The subtext sounds like “we guarantee your returns, then go public. If we go bankrupt you get the retail investors’ money, if we become the next Google you get your own private island.” All you have to do is trust Sam Altman and (breaks out in hysterical laughter).

Do they mean 17.5% a year? My balanced bond-equity portfolio made 14-15% annual returns over the past three years by the radical method of buying “shares of companies that make profits” and “bonds backed by my local and national government.” (Update: I made about 12% a year because I backed out of American stocks years ago, but the blandest 60% stock, 40% bond index fund in my country returned that 14-15% a year after expenses).

Vassar was trying to argue with Robin Hanson on Twitter back in 2024. Funny how the ‘mainstream’ LW posters and the ‘weird scary’ figures keep in contact!

The Behind the Bastards podcast says that a CFAR workshop or workshops was a big part of Ziz’s story of how she decided to found the Vegan Sith. It drew some connections to rationalist discourse and named the person who taught Effective Altruists that saving the shrimp might be more important than human welfare. Pretty soon that gets into the kind of sexual and emotional abuse that I’m not comfortable sneering about though. Its one thing to say that someone tweets creepy things, another to tell a story about an affair between two people I never met.

I think that many people take the techniques for social and psychological manipulation, and Yudkowsky’s narrative that he is the Chosen One, and ask “could I be the real Messiah?”

Wait, Julia Galef the skeptic married the guy who took Scientology courses and joined their Toastmasters club?

Valentine also asked Where’s the economic incentive for Wokism coming from? in 2022. He was one of the four co-founders of CFAR and left because he had been too close to Brent Dill. Previous discussion here. Someone tried to explain:

The reality is that in the Anglosphere there are lots of progressive people with money to spend on media. You can sell “woke” media to those people, and lots of it. Even more so when there’s controversy and you can get naive lefties to believe paying money to the megacorp to watch a mainstream show is a way to somehow strike back against the mean right-wingers. And to progressive people it doesn’t feel like “being lectured to about politics”, because that’s not what media with a political/values message you agree with feels like. So going woke is 100% a profit-motivated decision.

Rationalists love markets in theory, but not when they give ordinary consumers too much power or when actually making a profit is hard.

Vassar’s Twitter feed is retweets about solar power is awesome, the state should summarily execute murders if they are “drug-addicted parasites,” the UK should attack Iran because Iran attacked the US base on Diego Garcia, and Crémieux Receuil / Jordan Lasker. To me that is clearer and more important than exactly what he said about psychedelics ten years ago!

By Rationalist standards, Aella and her friends are good at asking “what could go wrong and how could we mitigate it?” I think most attendees understand “I might get bruises or herpes” better than most donors to MIRI understand that Yudkowsky might take $600k a year and just tweet some more. I would not trust them on the implementation!

This community has trouble with getting a man and a woman through a meal together before the man starts talking about pedophilia or how programming might not just not be for women. I don’t think most of them are ready for rape parties.

I forgot that Ivy Astrix says that someone called chaosprime who was active in Vibecamp and TPOT (a rationalist-adjacent Twitter community with a summer camp) turned out to be a convicted child molester. Funny how that keeps on happening!

chaosprime ran an “alternative Tantric lifestyle community” which briefly hosted Brent Dill after he was chased out of California.

My first degree was a professional degree, so after college I went out and got a paid job doing that, using the experience I had developed in paid summer jobs. Even when I was young I think I would have said no to Leverage Research.

I think that some 1980s and 1990s fantasy like The Mists of Avalon and a sprawling unfinished series has the “women are magical, men are not” trope. The author of Mists covered up for a pederast. I did not know this idea also comes up in Satanism.

Some forms of sex magic have the idea that men need a female ritual partner to be complete, which echos Scott Aaronson’s idea that he needs a woman to bear his babies to be complete and in a just world he would be the chief rabbi and the peasants and craft workers would give him their prettiest daughter.

Someone called Lennox posted some thoughts on “ideological drift” or Of Marx and Moloch where he seems to say that his time in Effective Altruism was channelling his frustration that he had not pair-bonded yet. Even though he sees many problems with EA, like the gigantic probabilistic models with incredible numbers of assumptions layered on assumptions which can only ever approve of a limited range of interventions, he still seems to think their approach is right.

Someone shared a list of incidents at these parties with me but I don’t have the link handy and I would be uncomfortable posting it anyways. Right now we have the stories by people close to Aella that they are responsible and fun, and the Buddhist poster who says there are drugs and unclear boundaries. I would not recommend that anyone explore risky things with our friends.

Edit, was the sprawling series Wheel of Time?

Edit, Lennox’ post features Bob Jacobs in the comments politely explaining that Effective Altruists don’t understand socialism and are very open to race pseudoscience/HBD and hostile to arguments like “a variety of studies show that cooperatives are more effective than hierarchical corporations, and EA orgs could easily be structured as coops”

Back and forth a few years ago on the SlateStarCodex subredit, roughly:

Scott Alexander: Bay Area rationality is wonderful, we have foundations and group homes and jolly social activities and a Solistice ritual and even “Reciprocity and Propinquity: two different rationalist dating/matchmaking services”

Rando:

I don’t know, I live in a nice community in a different city where people I know have lots of Shabbat dinners, choirs, board game nights, discussions, etc. And zero people I know have joined a cult, and one person I know has developed psychosis, but she had a family history of psychosis, starting having symptoms in early adulthood, and pretty quickly went on antipsychotics and got a lot better.

