> I have always wondered how someone who clearly does not know anything about math (i.e. Yudkowsky) has been able to bamboozle some people who are experts in math by talking incorrectly about math. I think there's actually a good answer to this that's valuable, because it also describes so many other charlatans out there: - you speak in lofty generalities. Nobody can pin you down for inaccuracies if you're impossibly vague all of the time. - you invent new jargon even though the ideas have existing names (see: "human biodiversity" instead of "scientific racism") - this is useful to help you sound sophisticated, avoid triggering a negative reaction from people who are *actually* familiar with the idea, *and* laundering long-debunked ideas back into the discussion. For the naive listener the presence of many Big Words They Don't Understand further sells the image of being a genius-beyond-understanding. These two qualities basically describe all bullshitters. Once you're onto these two patterns bullshitters of all stripes are awfully easy to pick out. It's also the best way to pin down a bullshitter - be relentless in asking them to be specific. Their ideas are almost never well-developed enough to survive a deep dive.

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> i had a hard time remembering what things i needed to hold onto, like knowing it was bad to pee myself Is this a common thing? People soiling themselves on acid? > the reason this whole fucking thing exists is that yud tried to talk to people about AI and they disagreed with him and he concluded they were insane and needed to learn how to think better You know that was a good observation. > the whole concept of an "infohazard" comes from lesswrong as far as i know. Blatantly ahistorical. See lovecraft and one of the earlier basilisk stories for example : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLIT_(short_story)

I only knew about him from his answers on math stack exchange. I don't know about a fallout, but he's describing his cult-like involvement in Rationalist circles. The thread is interesting to me as a good, 1st person account of how someone smart in one area, math, and not so smart in other ways, could get really wrapped up in the Yud/AI-doom cult. He gets to that part further down in the thread: https://twitter.com/QiaochuYuan/status/1542766976887447553?s=20

It should be illegal for him to share his opinions

Yeah. I'm glad he's doing the work and is getting there, but I did take some of what he says with a grain of salt. I'm a bit similar to him myself (used to be a "gifted math kid", have always searched for meaning) and fell into Effective Altruism / rationalism when I started university... And then as soon as I left that community fell into radical anarcho-veganism, believing that deconstructing social norms would "solve everything". It's quite strange to look back on now, but it took me a long time to accept that maybe there isn't "an answer" to life's problems because unlike math... life was not designed to be perfect. As much as I believe there's a religiousness to rationalist communities... this isn't Jonestown. After leaving, I did feel like I'd lacked autonomy and I guess that makes sense, because the purpose of these communities is to decide "how should you live your life?", but realistically there are social hierarchies and so you can end up being told by others how to live your life rather than deciding for yourself. And you can assess your self worth by these external metrics which cuts away at the self esteem. But an important part of moving on has been realising: **no one held a gun to my head**. Sure, there was mild-to-moderate social pressure against disagreeing "too much". There was an in-group/out-group dynamic in that community. They were evangelical, and leaving was challenging. But there was no threat to my safety. They weren't "brainwashing" me. They didn't encourage me to cut off my friends+family. My participation had been entirely voluntary. Something I realised too is that some of the extremism had come *from me.* No one *told* me to see everyone in my personal life as potential converts I could bring on board. No one said "when you moderate this discussion group, make it look neutral but actually give more air time to the people who agree with EA". That was all on me. Maybe certain aspects of the ideology encouraged those tendencies, but I was still an adult acting autonomously. The guy who wrote this thread was with a different group in a different place to me, but I guess something nagged at me a bit. There's no shame in having certain thinking styles or psychological traits that lend towards radicalisation/extremism, but it's about taking responsibility to avoid it repeating. At the end of the day, every single person on earth will get addicted to heroin if they take it enough times, but *very few* people would get hooked on LessWrong let alone form extreme beliefs surrounding it. I genuinely hope the poster is okay. I just suspect there may be some additional factors and it's not *all* coming from Eliezer Yudkowsky.

I think one unifying feature of rationalists is a crippling inability to understand their own emotions, and a corresponding inability to connect with other people in a normal way. It's hard to see women as people when you haven't quite figured out how to see people as people.

I'd maybe put forward an alternative explanation to some others here of... narcissism? I don't exclusively mean NPD. I mean narcissism as a natural human tendency. A lot of "gifted kids" grow up getting told that they're going to save the world, that they provide hope for the future, that they are "special" or "chosen" in some way. And so their sense of self can form around this unrealistic image, and when they get out there into the real world they have to cope with this. That unrealistic image gets undermined and they might be left with nothing or something unstable in its place. People high in narcissism typically have an unstable sense of self, and so they look to the reactions of others to regulate their self image. This can lead to manipulative behaviour (to try and root out positive reactions). It can also lead to lashing out at negative ones. And generally speaking, any type of rejection can be really hard to tolerate because it's a negative input to their self image and there is little-to-no inner self esteem to counter that. It'd make sense to me that high-in-narcissism "former gifted kids" are attracted to rationalist communities, because it provides them with the fantasy of living out their "gifted kid" dreams. They are here to save the world, with their big brains... all of the love and attention they received as children that soothed them, comforted them, and was their source of resilience was true after all... phew!! I think said people, who have narcissistic / low-self-esteem tendencies, might also be sensitive to romantic rejection just because of general rejection sensitivity. Source: I'm definitely not talking about myself here

He has a story on his substack, a psuedo Borges piece, not good, but it is rather telling about his feelings towards women. He gives me the creeps. Seems like one of those guys who at once places women on a pedestal and at the same time dispises them for having such a hold over him. He never stopped to see women simply as fellow human beings. They were always objects of desire or despair.