Yudkowsky denies the accusations! several thousand words in, and ten years after they were made : sneerclub

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 22 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (3 children)

I haven't looked into the Zizians in a ton of detail even now, among other reasons because I do not think attention should be a reward for crime.

And it doesn't occur to him to look into the Zizians in order to understand how cults keep springing up from the group he is a major thought leader in? Like if it was just one cult, I would sort of understand the desire just to shut ones eyes (but it certainly wouldn't be a truth-seeking desire), but they are like the third cult (or 5th or 6th if we are counting broadly cult-adjacent group) (and this is not counting the entire rationalist project as cult). (For full on religious cults we have: leverage research, and the rationalist-Buddhist cult; for high-demand groups we have: the Vassarites, Dragon Army's group home, and a few other sketchy group living situations (Nonlinear comes to mind)).

Also, have an xcancel link, because screw Elon and some of the comments are calling Eliezer out on stuff: https://xcancel.com/allTheYud/status/1989825897483194583#m

Funny sneer in the replies:

I read the Sequences and all I got was this lousy thread about the glomarization of Eliezer Yudkowsky's BDSM practices

Serious sneer in the replies

this seems like a good time to point folks towards my articles titled "That Time Eliezer Yudkowsky recommended a really creepy sci-fi book to his audience and called it SFW" and "That Time Eliezer Yudkowsky Wrote A Really Creepy Rationalist Sci-fi Story and called it PG-13

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 14 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Convenience links:

https://www.polemics.md/that-time-eliezer-yudkowsky-recommended-a-really-creepy-sci-fi-book-to-his-audience/ (https://awful.systems/post/2972738)

https://www.polemics.md/that-time-eliezer-yudkowsky-wrote-a-rationalist-sci-fi-2/

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 11 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Didnt the zizians also literally protest one of his events and got arrested for that? Or was that a different group they were protesting. Seems weird to not look them up at all. Very 'ideological turing test' failure levels.

Also funny that his logic would mean he doesnt look into Nelson Mandela.

E: also iffy he tosses the animal rights people (partially) under the bus for no reason. EA animal rights will love that.

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 12 points 3 weeks ago

Very ‘ideological turing test’ failure levels.

Yeah, his rational is something something "threats" something something "decision theory", which has the obvious but insane implication that you should actually ignore all protests (even peaceful protestors that meet his lib centrist ideals of what protests ought to be) because that is giving into the protestors "threats" (i.e. minor inconveniences, at least in the case of lib-brained protests) and thus incentivizing them to threaten you in the first place.

he tosses the animal rights people (partially) under the bus for no reason. EA animal rights will love that.

He's been like this a while, basically assuming that obviously animals don't have qualia and obviously you are stupid and don't understand neurology/philosophy if you think otherwise. No, he did not even explain any details of his certainty about this.

[–] ShakingMyHead@awful.systems 4 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Do you mean the retweets or actual replies? Because I'm not seeing any replies to his comment, even in xcancel.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 7 points 3 weeks ago

It's in the quote tweets.

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 5 points 3 weeks ago

I found those quote searching xcancel for Eliezer Yudkowsky

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 21 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Or maybe society would run a prediction market about whether ten years later the 24-year-old would think that it was a terrible terrible idea for them to have microdosed LSD as a kid. If society's rules were that sensible

Wha'the fuuuuuck

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 18 points 3 weeks ago

indefensible: voting for laws
sensible: gambling for laws

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 16 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

It makes total sense if you think markets are magic and thus prediction markets are more magic and also you can decentralize all society into anarcholibertarian resolution methods!

[–] istewart@awful.systems 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

There's maybe still a concise social history to be written of how all this crap congealed together. I'm particularly interested in the overlap between the AI doomers, the ancap libertarian weirdos who wanted to nail down their economics as capital-S Science™, and even the online poker grinders of the 2000s who aspired to become statistical-thinking robots. I hesitate to say any of this is undocumented, because the reams of posts are still out there, but a Michael Lewis-style pop history of it all would be a hoot. I understand Elizabeth Sandifer has it all well-covered from the ideological angle, and Adam Becker's new book looks good too, but having something covering it from the forum/feed-poster angle might end up being the epitaph the movement deserves.

[–] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 7 points 3 weeks ago

A Spider Robinson short story covers "is pederasty always wrong?" I think the topic was popular in American sci fi fandom in the late 20th century, Jerry Pournelle posted about it.

Yud is more comfortable using his position in the community to discourage people from taking LSD than discourage them from screwing much younger people or violating BDSM protocols. He has written many times about how he wanted to be treated as a credentialed adult when he was a precocious teenager, and about the roles he likes to take in BDSM play. He does not seem keen on the idea that a community's norms around high-risk behaviour will attract or repulse people who you really do not want in your community, he is more comfortable with asking "is LSD generally harmful to the individual person who uses it?"

