Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid. ...
A 2025 UBC master's thesis on our friends' ideas and their literary antecedents https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0449985 The supervisor was born around the time that Elron Hubbard, Jack Parsons, RAH, and their wives and lovers were having a chaotic transition to the postwar world.
I do my PhD in fair evaluation of ML algorithms, and I literally have enough work to go through until I die. So much mess, non-reproducible results, overfitting benchmarks, and worst of all this has become a norm. Lately, it took our team MONTHS to reproduce (or even just run) a bunch of methods to just embed inputs, not even train or finetune.
I see maybe a solution, or at least help, in closer research-business collaboration. Companies don't care about papers really, just to get methods that work and make money. Maxing out drug design benchmark is useless if the algorithm fails to produce anything usable in real-world lab. Anecdotally, I've seen much better and more fair results from PhDs and PhD students that work part-time in the industry as ML engineers or applied researchers.
This can go a good way (most of the field becomes a closed circle like parapsychology) or a bad way (people assume the results are true and apply them, like the social priming or Reinhart and Rogoff's economic paper with the Excel error).
Fortunately, most of the rest of the world economy is heading in the opposite direction and building new free-trade zones without the US. I think the US in a few years will start to feel a lot like the UK today, with everything falling apart, everyone becoming poorer and less mobile, and anger about Hispanics instead of Poles and trans people.
The power company wants money to power your datacenter. The refinery wants money to deliver five 40-foot containers of germanium to nvidia in Taiwan. OpenAI staff want money to buy houses in California. If you are really rich, banks will lend you money against OpenAI or nvidia equity, but then stock prices falling can trigger a chain reaction where the bank calls the loan, you need to sell equity to give them the cash they want, driving down the stock price, others get scared it will drop further and sell ...
originally posted in the thread for sneers not worth a whole post, then I changed my mind and decided it is worth a whole post, cause it is pretty damn important ...
This was in October 2016, eight years after Epstein was convicted of soliciting sexual services from girls as young as 14. MIRI spent 2014 and 2015 fighting and eventually setting with a former staffer who accused board members of statutory rape. Their legal expenses in those years were around $250k, similar to the money Yud says Epstein offered. So Yudkowsky was very familiar with the concept of older men seeking sex from underage girls and the risks of associating MIRI with it at the time. I don't remember the exact timeline of Brent Dill's Bay Area phase but that would have left Yud very familiar with another case where an older man abused younger women and girls.
Yudkowsky: "... (Sorry for the delay in answering; I was checking with Nate (Executive Director) to see what we knew about
why the fundraiser is going slowly.)"
Epstein: "Were you clearing my name with him"
Yudkowsky: "Not sure what you mean. Nate (Soares) knows you're Jeffrey E. I check not-yet-published info/speculation past him before saying it.")
The phrase "worth MIRI’s while to figure out whether Epstein was an actual bad guy versus random witchhunted guy" sounds like Yud has been listening to Scott Alexander and Scott Aaronson about how rich or educated white men are the real victims and hos be liars. It sounds like he was familiar with the substance of the accusations and thought there was a good chance they were untrue and not the tip of the iceberg.
As for who should "run diligence on donors", a random epidemiologist on BlueSky has a "no money from bastards" policy for his lab. This is the sort of thing Yudkowsky could have learned if he got a Master's degree rather than just attending the occasional conference.
Over on Old!SneerClub, Dembara asked Yud what he would do if he learned that a mature adult was grooming fourteen-year-olds into sex. Yud says he would tell nobody outside the community. The r/HPMOR editors erased the exchange but its still available under the two usernames.
Multiple cases and/or active recruiting would probably have me convene a star chamber to expel Jiff from community events, based on my expectation that at least one of those cases was statistically liable to end in victimful harm. I would not go to the police because of my expectation that law enforcement would be painful, tedious, and ineffective. https://old.reddit.com/user/EliezerYudkowsky
I hope he gets a chance to talk to Cardinal Pell about how well that response to sexual abuse works. A million years should do it.
CinnasVerses: Plea bargains work different ways in the USA depending on the race and status of the accused. I would read a wealthy white American who pleads down to one horrible sexual crime very differently than a poor black American pleading guilty to marijuana possession.
Yudkowsky: I'd read them differently, but still wouldn't assume the former had been guilty solely upon hearing that they'd been successfully forced into a plea bargain, especially if they were so wealthy that they might have political enemies.
