I also don’t understand why he objects to that story given that it gets people talking about him as weird but able to get what he wants? But the claim that he dated women at MIRI and wanted them to provide free labour attacks the narrative that MIRI is nothing like Leverage Research or the Zizians.

Missionary voice Have you tried Mastodon? That is where you find people like DeadSimpleTech and Baldur Bjarnason who think that corporate social media was always messed up and current web-development practices are a joke.

TvTropes says that the Yudkowsky-insert protagonist of Project Lawful/Planecrash! is driven by desire to have 144 children (and prove his society wrong for not paying him to have 144) which sounds like Scott Aaaronson? Did they know each other in those days?

I am glad that all I knew about Yud in 2022 was “wrote a Harry Potter fanfic that I did not finish, and runs a website where people pretend to be experts.”

He does not admit “I was wrong” very often does he? And if I were a kinky polyamorist, I would be much quicker to respond to “have you dated staff at the organization that funds your life?” than “did you play a specific scene?”

Planecrash seems to be the 1.8 million word Pathfinder fic with tumblr’s UnitOfCaring

And how the eff does someone claim to love Pterry in his dating profile but see people as things? Greg Egan is basilisk-unfriendly too.

From RationalWiki: Yud claims that the only women he gave orgasms for completing math homework was his future wife. If he ever denied dating / playing with people from his foundation or making people who wanted to play with him fill out an IQ test I can’t find it.

I think that is why he trains his followers to believe that science is corrupt and incompetent, its institutions and customs are irrelevant, and a gifted child can easily outdo the whole scientific community. He is on board with the eugenics so the EAs and LessWrongers with educations and achievements can tell themselves “at least he is good for the cause.” And his playmates have a fetish that needs filling.

A clinical psychologist in a EU country looked at Lorien Psychology and said that the writing looked like typical American biomedical psychiatry with some self-promotion. In the UK and EU you can find psychiatrists who say things like “psychiatric diagnoses are scientifically worthless as tools to identify discrete mental health disorders,” I think Scott Alexander blogged about Thomas Szasz at some point https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190708131152.htm

I am not comfortable exploring the question “did he violate professional ethics?” further because that seems like an unhealthy parasocial relationship like cyberstalking or swatting. I never met him or anyone who met him. More shoeleather reporting on these communities would help!

Even Ozy talked about someone converting zir to eugenics around the time that zi was moving from feminist blogging to LessWrong (although zi no longer endorsed eugenics two years later) https://web.archive.org/web/20141127052857/http://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2014/10/31/an-argument-against-eugenics-that-doesnt-involve-calling-anyone-a-nazi/

I wish they had not literally called their ideology rationality ™ because I can’t call it that with a straight face, but eighteenth-century rationalists would go through them like a galleon through a fleet of canoes. I don’t know if teenaged-Yud was already a Libertarian or if he reinvented Objectivism from first principles. Political movements on the American right also rely on the same rhetorical move: “we are for freedom! How could anyone be against freedom?”

The commentator who thinks that USD 120k / year is a poor income for someone with a PhD makes me sad. That is what you earn if you become a professor of physics at a research university or get a good postdoc, but she aged out of all of those jobs and was stuck on poorly paid short-term contracts. There are lots of well-paid things that someone with a PhD in physics can do if she is willing to network and work for it, but she chose “rogue intellectual.”

A German term to look up is WissZeitVG but many academic jobs in many countries are only offered to people no more than x years after receiving their PhD (yep, this discriminates against women and the disabled and those with sick spouses or parents).

AFAIK the USA is the only country where programmers make very high wages compared to other college-educated people in a profession anyone can enter. Its a myth that so-called STEM majors earn much more than others, although people with a professional degree often launch their careers quicker than people without (but if you really want to launch your career quickly, learn a trade or work in an extractive industry somewhere remote). So I think for a long time programmers in the USA made peace with FAANG because they got a share of the booty.

Piper’s self-described many unpopular beliefs that the rest of society considers loathsome

If Piper ever starts to publish essays on what goals and policy positions she thinks make her or SlateScott “sincere centre-leftists” they are going to be a trip. Just the explanation why she feels more comfortable saying what she believes under Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Big Balls than under Biden’s centrist technocrats would require a few doses of my favourite substance to get through.

Edit: I would also love to hear “so you agree that the talking head on Fox News who suggested executing the homeless is despicable, what about your friend Scott Alexander proposing to sterilize the poor and substance users before they receive help?”

When you are running a con like crypto or chatbot companies, it helps to know someone who is utterly naive and can’t stop talking about whatever line you feed him. If this were the middle ages Kevin Roose would have an excellent collection of pigges bones and scraps of linen that the nice friar promised were relics of St Margaret of Antioch.

unethical

His post on a woman in the EA/LW world who took her own life after saying she had been sexually harassed is https://archive.is/I85mC and there are discussions on Old! SneerClub here and there. I am not comfortable going into this without training in how to talk about self-harm and first-hand knowledge but yeesh.

The Tumblr he cites belongs to Kelsey Piper, a self-identified journalist and meatspace friend who receives donations from people and orgs in the Effective Altruism world and keeps reporting on how EA ideas and people are great.

Good point that SlateScott commented on accusations of abuse in rationalist and adjacent organizations. Would the Goldwater Rule have applied? At least there has been some reporting on those accusations but I don’t know if it was on the ground or just phoning and emailing people from NYC, Chicago, or LA.

Someone with biochem, pharmacy, or psychology training could comment on some things SlateScott has written.

So Hanson is dissing one of the few movements that supports his pet contrarian policy? After the Defence Department lost interest the only people who like prediction markets seem to be LessWrongers / EAs / tech libertarians / crypto bros / worshippers of Friend Computer.

The Manifest networking event in Berkeley combines prediction markets, race cranks, EA, and LessWrong. Scott Alexander likes prediction markets, does Yud?

Amanda Marcotte remembers that but I don’t see examples in her link https://www.salon.com/2025/02/24/what-elon-musks-on-workers-owes-to-gamergate/ It looks like the Wikipedia page was written by someone who noticed the slur on Twitter in 2018 or later, and its focused on the meme graphic not the slur “you are just a mindless machine that exists for my pleasure or as an obstacle to overcome.” I think Marcotte served in the Internet Feminism Wars on the feminist side.

The reporting on Gamergate that I can find focuses on the death threats and doxing not insults but “NPC” sounds like the kind of slur that the anti-feminists would have used.

We have some threads of Vaccinations in Book/Article Form which try to share good pop science and textbooks without the cult shit and Dunning-Kruger. People who think they know everything and are mysteriously underemployed tend to have the most time to post though.

When it started in ’06, this blog was near the center of the origin of a “rationalist” movement, wherein idealistic youths tried to adapt rational styles and methods. While these habits did often impress, and bond this community together, they alas came to trust that their leaders had in fact achieved unusual rationality, and on that basis embraced many contrarian but not especially rational conclusions of those leaders. - Robin Hanson, 2025

I hear that even though Yud started blogging on his site, and even though George Mason University type economics is trendy with EA and LessWrong, Hanson never identified himself with EA or LessWrong as movements. So this is like Gabriele D’Annunzio insisting he is a nationalist not a fascist, not Nicholas Taleb denouncing phrenology.