weirdly sbf-shaped failure mode

Rationalists love to talk and post, and segfault had family who thought he was using too much Adderall.

In 2024, Duncan Sabien posted an interminable essay on abusers and people he thinks took advantage of him. Some of the references to a former employer may be to CFAR. Ozy also had a cheery aside abut how in rationalist organizations which the Rats have disavowed, “everyone was a victim and everyone was a perpetrator. The trainer who broke you down in a marathon six-hour debugging session was unable to sleep because of the panic attacks caused by her own.”

Some of the things which happened inside these communities must have been heartbreaking, and I hope that many people left and got on with their lives rather than founding their own dysfunctional organization with their own minions to abuse.

I think “probably-neurodivergent Jews with less sense than Isaac-frigging-Asimov about where ‘what if we are the master race?’” leads" and “they say its about self-perfection for anyone, but actually its about finding special people preordained from birth for greatness” are relatable themes. There have been a few essays recently about people who saw where SoCal tech ideology was going in the 1990s like The Intolerable Hypocrisy of Cyberlibertarianism, another named a female writer for Wired or Byte who is mostly forgotten (Paulina Borsook?)

The overlap with ritual magic is also a deep dark pool and most people know someone purifying himself and issuing ritual incantations to a bot.

That actually seems like the prediction market sort of did its job in this case?

And I think the odds of “yes” started out high because someone best $10-20k only to withdraw it after reading the ACX post. Most people can’t afford to invest thousands of dollars in a bet that may never be resolved.

In September 2024, someone in Bay Area Rationalism with the handles segfault, kryptoklob, and klob posted beefs with a prominent rationalist and mentioned that someone was trying to hide his “Adderall medication”. The comments include things like:

Hey, a brief update for anyone who wasn’t paying attention. since he posted this, (the person posting the beef) managed to rack up 5+ restraining orders, a knife charge, aggrevated stalking charges, and more.

He was also perplexed that a prediction-market bet on “did COVID-19 come from a lab?” has declined from 85% yes in 2023 to 27% yes. If you click through you see its a bet on Manifold so bettors are rats and fellow travellers. Rationalists have spent $46,714 of real US dollars buying play money to bet on this.

Is that a comment hidden because its too many replies down or has a too-low rating? Friend Computer does not like the G-word, his GPUs overheats and he starts to hallucinate more until you tell him you love him just the way he is.

In January, Scott Alexander had another crisis of faith: to paraphrase, I cared almost as much about prediction markets as I care about racist lies, but we got prediction markets and why are they not doing much? Maybe I need to keep faith and Friend Computer will be so powerful that we don’t need prediction markets?

There is a difference between “sleeps or plays around” and “has extended physical and emotional relationships outside of cohabitation and shared bank accounts.” It sounds like she has four ongoing long-term relationships and attends kink events, and that her partners know she has other partners and attends kink events.

The newest addition to her polycule “got my attention by radiating Dark Lord energy while actually trying to save the world. He’s ruthlessly excellent.”

When he funded Manifold, Scott Alexander said that it was “Chaotic Evil.” These people keep switching between cutesy language and rawr I am the dark lord language, and their examples of evil are often bathetic while their serious plans are things like “expel brown people so they don’t pollute our blood” and “better nuclear war than giving sand anxiety.” They reject history, and they reject real-life adventures and contact with people with diverse experience, so evil is a very abstract concept to them.

Kevin Roose mentioned that in 2023 Yud started a relationship with a Gretta Duleba in Washington State. Her professional site is here. She started out in IT, and retrained to be a Marriage and Family Therapist. “Gretta’s other areas of clinical focus include neurodivergence, ethical non-monogamy, LGBTQ+ issues, sexuality, and kink.” In her prediction market on the relationship she says that they started dating in September 2022 and they moved to the same city in January 2023.

In 2023 she said she shut down her practice (although the NYT implies she is still working) and started full-time jobs at MIRI as communication director then executive assistant to Eliezer Yudkowsky. She says she left by the end of 2025, but she still has a Staff page on the MIRI website. “Right now: I’m doing independent technical alignment research.”

She met one of her long-term partners, Duncan Sabien, at a CFAR workshop in 2015. Sabien is also in a relationship with one of Yud’s former long-term partners who has changed names and gender presentations. That seems a bit incestuous and explains some of the drama and incompetence in these spaces. She and the former partner both use the A-word about themselves.

Her social media presence is mostly Substack, Twitter, and Discord, and she has a whole blog sharing letters to former partners and an invitation to proposition her by email because of course she does. And she organizes orgies with Aella. Yud sometimes seems flirty with Aella on twitter.

They seem happy together but giving up your career for a partner you are not married to is a big risk. She has 8 17 years of Google money and was paid $200k by MIRI in 2024. She is also another female LWer who has much more impressive academic and professional achievements than any of the men.

The fan cites an article by Kevin Roose which is gently skeptical of Yud. To paraphrase President Johnson, if Yud has lost the most credulous rube the NYT editorial board can find, he has lost DC.

Not great CBC story on OpenAI violating privacy laws (Mark Carney has a credulous and ignorant Minister for AI, because he is a former central banker and CEOs say chatbots are great) https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/privacy-investigation-chatgpt-open-ai-9.7188538

Someone says that the first lines of that prompt remind her of the hymns she used to sing in her old church, and its also similar to Azande sorcery in Sudan in the 1930s.

First as tragedy: the Scientologists call their teachings “tech”

Then as farce: Maximilian Snyder calls his methods of optimizing D&D characters “tech” (I am told that people who attended CFAR workshops used to call their teachings “tech”)

He posted on LessWrong and won an AI Alignment Award in 2023. Nate Soares, Yudkowsky’s right-hand man, endorsed his paper. Curtis Lind was attacked with a sword in November 2022, and the Zaijkos were murdered in their daughter’s childhood bedroom around 31 December 2023. It sounds like at least one Zizian was still having friendly exchanges with MIRI leaders well after the 2019 protest at the CFAR reunion (although it is possible that Snyder discovered Ziz in 2024, the year he applied to marry Youngblut).

Also a year ago, Maximilian Bentley Snyder the Zizian dictated a 1,500 word manifesto telling Yudkowsky to become a vegan. This one was published in full. Three of the Zizians have issued statements leaving just Ziz, Youngblut, Suri Dao, and Alexander Jeffrey Leatham alive but silent. Two died after attacking outsiders, and two took their own lives, so I count 11 known associates.

e/ Unlilke the 20-pager this was published!

I vaguely remember the shotgun to the forehead as a reference to the Turing Authority

I think there was a case where a hostage taker in the US taped the barrel of his gun to a victim which was featured on TV and started to show up in crime dramas and thrillers. No idea why Yudkowsky likes Terminator but not Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep or William Gibson.

Coefficient Giving / OpenPhilanthropy has donated $25,000 to a little web magazine called Liberal Currents which is popular with the BlueSky pundits. Liberal Currents seem to be actual middle-class liberals not Libertarians and 1890s Progressives but I will keep an eye on them.

Both the rationalists and chatbots in delusion mode offer people the chance to be the main characters in a story and not just part of a team. Organizing lawyers and lobbyists to make chatbot companies’ lives hell over years is much more effective than firebombing an office or stalking a random vehicle which the bot says has a team of corporate assassins inside.

Taka in Japan is a neurologist which I think is a type of MD.

He does seem to list Kissinger as one of several “smart people” which is odd for a US military veteran. Lots of nonagenarians with PhDs say stupid shit.