Epstein does, indeed, appear to have been guilty of much worse than what he plea-bargained for. That does not change my general position on, "I do not believe someone to be guilty solely upon being told that they entered a guilty plea bargain; additional information is required."
It's a classical liberal thing. We don't automatically trust the government. We sometimes conclude that, yes, the government sure as fucking hell was right that time, but only after looking into it first.
All I will say is that the rules for felony conviction are stricter than the rules for "you sound creepy, we decline your invitation." And that this experience is one I will draw on going forward when setting community norms to discourage abuse.
Edit: Isn't Dath Ilan the setting of the Project Wonderful glowfic? The setting where people with good genes get more breeding licenses than people with bad genes?
Yudkowsky more often calls himself a libertarian. His tweets on policy look like a Libertarian Usenet group in the 1990s. American Libertarians are notorious for having a problem with the age of consent.
Its not an original observation, but some people can't imagine moral courage. They think everyone is on the make and the only difference is between brave and cautious.
Over on Reddit, somewhatmorenumerous has been looking into Form 990 for the 2009 Epstein donation. Yudkowsky says:
In 2009, MIRI (then SIAI) was a fiscal sponsor for an open-source project (that is, we extended our nonprofit status to the project, so they could accept donations on a tax-exempt basis, having determined ourselves that their purpose was a charitable one related to our mission) and they got $50K from Epstein. Nobody at SIAI noticed the name, and since it wasn't a donation aimed at SIAI itself, we did not run major-donor relations about it.
The Epstein files say the recipient was someone called Ben Goertzel with a project named OpenCog or something like that. somewhatmorenumerous has doubts:
MatriceJacobine, if SIAI paid out a grant of more than $5k to Goertzel, it should show up in their tax records. It doesn't.
If Goertzel was an official Director of Research at SIAI in 2009, he would need to have been listed in Part VII. Compensation of Officers, Directors, Trustees, Key Employees, Highest Compensated Employees, and Independent Contractors (he wasn't).
I'm not disputing that Goertzel got money from SIAI, or that he and SIAI called him Director of Research: I'm pointing out that SIAI's official tax records don't reflect what Eliezer and Goertzel say happened. That's not good: you're supposed to file accurate tax records.
But maybe there's documentation that proves me wrong! SIAI is, after all, a 501(c)3, a public charity, and Eliezer is here in this chat trying to be transparent. I assure you I would be the most delighted person in this chat if such documentation were provided. ...
I don't think this is as serious as telling the Internet you would cover up a mature adult in your organization having sex with multiple minors, but inaccurate tax paperwork can cost you your nonprofit status.
They could easily afford to hire a good admin assistant to sort out their organizational structure and bookkeeping. Why they chose nor to hire and listen to her or him I leave as an exercise for the reader.
One more quote. Three years ago, Charlotte Alter investigated sexual harassment in the Effective Altruism movement (a movent which formed around Yudkowsky's mailing lists and blogs) for Time magazine.
This story is based on interviews with more than 30 current and former effective altruists and people who live among them. Many of the women spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid personal or professional reprisals, ... Their accounts were corroborated by other parties to the incidents, by people to whom the women spoke shortly afterward, and by contemporaneous documents and screenshots. While a few women have raised these issues on online forums, many spoke to TIME about their experiences with sexual misconduct in EA communities for the first time.
One recalled being “groomed” by a powerful man nearly twice her age who argued that “pedophilic relationships” were both perfectly natural and highly educational. Another told TIME a much older EA recruited her to join his polyamorous relationship while she was still in college. A third described an unsettling experience with an influential figure in EA whose role included picking out promising students and funneling them towards highly coveted jobs. After that leader arranged for her to be flown to the U.K. for a job interview, she recalls being surprised to discover that she was expected to stay in his home, not a hotel. When she arrived, she says, “he told me he needed to masturbate before seeing me.”
A necessary but not sufficient response to stories like that is to make it utterly clear that this kind of behavior is not tolerated in your community and that you will take complaints of sexual harassment very seriously. Three years later, Yudkowsky is still blathering about how statutory rape is not always wrong and its important not to move too quickly to judgement.
Edit: See also this response by a professor who was asked why he had asked Epstein to fund a 2016 conference on sexual consent and campus rape.
