yes, that’s his high-volume account, linked from @ESYudkowsky
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
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.
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.
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
Christ, it’s nonces all the way down, isn’t it?
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)
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
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!
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.
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?”
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.”
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
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.
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?
