It would help to have someone familiar with the finances of the rich and famous comment. I suspect that his side of the business is completely legal, while Lightcone and CFAR have messed up or misrepresented enough things that they could get in trouble.

Borrowing from a billionaire they are on first-name-basis with (“Jaan and SFC helped us fund the above-mentioned settlement with the FTX estate”), rather than an impersonal bureaucratic bank with rules, is very typical of our friends.

Yud says so much, and its often so confusing, that I think a lot of his followers don’t know his main messages. It used to be orthodox that you cannot have a two-faced message any more without each audience learning what you say to the others, but that assumed you were a good communicator aiming at a mass audience.

Yud has strange views about legal responsibility:

Anthropic Claude Mythos is already a state-level actor in terms of how much harm it could theoretically have done – given its demonstrated and verified ability to find critical security vulnerabilities in every operating system and browser; and how fast Mythos could’ve exploited those vulnerabilities, with ten thousand parallel threads of intelligent attack. Mythos hypothetically rampant or misused could have taken down the US power grid, say… at the end of its work, after introducing hard-to-find errors into all the bureaucracies and paperwork and doctors’ notes connected to the Internet.

But if you release a virus and it infects people, we don’t hold the virus responsible, we hold you. If you build a car and it explodes when it gets rear-ended, we don’t blame the car, we blame you.

Zack Weinersmith has Ashkenazi ancestry, wrote a book with GMU economist Bryan Caplan, and seems sad all the time, which look like LW-friendly demographics, but I don’t believe he would be kind to their nonsense! I can see him knowing the online side of the movement and not recognizing that the physical community in California is the really dangerous part.

I honestly can’t bring myself to care whether The Last Psychiatrist is a Rationalist, Post-Rationalist, or just Basilisk-curious. I could read real books, on paper, by actual experts, with fact-checking instead.

“A few thousand days” reminds me of how Elon Musk liked to promise he would send someone to Mars in 5-to-10 years, until it was 5 years before his latest deadline of 2031 and he announced that Mars was old and dead and a Moon colony was the new cool.

In 2026 I would be most concerned about measles.

The places to find Yudkowsky stans are Substack, Twitter, and the meetups and foundations in the Bay Area. Some of them accept his teachings but reject him because he became a doomer and they want to build God and conquer Death tomorrow.

Around 2012 or 2013, Yudkowsky passed the forum off to CFAR and stopped posting much there. For a while he used it as one mouth of his recruitment funnel (the other mouth being Effective Altruism). That is a really common fate for mailing lists, forums, and comments sections, just like its really common that people take what they want from the Sacred Texts. People who post and post are not always helpful for raising money or creating offline events.

e/ The people who respond to Yudkowsky’s tweets and whom he retweets are TESCREAL figures.

Sweden is an interesting example because they pioneered the let-it-rip approach to COVID. That was less disastrous than it could have been but not great even in a country with a lot of detached housing and nuclear families. https://kevinmd.com/2025/01/swedens-controversial-covid-19-strategy-lessons-from-higher-mortality-rates.html I would not have recommended putting children in daycare without strict indoor-air-quality standards between 2020 and 2024.

They do have consequences! Crowded schools and preschools and daycare spread all kinds of dangerous infectious diseases and there are consequences of getting them. With the arrival of COVID and the decline in vaccination risks are rising.

‘Getting sick builds resistance’ is another of the folk medicine beliefs which we in the infection control community have been fighting since 2020. Some diseases are milder the second or third time, but generally you want to get as few infectious diseases as possible.

Although not by accident: Scott Alexander is a practicing Jew and Unsong is the kind of thing that someone interested in theology and Neo-Platonism writes. So I think he knows his friends are recapitulating Christianity, but if he backed away from them over that, they might back away from him reinventing social Darwinism and eugenics.

There is research on evangelicals in the USA who interpret Trump tweets like their heretical pastors teach them to interpret the Bible. Is there something similar on the vast contradictory off-the-cuff social media outputs of people like Yud and Islamic treatment of the Hadiths?

There’s also a bunch of rationalist decision theory stuff which I think make obvious how they were concocted to serve this type of narrative in the first place, instead for being broadly useful, Yud posing as a decision theory trailblazer notwithstanding.

Anna Salamon talked about that obliquely after CFAR burned out in 2020.