I was not then and am not now aware of any evidence that Jeffrey Epstein was a ‘pedophile’ in the technical sense; his sexual preference appears to have been for young women aged 16-22, which would at most reflect partial ephebophilia. Although most of the women who were involved with him at that age retrospectively regret it, I am unaware of any evidence that the contacts were non-consensual at the time. (it goes on. I do not advise reading further but I note that Epstein's known victims were as young as 14)
The professor left Austin TX on retirement and now lives in California.
Outside academic psychiatry papers, distinguishing pedophilia from ephebophilia is a setup to arguing that it should be socially and legally acceptable for mature adults to have sex with anyone who has completed puberty (or at least that desire to do this is natural- naturalistic fallacy).
Anyone familiar with trials of sex abusers has heard "I was just educating them with my penis! As Plato explains in the Symposium ..."
Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid. ...
They are organizing another Inkhaven in April, maybe because it brings in at least $80,000. I do not recommend committing to spend a month in the presence of our dear friends given their practice of allowing sexual, psychological, and substance abuse in their communities!
I don't know if there has been any on-the-ground journalism about our dear friends except possibly the Zizian murders and some of the investigations into misogyny and sexual abuse. What reporter without a bankroll from EA has money to spend a few months in the Bay Area making friends with introverted bloggers?
One of the mentors at Inkhaven will be Jesse Singal who has said good things about pedophiles and KiwiFarms and is worried about so many young people identifying as trans. Does he have prior connections to eugenics or race pseudoscience? Pinkerite says he is Bluesky buddies with Razib Khan (one of the names RationalWiki can no longer mention).
I miss when Patrick McKenzie was just sharing an American's view on Japanese culture and reminding devs that names are not always Firstname Lastname in the Latin alphabet and 'just' paying yourself twice the average local income from your business is not a failure. The following is deep twitter pundit brain for a rich white man in Chicago who has lived most of his adult life in Japan and SoCal referring to social programs for poor brown people in Minnesota:
I think journalism and civil society should do some genuine soul-searching on how we knew—knew—the state of that pond, but didn’t consider it particularly important or newsworthy until someone started fishing on camera.
Edit. I also like the HN response which explains that private companies have few responses to fraud except refusing service, but the State of Minnesota can arrest fraudsters, command third parties to provide evidence about them, and send them to prison, so the People of Minnesota require strong evidence before it uses those powers.
Yes, I think the people who should have opinions beyond "the state government found some fraud and is investigating further cases" are people who live in Minnesota and have connections to daycare or immigrant communities. Its notorious that the NYT repackages stories by reporters in smaller orgs (or randos on social media) and puts its own spin on them! They don't have a specific editorial line on social services in the Midwest, just instincts.
Does anyone know what this June 2019 text from Epstein is about? I have added some links to RationalWiki and Wikipedia but not corrected spelling and corrected OCR errors. Was it at one of the institutions he sponsored like MIT Media Lab? Or more like his conference in the Virgin Islands? It seems to mix mainstream figures and ...
Learning that Rebecca Watson emailed Epstein for comment on a quote she was going to discuss, and Lawrence Krauss emailed Epstein because people like Rebecca Watson were outing him as a sex pest, reminds me of what a small world that was.
I don't plan to link every figure, but will do so if they are sleazy or the name is unfamiliar. Many of them seem like distinguished academics or popularizers.
The Weinstein brothers, Michael Vassar, Peter Thiel, and Yudkowsky were the names that leapt out at me. I don't know that Vassar has any mainstream intellectual or academic achievements.
Some names are missing like Sabine Hossenfelder, the GMU economists, Brad Delong, and Hoover Institute staff. And I would not underestimate the number of people in this network who just went to the right university, met the right people, got the right job, and started to climb the ladder of fame.
My friend Michele Reilly asked me to reintroduce her to you; you met her and Michael Vassar a few years ago on the
island
Vassar is best known for the MetaMed startup which bet that LessWrong posters were better at diagnosis than MDs. He also founded one of the LessWrong splinter movements that Scott Alexander warns people against.
There is a MIT computer scientist and popularizer called Michele Reilly although he could have meant someone else. My career has not been very successful but at least I never asked a friend to introduce me to a pederast or accepted an invitation to a sex criminal's private island.
This is not the worst academics and pundits in Epstein's network, this virologist named Nathan Wolfe is new to me. If an American academic had their career ended by fraud or misconduct there is a good chance that he or she was trying to make nice with Epstein afterwards.