Is it just that California attracts weird shit and if you put people in California, whatever they’re already doing will get culty?

Alexander: base rates! how do your demographics compare to ours?

Rando:

Probably similar size and age? Nearly everyone I knew has parents who are teachers/lawyers/doctors/therapists/etc, so I guess upper middle class according to that book you wrote about a while ago.

It’s not like everyone’s doing great, lots of people have depression and anxiety and probably smoke more weed than is good for them. Most of those people already had those problems from their adolescence.

But our rates of weird problems, like multiple people with overlapping psychoses tied to some guy, are low.

Has the person in the comments musing about whether women like to quantity things ever watched a mother with small children or a retired woman on a fixed income juggling membership rewards points, coupons, and competing places to shop?

Habryka advised “Try to prevent ‘slums’ forming where people who don’t meet your group’s standard congregate.” That sounds a lot like “try to prevent my new girl hearing what it was like to date my supreme awesomeness Christian Grey.”

An Effective Altruism Forum post accuses Michael Vassar of very rude behaviour to younger women he was attracted to, and of telling a 22 year old woman that it was noble and educational for older men to have sex with girls as young as 12. That is two very common archetypes (the Libertarian Pedophile and the Christian Grey who can only dominate people with very little experience) but not Aella’s sexuality.

Some thoughts.

Paschal Beverly Randolph is a curious character.

Emily Nagoski writes that she still meets undergraduates who think partners should have simultaneous orgasm like Randolph recommends.

Napoleon Hill’s 1937 Think and Grow Rich has a chapter on channeling your sexual energy.

Someone called Mitch Horowitz spoke about sex magic at Hereticon, an event where Aella spoke about her kink events. Aella is definitely woo-curious.

Your take on sex magic reminds me of the Taoist version (I think the Indian version is more about joyfully breaking taboos- I don’t know if Aella knows she is following the Left-Hand Path of Vamachara or if she is a natural like REH’s Salome).

I find that the ways American kinksters talk about sexuality are a mixed bag, but kink practices seem good harm reduction. The one Bay Area kinkster I talked to had never heard of the Rationalists until I asked. I think any reasonably experienced Bay Area kinkster who heard the story would advise a young person to avoid our friends.

I would not underestimate how much one person with money and extroversion can influence Bay Area rationalist culture just by organizing events. Most Rats seem too scared of the outside world to go to a munch or a dance club where they might meet people with sawdust on their clothes and people who work in warehouses, and people who have punched a Nazi. If the sex parties in your community are rape-themed, a lot of men will decide they are interested in rape play (maybe obtaining some Viagra and some drugs that reduce inhibitions). So I think Aella organizes these events because she likes to be ravaged and because it lets her manipulate and corrupt people. TvTropes tells me that Project Lawful has a theme of the evil nation using BDSM to corrupt the Dominant hero.

Nothing that they have shared sexually is uncommon, but getting mild-mannered geeks to effuse about the house parties with a sexual free-for-all and the capture-the-flag games where if you capture the other side’s women you get a sexual forfeit is. Those are unusual ways to work through these desires, and most people into things that risky keep it private.

Lots of people try “you play the student renting in a bad part of town, and I play the sexy burglar” and a few sign up for a porn shoot where they can be ravaged by skilled, athletic people in a controlled environment. A house party where you sign up to be ravaged by any guest who can catch you is unusual even in fetishland and I don’t think many kinksters would recommend combining that with drugs.

There are kinksters who are proud of their 3D printers, cordless drills, and ability to pervert the contents of a hardware store. That just does not seem to be our friends’ thing.

I think the author of the second link is part of MAPLE, a Buddhist Rationalist cult.

There is a post somewhere which compares Michael Vassar to plutonium and says that plutonium is not a wicked element you just don’t want to put it in the water supply or handle it without protective equipment.

The rats have a weird mix of fear of outsiders, and fearlessness towards insiders no matter how dangerous their behaviour. I should hope that nobody feels like they have only one outlet for taboo desires in Berkeley.

Gleiberman’s paper on the longtermist foundations of the Effective Altruism movement is great!

I read a post by someone leaving LessWrong-the-site who said that from now on he would only donate to Aubrey de Grey because obviously we are so close to curing aging. Found it http://lesswrong.com/lw/m81/leaving_lesswrong_for_a_more_rational_life/

An Aella-curious blogger in SoCal has noticed something:

But what I find more interesting than broadly “weird sex” is the specific interest in BDSM, kink and particularly full-contact CNC; a relatively common fantasy in individuals, but one I’ve never seen such widespread community interest in outside the Bay Area.

Kink and power-play are practices of manufactured risk, with CNC clocking at a more intense point on the same spectrum. The idea that many of these people are devoting their 9-5s and beyond to eliminating the ultimate consequence (death), only to go home and collectively play-pretend violence (scaffolded with extensive rules and consent forms) is fascinating, and- to me- makes complete sense.

The rationalist interest in manufacturing risk is the direct byproduct of their commitment to flushing it out.

The blogger attended Aella’s SlutCon. I don’t know if she knows that many of our friends have problems with consent as most of us understand it (their understanding is more “if they are old enough to sign the contract, and they sign, that is on them”).