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Notes -
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:
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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