Also likely to be concentrated in the USA, whose government is helpfully screaming at the rest of the world "disconnect your economies and your IT systems from ust!" Most of us are busy doing that as fast as possible although it takes a while to get everyone on board.
its a very useful skill when reading the internet to learn to see when "in the US and UK" or "in SoCal and London" should be appended to a sentence. Once you see it you can't unsee it.
I searched for “eugenics” on yud’s xcancel (i will never use twitter, fuck you elongated muskrat) because I was bored, got flashbanged by this gem. yud, genuinely what are you talking about
I am starting to suspect that Yud never learned to compartmentalize knowledge and put it in different epistemic categories. To him, AD&D alignments, Large Language Models, and race pseudoscience are all nerdy ideas he read about on the Internet, all equally real and true. He does not seem to file a carpenter telling him how to frame a roof, a rabbi teaching theology, and a random twitter account in different categories like most of us would.
I wonder if Yud has biological children? He is mercifully discreet about his home life even if he shares his kinks like he has a five-book contract with Baen Books.
considering his confidence in an AI apocalypse I heavily doubt it
He argues that the way to prevent the AI apocalypse is to breed superbabies from high-IQ stock, and a major plot point of Project Lawful is that the hero wants to prove himself worthy of having more children than average and nation he isekais himself to agrees but wants any future children to use their genes for evil.
Since it comes up on one in 216 characters with random stats rolled on 3d6, shouldn't INT 18 be three standard deviations above the norm?
Its a surprisingly modest claim about Marty Stu (Cheeliax with 20 million people, most of them poor given stated infant mortality, has 20 equally bright women available for breeding duty).
Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid. ...
A few people in LessWrong and Effectlve Altruism seem to want Yud to stick in the background while they get on with organizing his teachings into doctrine, dumping the awkward ones down the memory hole, and organizing a movement that can last when he goes to the Great Anime Convention in the Sky. In 2022 someone on the EA forum posted On Deference and Yudkowsky's AI Risk Estimates (ie. "Yud has been bad at predictions in the past so we should be skeptical of his predictions today")
Yes, in the 2016 emails Yudkowsky hints that he knows Epstein has a reputation for pursuing underage girls and would still like his money. We don't know what he knew about Epstein in 2009, but he sure seemed to know that something was wrong with the man in 2016. And that makes it harder to put Yud's writings about the age of consent in a good light (hard to believe that he was just thinking of a sixteen-year-old dating a nineteen-year-old, and had never imagined a middle-aged man assaulting fourteen-year-olds).
And its a fable about having to petition a mercurial and brutal authority for resources you need to live! A lesson that anyone who wants to make their living vibe-coding should ponder.
Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid. ...
Even though I have a clear memory of locating the third quotation in the Gutenberg edition, I can’t find it now. So, I;ve edited the post to deleted it. Apologies for this.
I’m assuming the quote I found was some kind of AI confabulation, and that I slipped up on the check. I will need to double check more carefully in future.
A Christopher DiCarlo (cwdicarlo on LessWrong) got AI doomerism into Macleans magazine in Canada. He seems to have got into AI doomerism in the 1990s but hung out being an academic and kept his manifestos to himself until recently. He claims to have clashed with First Nations creationists back in 2005 when he said "we are all African." His book is called Building a God: The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and the Race to Control It.
There must be many such cases who read the Extropians in the 1990s and 2000s and neither filed them with fiction not turned them into a career.
There is an old principle in software development not to make the GUI too pretty until the back end works, because managers and customers will think its ready when they can click around buttons with nice shading and animations. I think slopware is like that. People see the demo that appears to work and don't see what maintaining it and integrating it with other systems is like.
Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid. ...
AFAIK, the people in this space who have acknowledged using LSD and other psychedelics are gwern, Aella, and QiaochuYuan (during his rationalist phase). Scott Alexander hinted that he might have tried it, Eliezer Yudkowsky is interested in psychedelic therapy but also tells readers to please not use LSD. Can any of you name anyone else in this space who has talked about dropping acid?
I don't want to get into "A says that B dropped acid" in a StubSack thread.
Among my friends who came to my attention for psychelics[sic] having had any significant impact on them, positive or negative, I would say the mean result has been overwhelmingly, heartbreakingly negative. Please seriously consider not doing drugs.