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 19 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Hello Yud this is your lawyer speaking. I am advising you today to keep posting this shit

Dril jokes aside, posting this towards a deathcult who maximize reactions to imagined threats seems like a bad idea. Thankfully I think the zizians are gone as a cult. (I mean arent they in jail)

[–] captainlezbian@lemmy.world 17 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

This is the wildest ride of a tweet I've ever fucking read. Like seriously, I didn't expect a tweet with multiple paragraphs about how he doesn't like lsd or laws against it, to include him not liking age of consent laws but prefers living in a world with them to without them, a casual disclosure of how the underlying opinions behind all that relates to his bdsm practice, all to wind up with the tweet being about how he believes the zizians are wrong about him sleeping with an underage person.

Also he puts rationalist in quotes and asserts its what they call themselves as though he isn't one of the leading members of the ideology.

[–] protectedinfoil@awful.systems 17 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

This from a man who runs an all-ages Discord to discuss his BDSM teacher-student AI-doom philosophy fanfic, including users who have identified themselves as minors

[–] AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space 13 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Christ, it’s nonces all the way down, isn’t it?

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 6 points 3 weeks ago

Guess who gave money to MIRI in 2009

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 15 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Saying that a 30-year-old cannot have sex with a 17-year-old (in CA) or a 16-year-old (in NY) is not a crazy law; it is the sort of "I would like to live in a civilization" law that I prefer to obey.

age of consent quoting aside, why would you make it sound like you only follow this law because you want to live in a society

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 14 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Death Note deleted scene:

Yagami Light: "No you see I couldn't possibly be Kira because if I was I would have replied to your inquiry with `I can neither confirm nor deny that I am Kira`!"

L: "Oh dang that's exactly what Kira wouldn't have not not not said"

Yagami Light: "... which BTW shouldn't be illegal in the first place and also I would give sufficiently needy 14 year olds LSD and this medicine I'm taking fell off the back of a truck."

[–] istewart@awful.systems 7 points 3 weeks ago

Awkwardly reimplementing formal logic through obtuse fan fiction seems to be a core faith practice of these folks, so I think you're onto something here

[–] istewart@awful.systems 14 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

I understand where he probably got the neologism "glomarize" from (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer) but his willingness to beat you in the face with it until you accept it is a big part of what makes his writing style so offputting. And, uh, this level of enthusiasm for specialized jargon continues to fail to overcome the cult allegations.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 11 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

in the shipped club. straight up 'glomarizing it'. and by 'it', haha, well. let's justr say. My peanits.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 8 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Glomarizing is the new squanch

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 5 points 3 weeks ago

I dont smurf any of this.

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 9 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

One of the only reasons I'm hesitant to call Rationalism a cult in its own right is that Yudkowsky and friends always seem to respond to this element of cultiness by saying "oh, let me explain our in-group jargon in exhaustive detail so that you can more or less understand what we're trying to say" rather than "you just need to buy our book and attend some meetings and talk to the guru and wear this robe..."

[–] istewart@awful.systems 13 points 3 weeks ago

I would say that the in-group jargon is more of a retention tactic than an attraction tactic, although it can become that for people who are desperately looking for an ordered view of the world. Certainly I've seen it a lot in recovering Scientologists, expressing how that edifice of jargon, colloquialisms, and redefined words shaped their worldview and how they related to other people. In this case here, if you've been nodding along for a while and want to continue to be one of the cool guys, how could you not glomarize? Peek coolly out from beneath your fedora and neither confirm nor deny?

I will agree that the ratsphere has softer boundaries and is not particularly competently managed as a cult. As you allude to, too, there isn't a clear induction ritual or psychological turning point, just a mass of material that you're supposed to absorb and internalize over a necessarily lengthy stretch of time. Hence the most clearly identifiable cults are splinter groups.

[–] hrrrngh@awful.systems 5 points 3 weeks ago

Fortunately the EA side is a little more on the nose sometimes.

One of my first wakeup calls was they offered to mail me a book for free🚩🚩🚩 (it was from 80,000 hours)

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 8 points 3 weeks ago

He knows that his flunkies will happily parrot his new toy words with no hesitation. To that I say, to all of Yud’s ideas and writing, I bartleby-the-scrivenerize them.

[–] EponymousBosh@awful.systems 2 points 3 weeks ago

I don't see what the problem is. It's a perfectly cromulent word.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 14 points 3 weeks ago (6 children)

And apparently, one of their FOUNDING BELIEFS, is that I had sex with somebody underage (mutually desired sex, according to the Zizians)... and then MIRI, a nonprofit I started, paid money (to a third-party extorter) to hush that up... which payment, according to the Zizians, is in violation of DECISION THEORY... and, therefore, for THAT EXACT REASON (like specifically the decision theory part), everything believed by those normie rationalists who once befriended them is IRRETRIEVABLY TAINTED... and therefore, the whole world is a lie and dishonest... and from this and OTHER PREMISES they recruit people to join their cult.

Yudkowsky is the first person I have ever seen describe this as a load-bearing belief of the Zizians. Offhand, I don't recall the news stories about the murders even mentioning it.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 12 points 3 weeks ago

What’s kinda fun is that Yud prefaces this with basically “i have not personally read up on the zizian texts”, and then follows it up with this stuff. Now, did he make this stuff up himself in a weird ego play, or did he hear it from someone else and decided to hold onto it, also as an ego play?