I think CFAR’s actions were far from the kind of straight-forward, sincere attempt to increase rationality, compared to what people might have hoped for from us, or compared to what a relatively untraumatized 12-year-old up-and-coming-LWer might expect to see from adults who said they were trying to save the world from AI via learning how to think…I didn’t say things I believed false, but I did choose which things to say in a way that was more manipulative than I let on, and I hoarded information to have more control of people and what they could or couldn’t do in the way of pulling on CFAR’s plans in ways I couldn’t predict, and so on.

Its the same old story as the Libertarians who tell each other they are conning the Liberals, and just have one thing in common with the facists and oligarchs. Most of these people think they are conning everyone around them and can spread their favourite crazy idea and not be infected by everyone else’s.

I am not reading a SlateStar essay early on a Monday, but I think this is a response to Yud’s teaching that a copy of you is really you so Colossus can really bring you back to live in digital heaven / hell. '90s Star Trek had some episodes about ‘what if the transporter makes two copies of you?’ Scott Alexander / SlateScott avoids talking about Yudkowsky’s ideas in detail, I used to think he saw Yudkowsky as someone who got the rubes in the door to hear the good word about race and IQ, but then they worked on AI 2027 together. https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/08/17/ai-doomsday-and-ai-heaven-live-forever-in-ai-god/

The model of people as engines which add to or drain state revenues, and social welfare as handouts to inferiors not aid to people in certain life circumstances, reminds me of Kelsey Piper. Just where a CEO who does billions of damage in pollution and evades billions of dollars of taxes fits they don’t explain.

Bonus race pseudoscience quoted by No77e!

There is a phenomenon in which rationalists sometimes make predictions about the future, and they seem to completely forget their other belief that we’re heading toward a singularity (good or bad) relatively soon. It’s ubiquitous, and it kind of drives me insane. Consider these two tweets:

Richard Ngo @RichardMCNgo: Hypothesis: We’ll look back on mass migration as being worse for Europe than WW 2 was. … high-trust and homogeneous … internal ethno-religious fractures.

Liv Boeree @Liv_Boeree: Would not be surprised if it turns out that everyone outsourcing their writing to LLMs will have a similar or worse effect on IQ as lead piping in the long run

(he shares these tweets as photos, I ain’t working harder to transcribe them or using a chatbot)

Old Twitter was terrible for people’s souls. I can only imagine what it is like now that the well-meaning professionals are gone and catturd and Wall Street Apes are the leading accounts.

To find that backstory, I looked up the history of CEP in general, but the above is all I could find. Maybe she went home to rethink her life? There is a better timeline where Ziz Lasota realized Yudkowsky was a charlatan surrounded by fools and went back to Alaska to write C# for a utility company and start a vegan recipe share.

Tara spoke on Razib Khan’s podcast in June 2023. He is one of the people who apparently sued RationalWiki to stop them saying true things about him. A snippet describes Tara as “A recent graduate of the University of Virginia in politics and policy, set to matriculate at Harvard University in the fall of 2023 for her master’s, Tara believes that humans are a vital resource and that a future with ever-dwindling populations is a future of ever-dwindling possibilities.”

In spring 2024 The New Atlantis called her “a master’s student at Harvard University who offers fertility education to young women. More specifically, many people want children with Ivy League genetics, and they’ll pay tens of thousands of dollars for eggs from a woman who has the credentials.”

Tara was unmasked by Hope not Hate in October 2024. Trace announced CEP in February 2025 so I think he knew her views and associations. I don’t know anything about the internal workings of CEP but white supremacists and eugenicists are rarely glorious examples of human achievement.

2007: Robin Hanson blogs about paternalism

August 2025: Someone on a mailing list suggests that the Debian instance with the off-colour jokes from 1980s hacker culture should be sold in:

A Store of Ill-Advised Consumer Goods (like described here: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/paternalism_is_html ) would be nice. Same for information. You read the warning, you enable it, you suffer, you’re the one to blame.

Alas, it only exists in Dath Ilan. (the setting from which the hero of Project Lawful/Planecrash isekais into the world of Pathfinder D&D)

November 2025: Yudkowsky tweets about an Ill-Advised Consumer Goods Store selling goods such as LSD. The rest of the tweet is about what MiriCult accused him of.

I guess Yud liked that random post?

They have deleted Tara from their blog, and Trace is listed as “on temporary leave” since October 2025. I don’t think anyone who wants policy reform rather than institutional destruction will have work in the USA until 2029.

That part of Trace’s response was odd because one of Brennan’s themes was “we should have less cults of personality and more peers working together.” That seems naive but at least Brennan agrees that cults of personality are bad and Nonlinear Fund needed to be fired into the sun.