He seems very worried about his tendency to procrastination (akrasia in LessWrong jargon) and inability to make himself exercise. So he is concerned about inability to control himself. So his public position is that LSD might have medical uses, but it has harmed people close to him.
"U" for "you" was when I became confident who "Nina" was. The blogger feels like yet another person who is caught up in intersecting subcultures of bad people but can't make herself leave. She takes a lot of deep lore like "what is Hereticon?" for granted and is still into crypto.
She links someone called Sonia Joseph who mentions "the consensual non-consensual (cnc) sex parties and heavy LSD use of some elite AI researchers ... leads (sic) to some of the most coercive and fucked up social dynamics that I have ever seen." Joseph says she is Canadian but worked in the Bay Area tech scene. Cursed phrase: agi cnc sex parties
I have never heard of a wing of these people in Canada. There are a few Effective Altruists in Toronto but I don't know if they are the LessWrong kind or the bednet kind. I thought this was basically a US and Oxford scene (plus Jaan Tallinn).
The Substack and a Rationalist web magazine are both called Asterisk.
It looks like this site requites https:// or http;// to recognize a link as an external link, otherwise it prepends awful.systems/ and treats it as an internal link
Edward Niedermeyer write a book to answer that very question (cheating on taxes + organize gangs of invested fanboys who suppress negative news online)
Stock markets in the rest of the developed world seem less bubbly than the US market.
Everything depends on the details like what country, what field, and what university. Because this involves specific people, its also inherently unpredictable. I would say that in general, a field that will accept a second go at a PhD, but won't accept a well documented HR complaint against a supervisor, is not one worth working in.
Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret. ...
There is a better timeline where Eliezer Yudkowsky got better religious education, understood that he was having messianic thoughts reinforced by Orison Scott Card's Mormonism, and ended up working in a cafe, writing pulp fiction, and participating in the local kink scene (I think Scott Alexander knows damn well what he is doing and thinks the Truth about the Lesser Breeds is more important)
Its almost the end of the year so most US nonprofits which want to remain nonprofits have filed Form 990 for 2024 including some run by our dear friends. This is a mandatory financial report. ...
In another thread, I have posted about Form 990 for SIAI in 2009: was a Ben Goertzel an employee, and was the $50k donation from Jeffrey Epstein passed on to another organization such as OpenCog or kept in house? Form 990 says "not an employee" and "kept in house" but people who were staffers at the time tell different stories.
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th February 2026 ( awful.systems )
Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid. ...
The long awaited Gerard/Zitron crossover: I'm on Better Offline saying the stuff I always say, about OpenClaw, Moltbook and the coming Great Depression 2 ( podcasts.apple.com )
raw mp3
Eliezer’s response to being in the Epstein files ( www.reddit.com )
originally posted in the thread for sneers not worth a whole post, then I changed my mind and decided it is worth a whole post, cause it is pretty damn important ...
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th February 2026 ( awful.systems )
Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid. ...
A series of talks in the Epstein documents
Does anyone know what this June 2019 text from Epstein is about? I have added some links to RationalWiki and Wikipedia but not corrected spelling and corrected OCR errors. Was it at one of the institutions he sponsored like MIT Media Lab? Or more like his conference in the Virgin Islands? It seems to mix mainstream figures and ...
The job losses are real — but the AI excuse is fake ( pivot-to-ai.com )
Great Depression 2.0 gets under way ...
Yudkowsky’s “dumb maths question” for genetics twitter
I searched for “eugenics” on yud’s xcancel (i will never use twitter, fuck you elongated muskrat) because I was bored, got flashbanged by this gem. yud, genuinely what are you talking about
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st February 2026 ( awful.systems )
Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid. ...
Steve Yegge’s Gas Town: Vibe coding goes crypto scam ( pivot-to-ai.com )
Stop it. Get some help. ...
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th January 2026 ( awful.systems )
Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid. ...
If AI coding is so good … where are the performance numbers? ( pivot-to-ai.com )
Claude bros know how to measure performance. They just don't. ...
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th January 2026 ( awful.systems )
Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid. ...
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 11th January 2026 ( awful.systems )
Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret. ...
Who owns Lighthaven? Reviewing Rationalist Finances
Its almost the end of the year so most US nonprofits which want to remain nonprofits have filed Form 990 for 2024 including some run by our dear friends. This is a mandatory financial report. ...