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 10 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

There is a mention of something that might be what Yudkowsky is on about in this Wired story:

The group had become especially fixated on a particular rumor, namely that the nonprofit MIRI had potentially used donor money to pay off a former staffer. The ex-employee had launched a website accusing MIRI leaders of statutory rape and a coverup. Though the facts were never litigated in a courtroom, MIRI’s president wrote in 2019 that he had checked “some of the most serious allegations” and “found them to be straightforwardly false.” The website’s owner had agreed to retract the claims and take the site down, the president said, under conditions that were confidential. But what angered LaSota and Danielson was as much the idea—in their minds at least—that the nonprofit had succumbed to blackmail as the allegations themselves. In negotiating, they believed, the organization had violated one of its fundamental principles: “timeless decision theory,” a concept developed by MIRI cofounder Eliezer Yudkowsky. (Yudkowsky, who later renamed it “functional decision theory,” declined to comment for this story.)

This article doesn't make it sound so much like a "FOUNDING BELIEF"; lots of weird shit like the brain hemispheres business appears to have come first. But the much more interesting thing is at the end of the story:

One of the last things LaSota seems to have written for public consumption was a comment she left on her own blog in July 2022, one month before she supposedly went overboard in San Francisco Bay. “Statists come threaten me to snitch whatever info I have on their latest missing persons,” she wrote, seemingly referring to deaths by suicide that had already happened among those who’d embraced her ideas. “Did I strike them down in a horrific act of bloody vengeance? Did I drive them to suicide by whistling komm susser tod?”—a German phrase that translates as “come, sweet death.” “Maybe they died in a series of experimental brain surgeries that I performed without anesthetic since that’s against my religion, in an improvised medical facility?”

Below it was pasted a stock photo of two people wearing shirts that read, “I can neither confirm nor deny.”

(Archive link to Ziz's blog)

Hmm. Hm-hmmm.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 7 points 3 weeks ago

The bride at every wedding and the body at every funeral

[–] BioMan@awful.systems 7 points 3 weeks ago

Offhand as someone who read their websites out of morbid fascination just like I read all this stuff out of morbid fascination, it was indeed pretty important to them at least as presented on the internet

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 6 points 3 weeks ago

not a load bearing belief, but one of the things Ziz was specifically pissed off about

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 5 points 3 weeks ago

Also just a very bad cult recruitment pitch.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 14 points 3 weeks ago

I have never experienced semantic satiation immediately after encountering a word for the first time in my life, but the word "glomarize" somehow made it happen.

[–] corbin@awful.systems 13 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

He very much wants you to know that he knows that the Zizians are trans-coded and that he's okay with that, he's cool, he welcomes trans folks into Rationalism, he's totally an ally, etc. How does he phrase that, exactly?

That cult began among, and recruited from, a vulnerable subclass of a class of people who had earlier found tolerance and shelter in what calls itself the 'rationalist' community. I am not explicitly naming that class of people because the vast supermajority of them have not joined murder cults, and what other people do should not be their problem.

I mean, yes in the abstract, but would it really be so hard to say that MIRI supports trans rights? What other people do, when those other people form a majority of a hateful society, is very much a problem for the trans community! So much for status signaling.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 7 points 3 weeks ago

He’s saying the loud part out quiet

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 5 points 3 weeks ago

Ow god im a fool, totally read over what that meant. Thanks, jesus fuck (and to think I mentioned the animal rights people).

[–] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 13 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

If I was the leader of a community which had to expel someone for plying people with narcotics, having sex with them underage, and pushing them into extreme BDSM scenarios, I would simply not post that each of those acts is OK sometimes and its not my business to investigate them.

Bloomberg names the person I am thinking of and mentions the first and third accusations

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 11 points 3 weeks ago

But if hypothetically you ask me whether I know about any couples currently doing this ill-advised thing, where it has not yet blown up, then I do not confirm or deny; it would not be my job to run their lives. This is true even if all they'd face is a lot of community frowning about BDSM common wisdom, rather than legal consequences. It is very hard to get me to butt into two people's lives, if they are both telling me to get out and mind my own business; maybe even to the point of it being an error on my part, because if I was erring there, I sure do know which side I would be erring on.

This reads a lot like an ixnay on the exualassaultsay admonition towards the broader rationalist community.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 11 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Émile Torres asks,

Why did Yudkowsky choose to tweet about this now? Is there an article coming out suggesting that he's had relations with underage women, and he's trying to get ahead of it? Hmm.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Hasn't it lately become increasingly possible that the files of famous financier and MIRI donor J. Epstein will be finally released to public cognizance?

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 7 points 3 weeks ago

Well, he does appear in the files that have been released so far, but only in the most banal way; an entire book by Goertzel and another by Brockman were included somehow.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 11 points 3 weeks ago

My "Will not confirm or deny whether involved in human trafficking" T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 8 points 3 weeks ago

Yudkowsky : "I do not think attention should be a reward for crime" :: Siskind : "I’m not okay with giving [Kathy Forth] martyrdom"

SneerClub