It ends up as a mixed metaphor which I think is why so many are confused by it.

The shared element is that both "only had an iced coffee to eat today" and "worried about Jew's apocalyptic cult that consorts with prostitutes and preaches universalist morality" are implicitly being presented as remarkable by the fictional interlocutor but are actually mundane and uninteresting because they happen all the time (where all the time in the second case means at least twice). It does add a major new element with the comparison though, which makes that less clear.

It reads like the average Twitter tantrum.

As i said in the previous thread he is simultaneously pissing off his rationalist friends by seeming to agree with the Christians and annoying his earnestly religious Unsong fans (both Christian and Jewish) by coming across as both aggressive and dismissive.

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 his 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.

Oh, definitely repentance and conversion of life is indicated. I'm not saying they can just keep going on as they are, I'm not a liberal Christian 😁 But when does repentance come? "Between the saddle and the ground is the mercy of God".

130 'Let the people, then, not be too certain
131 in their judgments, like those that harvest in their minds
132 corn still in the field before it ripens.

133 'For I have seen the briar first look dry and thorny
134 right through all the winter's cold,
135 then later wear the bloom of roses at its tip,

136 'and once I saw a ship, which had sailed straight
137 and swift upon the sea through all its voyage,
138 sinking at the end as it made its way to port.

139 'Let not Dame Bertha and Master Martin,
140 when they see one steal and another offer alms,
141 think that they behold them with God's wisdom,

142 for the first may still rise up, the other fall.'

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.

Tactical advantage? What are you talking about dude? You already said this is not to his advantage.

Because he's bad at it, not because tactical advantage wasn't his intention.

I'm sorry but "they're fighting these people with insidious methods but they're bad at it" is such a retarded line of attack. These people are running some of the most valuable companies in the world. You have to do better than this.

Also we are collectively overthinking a throwaway Twitter joke 1000 times more than Scott did when he wrote it.

It doesn't take much thinking to understand what's wrong with the joke. What takes a lot of thinking is stating what's wrong with the joke when people wilfully refuse to understand. As a general rule, having to rebut someone who willfully refuses to understand will always take a lot of thinking.

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.

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.

She also runs Plzdontkillus, an experimental creator camp on AI risk hosted at Lighthaven (man, EAs/Rats have a bad track record with actually owning locations playing poorly for them), funded by MIRI (another Yud connection) and co-run with Ronnie Fernandez, ex-husband of Holly Elmore of Pause AI US (who went a bit crazy during/after the divorce and deeply hates Aella).

She's very interconnected with the Bay Arean EA/Rat community, and the long-termers of the community circle the wagons when she comes under scrutiny.

"Are you under the impression Eliezer is sleeping with Aella?"

I mean... Not really, but they'll make overtly sexual memes for donations, so it's easy to see how someone gets that idea.

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.

Huh, looking him up he is the current president of MIRI so he does lead a rationalist institution even though he isn't particularly prominent among the online LessWrong community. He's just her boyfriend though, and looking it up they were already dating when he was just executive director at MIRI. I did say "leaders" plural, I was thinking in terms of people like Eliezer or Scott either hiring her services or using their positions as a leaders of the "rationalist cult" to get her to sleep with them, not her dating a guy who isn't particularly well-known but who rose to president of MIRI after they were already dating. I should have just said "Are you under the impression Eliezer is sleeping with Aella?" since I wasn't actually familiar enough with Aella to know who she was dating.

Huh, looking him up he is the current president of MIRI

Which is a big deal. MIRI is the most prominent organisation that is explicitly about AI safety and was the original registered-with-the-secretary-of-state organisation in the rationalist ecosystem. The president of MIRI is the most legibly important leader in the "rationalist" and "AI safety" legs of the rat/EA/AI tripos, even if Yud remains the rightful caliph.

He also co-wrote big yud's "if anyone builds it everyone dies" book. He's not a big blogging voice but very much in the circle.

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.

John 8:11. Technically an adultress rather than a prostitute. The point indeed being to go forth, and sin no more.

"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.

Neither do I; I speak Australian English.

Thank you for the words "rort" and "wowser" which neither BrE nor AmE has a short synonym for.

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 thing you're missing is that the assumption of engagement in good faith is just not there on either side. It's nakedly a manipulation tactic; it fails for exactly the same reason that "the left are the real racists because of the racism of low expectations!" fails. Shitting all over someone's beliefs day in and day out and then abruptly talking out of the other side of your mouth and appealing to those beliefs because you can squint and contort and twist them to align with something you want that is obviously not in the other person's interest is contemptible.

I think there is a difference between not accepting someone else's beliefs, and and shitting all over them.

When you merely don't accept someone's beliefs, I think it is can be perfectly within the confines of good faith, to find points of agreement between their worldview and yours, and to argue that a person should live up to their principles and commitments.

The progressive left is slave morality, and Christianity is slave morality, so it is not surprising that even secular progressives find a lot to admire in Christian ethics, even if they also dislike a lot of aspects of conservative Christian dogma.

