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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   26322 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 5, 2026

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Scott Alexander, the guy who hosted the Culture War Thread on his blog slatestarcodex before that landed him in so much heat (from the woke left) that it was moved to reddit under the name /r/theMotte (and from there, subsequently, to themotte.org to preempt a reddit crackdown) comes usually across as a kind and considerate person to me. Charitable interpretations are very much his thing. While he has always engaged in CW topics on occasion, his forays deep into the trenches are rare (and in my impression have become rarer compared to the SSC days).

Apparently, there is a person called Steven Pinker. I have been vaguely aware that there was a book called The Better Angels of Our Nature which was probably authored by someone, but he was not someone I really had on my radar.

From the WP article, he seems solidly Grey Tribe. Believes in a computational theory of mind, Ashkenazi Intelligence Hypothesis, critical of both the woke left (cancellations) and the MAGA right (foreign student restrictions).

The main topic where he disagrees with Scott Alexander is AI x-risk.

Scott has now responded, and his reponse is a bit less than maximum charitable.

I agree that in-person debates are confrontational and bad for truth-seeking. But I didn’t propose a debate in order to seek truth. I proposed it because, under California Penal Code § 415(1), it’s illegal for me to challenge you to a duel.

While Scott is diligent enough with his technical points, it is clear that he is personally hurt by Pinker's decision to ridicule AI x-risk. So his post is also a broadside fired against him. He cites Garfinkel et al 2017 who "proved" that machines will never be larger than humans using common philosophical arguments for AI being harmless.

Scott points out that while Pinker is busy berating the LW crowd for distracting from the more mundane risks of AI, x-risk advocates are willing to work hand in hand with groups with a more practical focus to combat pro-AI PACs like Leading the Future.

On model welfare (which is certainly not the core topic of the x-risk advocates):

Here you are not calling this AI torture “depraved”, you’re calling it depraved to object to it. Your argument, astonishingly, is that since we can’t be certain that AIs feel pain, we must assume that they don’t. In fact, anyone who doesn’t jump on board with this assumption (you intimate) is some sort of evil tech oligarch who wants to genocide humans. [...] I have donated $100 to a model welfare charity just to clean the stain on my soul I got from reading about it.

He accuses Pinker of endorsing the "lowest quality voices", quoting Claire Lehmann:

Thinking AI might be conscious is like thinking that there are real people talking to you from inside the TV, or that there is a tiny band playing music inside the radio.
Fine for 2 year olds to believe, but beyond that, insane.

Or

Geoffrey Hinton is the Nobel Prize winning and Turing Award winning inventor of the modern artificial intelligence paradigm. Lehmann thinks the media should “stop platforming” him [talking about persuasive AI avoiding a shutdown] to devote more time to her, a culture warrior who pivoted to AI two months ago when it got popular.

It ends with Scott seeming seriously willing to duel Pinker:

If you continue to object that debate is a poor method for determining truth, then I suppose literal dueling is the only option left. As an eminent psychologist, I’m sure you’re familiar with Cucina et al (2023), which finds a correlation of .179 - .268 between logical reasoning ability and firearms proficiency - meaning that duels are truth-tracking in exactly the way you worry debates might not be.

Scott has admitted in the comments that this is already the toned-down version of the post he originally wrote. I think that while he held back verbally (nobody get's called a "Vogon spy in a skin suit" this time), he uses his craft well to show his frustration.

For what it's worth, I think that Pinker is correct that Eliezer is in fact over-confident in p(doom|default-ASI). Just like Pinker is when he declares that any fear of doom is ridiculous.

The main difference is that for practical purposes, it does not matter much if your p(doom) is 0.99 or 0.05. Both would be pressing problems whose solution is the most important thing in the world.

Eliezer was bullish on AI capabilities when that was far out of the Overton window, back when the machines could beat humans at chess at most. Steven Pinker was tweeting that "deep learning has probably peaked" in 2019.

This might be giving too much credit to Pinker, but here is Clarke's first law:

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

AI X risk is just this round of global warming catastrophism(we're going to be underwater by 2000 2012 2020[oh wait, that was a different ridiculous hysteria we'd all be better off ignoring]) because seriously, datacenters are fragile and require constant inputs from outside that we can just cut off. Like against Skynet we can take some collateral damage if we've got to. It's not worth worrying about, it's just another made up problem to justify giving ridiculous people more power. In this case, a literal sex cult.

In this case, a literal sex cult

Arguments like these should be left to twitter, unless you want to bring proper evidence for them

what part are you objecting to and what evidence will you accept

would you prefer the arrangement "apocalyptic cult that happens to put an incredible emphasis on certain kinds of sex, but that is not technically the focus of the cult"

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!

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.

Scott agrees with you

I think it really does damage the credibility of a movement with 60 year old voters in Ohio when it's hosting Slutcon and asking questions about sex with dead cows on its application forms. https://x.com/slatestarcodex/status/2102182530191647019

And to push back a bit about rationalists defending everything she does, her "frame control" got solid pushback from big names.

Scott agrees with you

D:

I don't catch his twitter much. I was probably overindexing on the time he told me directly that he didn't care about the people that say poly culture turns them away from EA/rationalism, but that was several years ago now, maybe he's matured a bit on the considerations.

I think he overrates the degree to which anyone outside the social group itself is willing or able to distinguish between Movement EA and rationalism (the XKCD geology comic comes to mind)- hell, the editor in chief of Asterisk says she can't draw a distinction between the two- but overall good post.

Maybe the most interesting part is learning Scott and Oliver consider LessWrong to have more influence than EA. Outside of the Scottsphere I never see people reference it, while I see outsiders reference EA pretty regularly (probably largely influenced by Leah Libresco Sargent, who identifies as EA but is more or less wholly unaffiliated with Mainstream EA). I wonder what class/culture grouping I'm missing that reads LessWrong so much more.

And to push back a bit about rationalists defending everything she does, her "frame control" got solid pushback from big names.

Fair enough, I was specifically thinking of the post-Slutcon circling of the wagons, though that did result in one researcher losing his grant too.

I wonder what class/culture grouping I'm missing that reads LessWrong so much more.

If we talk influence, AI researchers that discuss papers, recruit into companies, that sort of thing. EA grants are impressive, sure, but no match for a16z.

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