Friendly reminder that topics like sexual abuse are serious. So the usual shitposty style of sneerclub isn’t appropriate here. (Not accusing anyone of anything, just want to put this out before anyone is tempted.)

It is really awful reading writing by someone who’s been damaged and screwed over by the Bay Area rationalist community, but I am not going to source my sneers from someone who says this:

https://i.imgur.com/Hx16P4x.jpg

That page is so long and ridiculous that there’s no way to sum it up, but I want to point out one section:

MIRICFAR’s location in the Bay area, combined with the false community belief cultivated by these organizations that they are the leading/only orgs taking heroic responsibility for the hopes and dreams of sentient life across the world and time, results in:

the people who answer Eliezer’s phoenix call moving to the Bay area, and their lives falling apart

the people who move to the Bay either having to get a toxic job at a tech company that consumes most of their time in order to pay elevated rent, or burn through their resources and decay into worse and worse living conditions

For a while it could be said that even if the rationality community was very dumb, it had created a place where socially awkward people could make friends and find a home and ultimately be happier. That may have been true for some of the original bloggers and their friends, but it’s very much not true for the majority of the people in the community. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of vulnerable people who have been drawn in and had their lives overturned in service of this stupid group, all because of Yud, who just gets to sit around, rake in money, and ignore all of the consequences.

The rationalists continue to demonstrate their idiocy, over and over again, by believing they can invent and run nonprofits, research institutes, self-help groups, start-up businesses, social communities, and sexual relationships from scratch based on rationalist logic, completely ignoring millions of instances of those things already existing in the entire rest of the world, because every other organization is not run by Rationalists and their experiences are therefore useless. This causes all of their ventures, with zero exceptions, to become hotbeds of drama and abuse while they fail at all of their stated goals (except for making money for Yud).

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What a strange rabbithole. All of the bizarre jargon (beyond the typical rationalist stuff) makes a lot of this incomprehensible, and then further reading shows that the writer of the blog is part of some bizarre cult led by somebody named Ziz that is a schizophrenic version of rationalism taken to bizarre extremes. Does anybody here know more about this?

I feel like I’m losing 1d6 sanity points with every page of… whatever this is that I’m reading. Every link I follow is 1d10 extra on top of that.

I should probably stop, but… I can’t?

Got to love how these cultists, even when they split off and accuse the main cult of pedophilia^*, still believe that the main cult is

one of the communities most capable of being aligned with saving the world from x-risks and g-risks.

^* which wouldn’t be surprising, a cult that tries to recruit young people with harry potter fanfic, is bound to go there. But you can’t find them guilty based on what a splinter crazy group of true believers say, without physical evidence or actual testimony, so it will probably take a while until they get properly caught.

edit: It’s like those split-off scientologists who still do the e-meters and thetans.

I have seen many others’ living conditions decay to near-homelessness. Even the most functional group houses I’ve visited are overpacked with people in tiny spaces (often multiple people to a room, sometimes “rooms” made from putting curtains in what were designed as common areas) and filled with clutter. Other group houses I’ve visited look like homeless camps.

OMG what? Is this real? Also, is this unique to rationalists, or a feature of group houses in the area in general? Like, I knew housing in the US is a fuck, but damn.

NXIVM, huh?

Not a bad comparison. A friend of mine told me that it all reminded her of the stories about Bohemian Grove, too.

Maybe aligning yourself with trying to save the world via conceptual means just automatically turns you into a terrible person with the appearance of a morally and philosophically unassailable one?

Note that this post was published as early as 2020/04/24, judging from the comments. That wasn’t clear to me from the thread title.

Before the reunion, Emma had recently gotten out of a many months long abusive living situation with Alice Monday, where Alice had among other things been weekly beating Emma with a stick

What? Just what?

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As much as the Rationalist community might be a cult, this post is pretty insane and without stronger evidence I would consider it potentially libelous.

OP, can you summarize the linked page in a few paragraphs? I am extremely interested in this topic, but it’s very difficult to understand the allegations without a seeming mountain of context.

Anna participated in a coverup of MIRI paying out to blackmail using donor funds over allegations of statutory rape.

I have no idea what this means, but it sounds bad I guess?

This reminds me of #GameB which is a twitter postrat cult which wants to buy houses for its group

Just pointing out that one of the people heavily quoted in this blog (Ziz, who was also mistreated/exploited) has been sneered at in the past: “What the hell are they smoking Vol. 1011.”

I understand the temptation to punch-down at people with off-the-wall takes but I think there are some lines that shouldn’t be crossed

What I document here is evidence of Anna Salamon, CFAR, LW, MIRI, and many individuals in those organizations and the community digging themselves deep into a culture built on defense of lies and cancerous optimization, covering up both crimes and ordinary bigotry, and thereby destroying nearly all of the value of one of the communities most capable of being aligned with saving the world from x-risks and g-risks. Among other things, this demonstrates that MIRI is not an organization anyone should trust to deliver a sentient-life-compatible utility function to the future light cone of this set of timelines

I am unable to understand it. Like my brain is physically incapable of parsing the intent in these sentences

This is a mix of horrifying, fucked up allegations, and weird Rationalist jargon that is honestly super hard to parse, and I really just… can’t make myself read all of it.

Everything on that site is highly suspect. I wish the author(s) well and clarity of mind in the future.

This author is weird and certainly wrong about many things, but spiritual opposition to AI is perfectly rational for a human being.

I’d like more information on the connection between MIRI and Epstein.