I mean, that's why the meme specifies backwards and contemptible, right? But I've never seen any kind of progressive find anything admirable in any kind of belief that isn't their own. Even if you argue they share a basic nature, I just don't think I've ever seen that kind of engagement in good faith in practice. It is almost always naked and cynical attempts at manipulation.

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.

I'd say just the opposite. A critique so shallow it makes you dismiss the entire argument.

Not to be too poisoned by reddit, but, I've seen this plenty and it is the anti-steelman. Perfectly dodging the actual beliefs of the opponent and instead trying to hold them to a silly simplified misunderstanding of their views.

Trying to assign views to unwilling opponents. That'll never work of course. But it lets some people pretend their opponent are hypocrites. Just ignore what they actually say and think despite their objections.

They absolutely do not, that's why the meme exists; "oh, you don't believe in allowing infinite immigrants to abuse welfare benefits, didn't Jesus say to love your neighbor?" >deliberately ignores all scripture about charity not extended to allowing individuals to be leeches upon society. The rebuttals have been done to death, to absolutely no avail, because Internet Atheists don't give a shit, they really think they've "owned the Xtians" by cherry-picking a quote that they don't even understand, but are absolutely certain they do.

"oh, you don't believe in allowing infinite immigrants to abuse welfare benefits, didn't Jesus say to love your neighbor?" >deliberately ignores all scripture about charity not extended to allowing individuals to be leeches upon society.

A helpful illustration of how Christianity gets used as a paper-thin cover for crude tribalism. Because, of course, leaving aside the object-level problems with that belief, it's not just immigration. They're among the most militaristic people in the country despite Christianity being explicitly pacifist. They're among the most explicitly greedy people in the country despite Christianity explicitly praising the poor and criticizing the wealthy. Among the most unforgiving despite Christianity being a religion fundamentally founded upon grace. And I could go on.

Now, on some level this is not unexpected. Textual Christianity is not particularly liberal in most respects, but neither does it line up very well with the parochial worldview of right-wing populists. To be frank there's always been a struggle aligning Christian values with Christian practice. Christianity is an apocalyptic cult that did a hard pivot when the world failed to end and they got some political clout. A bunch of principles that were fine when the world was going to end imminently are less practical and practicable when you have an eye towards long-term survival. Radical pacifism, for example, is not conducive to long-term survival.

As I mentioned before, this is mostly a problem for conservative Protestants. Catholics, conservative or liberal, have an easy out: the spiritual authority of church leaders gives them a lot of interpretative flexibility. Liberal Protestants simply reject biblical inerrancy, and in particular are willing to take the view that Paul was just a guy. The hardline conservative Protestants, by contrast, are left doing intellectual backflips to try and reconcile their particular worldviews with the plain text of the Bible.

scripture about charity not extended to allowing individuals to be leeches upon society

So I'm curious. What scripture should I look at that discusses the limit of charity?

1 Timothy 5 is a pretty good place to start.

Thank you.

More comments

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 character and substance of socialists if I say they just want free stuff

I have suffered the tragic misfortune of in person honest discussions with such people. They just want free stuff.

"Yeah, but actually economic calculation problem and pricing signals and seizing the wealth of the rich would both hard crash the economy and not pay for that much social spending." They don't care and especially don't care to listen to economic arguments against their views.

I don't want to be this reductive and oversimplified. But they are, so, in what more sophisticated sense should I understand them.

What exactly is the real defense to 'You're an idiot who believes in sky daddy?'

I couldn't possibly say, but that's not the topic at hand here. The topic at hand is that there's a certain kind of Christian who make a bunch of theological commitments and then refuses to follow them to their conclusion and instead treats Christianity as a costume, but still wants to claim credit and authority as if they are actually pious. They're not being made fun of for being religious, they're being made fun of for being sanctimonious hypocrites.

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."

what third parties are going to be convinced by this

I've got to be honest, I don't really care about the specific matter of SA's tweet. My point of contention is the more general matter of how religious chuds handle the charge of hypocrisy (which is pretty well-founded on the whole).

Religious people are capable of commanding a certain amount of respect from the... aspirationally religious (this is why, for example, priests are often receive reflexive deference). People who do not do a particularly good job of following the tenets of their faith but admire those who do. Pointing out that these religious authority figures are, in fact, not very good at following the tenets of their faith or outright reject them does really work chipping away at their legitimacy.

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?

Deathbed conversions are better than regular adult baptism, as they leave you less time to sin.

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.

This cow question seems like the best opportunity to use mu.

As somebody who had some incidental cult interactions in his 20s, this "cow question" isn't really selling me on any of the "it's not a cult" arguments. It's almost a perfect encapsulation of the shared secrets, humiliation, and blackmail collection that high control groups use to further ensnare members.

"Don't worry, we're all cow fuckers here" can turn into "you wouldn't want your employer to know about your opinions on cow fucking" real quick if somebody pisses off the leadership.

Maybe I'm applying my past experiences to a different situation, but if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and asks bizarre questions that carry future social consequences like a duck, maybe the duck is in a cult.

