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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15527 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 5, 2026

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In this case, a literal sex cult.

I'll list objections to this statement:

  • that there are sufficient conditions around people involved in x-risk to describe it as a cult
  • that the same people involved in the above cult are also involved in a sexual cult of some kind
  • that these 2 groups significantly overlap and that these are the majority or at least plurality of people interested in x-risk
  • that any of the proposals around x-risk involve giving these people specifically more power.
  • assuming all of the above, demonstrate what relevance there is to their power seeking and them being in a sexual cult. For example, will it involve them achieving more sexual goals?

Any form of evidence is fine

Any form of evidence is fine

I don't think the below constitutes evidence that will satisfy you, but thank you for being specific, and hopefully the below provides a jumping-off point for anyone else that wants to try to draw all the connections.

I think "sex cult" is a convenient but somewhat exaggerated shorthand for the actual situation.

sufficient conditions around people involved in x-risk to describe it as a cult

Zizians were motivated in part by x-risk (and huge amounts of mental illness). Confirmed cult, but also fringe and defunct.

One catch to providing evidence is that there isn't one cult, there's more like half a dozen with varying degrees of evidence, intensity, and overlap.

these are the majority or at least plurality of people interested in x-risk

I strongly disagree that the majority or even plurality matters, because it's hierarchical and it's the small tight-knit social sphere at or near the top, that are friends/siblings/housemates/non-monogamous partners/polite ex-partners/orgy attendees with each other and with the people they want to regulate their industry.

Probably no more than 100 people total with various overlapping relationships because it's such a small yet important field, and certain people have substantially outsized influence therein.

any of the proposals around x-risk involve giving these people specifically more power.

That is inherently to the race dynamic that Anthropic pushes, that getting to AGI first means you set the morality of the future.

For example, will it involve them achieving more sexual goals?

Aella is the keystone of the sex accusations and complicating factor here, depending how charitably (or not) one wants to take her interactions with the field, with her likely-joking-but-hmm offers to provide reverse gangbangs as a reward for any researchers leaving top AI companies, doing that infamous couch photo with Yud and other AI researchers/whatever you want to call them, etc. I think she is ultimately net-negative for the rationalists, and their interest in circling the wagons when she gets critiqued is what causes people to say EAs/rats consider the weird sex stuff more important than AI safety.

Borrowing from Ian Duncan, important links in the original not reproduced here:

One of the most well-known, wish you could scrub your brain with soap incidents was a gangbang she organized for her birthday. In a sense, it was a ritual for the rationalist community: weeks of screening, an application process, a guest list vetted for doctrinal compliance, a published post-event analysis with a flowchart that went viral, outlining statistics about who came in who, and so forth. The gangbang came with a doctrinal test: adherents of “effective accelerationism,” the faction that wants AI development to go faster, were screened out, because of her views on AI risk. Even the orgy had an AI-governance position. This further reinforces, I think, the cultlike control aspect of this social group. Believe in the right things, and maybe you get to have sex with the community porn star. Supposedly, a number of startup founders recognized each other there and commented on their surprise at seeing each other. Small world indeed.

emphasis mine because lol

And in 2026 she entered the Yudkowsky’s clergy more directly, launching Plz Don’t Kill Us, a Berkeley residency that pays creators to produce viral AI-doom content, with Grimes attached as a mentor.

Plzdontkillus is co-run with Ronnie Fernandez, who is the ex-husband of Holly Elmore, president of Pause AI US. It was the application for this camp that had the infamous Cow Question, to select for a certain kind of person willing to answer obscene and gross hypotheticals. Further complications involving Aella would mean delving into SlutCon and RedMeansNo discourse, which I don't really have the time for currently. Continuing from Ian-

The professional overlap is less funny than the guest list. The New Yorker has mapped the romantic network at the top of the field: AI-forecasting researcher Katja Grace co-founded AI Impacts with her then-boyfriend Paul Christiano, a former OpenAI alignment lead, and later dated Alexander. Christiano is connected by friendship and past romance to Holden Karnofsky, the philanthropist whose Open Philanthropy steered hundreds of millions into AI safety, and Karnofsky married Daniela Amodei, co-founder and president of Anthropic. No wrongdoing necessarily follows from any of that, but it does raise significant questions around how AI safety concerns are in fact being handled or promoted with so many industry movers and shakers are entangled to this degree.

Daniela being, of course, the more famous Dario's sister. And this is only a fraction of the interconnections!

Zizians were motivated in part by x-risk (and huge amounts of mental illness). Confirmed cult, but also fringe and defunct.

Indeed, so I'm not sure this really proves anything except that some crazy people were also rats/safetyists/etc.

You are correct that there are multiple overlapping groups here - as I just mentioned - and each one could be a cult, and it's difficult to demonstrate that for each individual group. Rationalists, AI safetyists, Effective altruists, and probably more offshoots from those groups, and people who may be members of all, some, or none of those.

But if we go back to the original point, hydro talked of a "Literal sex cult". Unless I'm mistaken, I'm going to take that to mean people who attend Aella's Slutcon and similar events. Now I'm extremely skeptical that going to some events run by a prostitute makes you part of a cult, but let's put that aside and assume it is a cult for now.

Now, how many people who fit the above are also AI safetyists or involved in x-risk somehow? I very much doubt it is even a small minority.

But you do say

I strongly disagree that the majority or even plurality matters

Probably no more than 100 people total with various overlapping relationships because it's such a small yet important field.

I don't think I fully agree with this point either, but I'll grant it for now. Who are the key people in this field?

Is it Yudkowsky, MIRI, and the many related safety organisations? Does the UK's AISI count?

Is it the labs? Is it specific labs, like only Anthropic and OpenAI but not Google or X? Is it specific people at specific labs?

I might accept that a good chunk of the MIRI crowd could also be attendees of SlutCon, although that would be an assumption. But AI safety organisations are now so widespread that it surely isn't true for the majority of them. And it definitely isn't true for the major labs, even if you limit it to just some people.

The latter sentence is relevant, as you then say

That is inherently to the race dynamic that Anthropic pushes

Which gets straight to the argument that pretty much all the E/accs, Open weights people, AI skeptics, and others use: that AI safety is an excuse for regulatory capture by Anthropic/Amodei/OpenAI/Altman. Not MIRI or any of those groups. The big labs and the CEOs and the investors. And are any of these people attendees at Slutcon?

I would accept the argument that some proposals specifically name METR as a key player, and METR may have Slutcon people, and therefore it is still fair to say that a sex cult to using AI safety to gather power. But it is a very stupid argument because

a) the proposals would basically give METR people a small sinecure, nothing really beyond their existing positions in the AI industry

b) there are a ton of proposals that have nothing to do with METR

and

c) I would wager that 99% of people interested in AI safety would gladly throw METR to the wolves in order to get any of the above proposals implemented.

Everything after this is basically Ian Duncan stating that there is a weird prostitute who has ingratiated herself with a number of AI people, and because a lot of AI people know other AI people, therefore aella knows them. But really what both Duncan and hydro are trying to do is state "Here is this low status person who associates with this other group. This group must therefore be wrong and low status!"

Given that this argument has appeared here on the motte, I think you would have to grant your position that aella is a net-negative for AI safety and rationalists, as there are clearly a lot of people willing to be taken in by such drivel. But we should at least recognize that it is drivel

"Here is this low status person who associates with this other group. This group must therefore be wrong and low status!"

Aella does not seem to be low-status within the group, since any rationalist with a recognizable name will circle the wagons to defend her and everything she does.

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