...whether the attendees would prefer intimate relations with a live cow or a dead one.

I wonder did anyone answer "Dead, skinned, tanned, and wrapped around an attractive consenting adult human of my preferred gender"?

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.

Most of the people saying that know very well why it's offensive. Their claim that since the answer doesn't literally imply anything bad, they don't understand why it's offensive, is not actual autism, it's trolling by feigning autism.

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.

Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.

--George Orwell, 1984

I would guess that the cow question is trying to filter against that.

I disagree. Crimestop is designed to prevent a rational consideration of undesirable matter - because considering it may lead a person to conclusions or thought patterns that are disapproved by the Party. However, the cow question, if pondered seriously, would most likely lead people to become disgusted and more entrenched in the value of their current culture - "we normies have our faults, but at least obsessing with questions like that isn't one of them". It's not a slippery slope, rather it's the opposite of it - the more you try to go there, the more all of your instincts scream at you to turn back. Except, of course, for the rare few that are really into it. Crimestop is not designed to guard against a rare few freaks - it is designed to control the masses. This question is designed to filter for certain kind of freaks.

But you contradict yourself:

Crimestop is designed to prevent a rational consideration of undesirable matter

the cow question, if pondered seriously, would most likely lead people to become disgusted and more entrenched in the value of their current culture [the definition of crimestop]

The question is designed to get those kinds of people- the ones that have disgust-forward personalities and conventional morality (we're talking Kohlberg 3/4s)- to throw out the survey.

Crimestop by contraposition, if you will; this works because Kohlberg 3/4s see the behavior of 5/6s as indistinguishable from 1/2 and, by observing that they are quite literally morally superior, are emotionally protected from the cognitive dissonance that someone actually better would feel if they let their moral indignation get in the way of being able to answer the question.

See also: bell_curve_iq_meme.jpg (positions are 'answers question', 'noooo u can't that's disgusting and sacrilegious', 'answers question').

the ones that have disgust-forward personalities and conventional morality (we're talking Kohlberg 3/4s)- to throw out the survey.

That's the big difference, right here. Cults can be very selective. They only need 0.01% to join to survive (in fact, much less - in a nation of hundreds of millions, typical cult size is probably dozens). Totalitarian regimes can't thrive on 0.01% success. That's why crimestop is the technique that works on 99% of people - because it's designed for mass control. Cult filters, on the other hand, are completely fine with rejecting 99% of people - as long as the remaining 1% is a good match.

You propose that the high IQ bracket is characterized by being unable to refuse answering the question?

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Might as well turn this around - the ritual exists to check whether people do the bullshitstop, whether they have enough common sense to realize they're being taken advantage of, and if not to detect that they are good material for your subculture that's all about being disgusting to normies.

Supposedly Nigerian email scams make sure to purposefully have terrible grammar and spelling and implausible claims. They don't want to waste their time on people with moderate or high amounts of skepticism. Someone so dumb and trusting that they'd reply to such an obvious scam is their target.

The cow question is similar to "have you stopped beating your wife" in that the literal truthful answer of an innocent person would, by implicature, suggest guilt. It's preposterous to describe someone objecting to that as not grasping analogies, logical errors, etc.

"would you rather" questions are not at all the same as questions that smuggle in unsupported assumptions. The cow question doesn't force you to say you enjoy either dead or living cows, it merely asks you to decide what you prefer-- with the goal of getting you to examine what your moral rules and foundational assumptions about the universe are. Not being able to answer the cow question is a red flag in the same way as not being able answer the trolley question. It's entirely reasonable to distrust people who either refuse to analyze their own system of morality and apply it in self-consistent ways or else refuse to describe and stand by their morals for fear of social sanction.

The cow question doesn't force you to say you enjoy either dead or living cows, it merely asks you to decide what you prefer

And the question about beating your wife doesn't ask if you haven't stopped because you are doing it and wish to continue, it just asks if you haven't stopped. Someone who doesn't beat their wife hasn't stopped beating their wife, after all. It's a perfectly truthful answer to say "no, I haven't stopped beating my wife".

But the person asking the question knows very well that by implicature, saying that you haven't stopped means that you are doing it and are continuing, even if literally speaking, if you don't beat your wife you won't be stopping.

Likewise, although the question about cows doesn't literally mean that you enjoy one of the two options, by implicature it does.

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Distrust me then. I refuse to answer those kinds of gross hypothetical questions. They are not asked in good faith.

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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.

The apocrypha are probably another matter. They get wild.

FWIW the Apocrypha usually refers to a specific set of Old Testament books that are accepted by the Catholics as canon but rejected by most Protestants. Books like the Gospel of Thomas etc. tend to be called "Pseudepigrapha".

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".

It is quite the situation that they, despite their enormous fiscal resources, won't or can't hire a normie spokesperson who both states their points and doesn't scare the other normies.

There are literal "knife missile" companies that lack this self-inflicted problem. We might be making better technologies, but a few unpleasant contrarians are both pushing it forward and simultaneously running anti-PR campaigns on their own companies.

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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