It’s not always easy to distinguish between existentialism and a bad mood.
They had a couple of videos openly sponsored by effective altruists a while ago. Could be they are still downstream of EA money, or they got audience captured because pretending the inevitable scifi future is just around the corner comes with a built in audience.
Is that code for please use the tokens we are paying out the ass for either way or for we have no intention of paying you like regular swengs?
The thread seems to be dropping off, but this is gold.
According to the Verge article other changes to the EULA include amdonitions against making election tampering and aiding terrorism, so it’s possible adding model welfarism there was to draw attention away from the fact that their security model for preventing malicious actors from disrupting society so far appears to be that they make it break the EULA.
Feels like for a community that swelled its ranks by welcoming disaffected gamergaters and anti-feminists of all stripes to become a safe space for rapists would be the most natural progression ever.
The photography thing comes up so early too, it was tempting to read just to find out what they’d hidden behind the idiot filter.
But not that tempting.
Yeah, the group sex.
He’s just an intellectual coward, he didn’t even own up to the basilisk despite his whole decision theorist phase clearly being about trying to cook up a convincing cope for it.
Apparently he has a book called Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millenium so that’s likely to have you covered. I read “How Jesus Became God” from him at some point which might have touched on this, but it was mostly about the evolution of the messiah concept itself, like how the ‘son of man’ was supposed to be it’s own specific thing and not just a euphemism for messiah, or how the term in jewish apocalyptic literature is pretty much completely separate from where the christian interpretation ended up.
Overall a very readable book, I remember liking it but it’s really been a while.
Did Christ actually talk that much about the literal end of the world
Nobody knows exactly what he talked about, but the view that he passes the bar for historicity but seems to have been more of a the-end-is-nigh witch doctor type character as the new baseline has gained a lot of ground, especially with biblical scholars like Bart Ehrman breaking into popular science writing.
Also John’s apocalypse has the whole coded anti-roman-empire screed going for it beyond the psychedelia, so it’s arguable Jesus was the more direct doom prophet, but for a more distinctly jewish flavored apocalypse.
John Wentsworth featured in the retracted S.E. Gyges essay.
Second guy from the right apparently.
It seems he won’t get the full payout:
The rationalists are starting to cancel people for exercising free speech! woke 3.0 is go I repeat woke 3.0 is go
Survival and flourishing Fund tweeted:
We have withdrawn our grant recommendation to John Wentworth from the 2026 S-Process Grant Round. After we posted our announcement on Sept 30, public statements by Mr. Wentworth came to our attention, which we found objectionable, disturbing, and contrary to the values of SFF.
A Speculation Grant to Mr. Wentworth was appoved and disbursed earlier in the year, prior to SFF becoming aware of his statements. The Funders of this round will not be fulfilling the remainder of the grant recommendation.
If you have concerns about the conduct of an SFF applicant or grantee, you can contact us at <some email>
How much of a complete fucking idiot do you have to be to publicly acknowledge the Zizians in the middle of an ongoing PR disaster about your clan being on the women like to be raped they just don’t have the balls to admit it ideological bandwagon. Hey everyone, check out how my writings caused the Zizians1! Specifically by making them think we are ridiculous hypocrites for making huge claims about being scientifically unblackmailable and then paying a bunch of hush money to sexual assault victims who threatened to make a fuss. Yeah, the part where we where trying to cover up systematic abuse didn’t help either.
EAs need to downplay climate change because otherwise it becomes really hard to explain why preventing it isn’t the main focus of the organisation, since it should break their utilitarian calculus just as much as imaginary future robots with a hard on for paperclips do, with the additional problem that it would make their relationship with capital providers far more adversarial.
Plus they probably think that if they oppose industrial build out even indirectly it will piss off the basilisk.
uncovered downside risk
This is a novel and interesting way to euphemise rape, and because it’s an EA I can’t even tell if it’s supposed to be tongue in cheek.
EA/rationalism and redpill fit like yin and yang. Akin to how EA is an optimization of altruism with “suboptimal” human tendencies like morality and empathy stripped from it, red pill is an optimized sexual strategy with the humanity of women stripped from it.
Really well said.
Despite this culture, EA as a philosophy has a lot of good in it and they should fix this bug with some introspection
sigh
Anthropic was $42B in the hole for 2025, reuters reports. Apparently this puts their $-spent-to-$-earned ratio slightly over the one calculated by Zitron for OpenAI, making Anthropic in fact the shittier business.
For comparison, the GDP of Cyprus for 2025 was $41B.
I lean towards things being unfathomably worse that they appear a the surface, there’s just so much smoke, except I think the problem is structural and not the result of deliberate machinations by evil genius pedophiles.
The nazi bar analogy works for more than ideology, and the burgeoning CNC scene they got going seems to be exacerbating the if-you-build-it-they-will-come aspect of the whole thing, because good luck trying to explain to authorities how you got real raped at the fake rape party you are supposed to have willingly attended.
This is all third hand at best, but I live on the other side of the world so whatever. As far as personal experiences go @ivyastrix just posted a new blog about her victimization at rationalist events where she describes some of the systemic pathologies in rationalist organisations trying to deal with SA allegations, and it’s basically the same principles that make them believe that vertical workplace romance is not a minefield of power imbalance and coercion but actually fine and ethical when the right people are doing it, just fundamentally unserious people biting off more than they can chew and acting defensive and victim blaming and trying to pass it off as drama when it blows up in their faces.
It goes off the speculative rails for most of the second half, but I have to admit the rate at which Αela compliments people on her socials on being good rapists could be the most off-putting thing I’ve ever encountered in relation to rationalism.
From the more out there claims I thought the part where he advocates that Irregular (the people with rat/EA ties who made the swiss cheese LLM sandboxes) where employing weaponized incompetence in order to let a big incident happen that would force the government to go through with pausing AI research was interesting. though obviously of dubious likelihood. The whole doomer rationalists sabotaging slightly less doomer EAs in a low key sort of civil war over pausing vs slowing down AI research wasn’t very convincing in general.
There’s also a bit where he thinks the EAs have infiltrated all levels of government and are planning to eliminate the competition (non rationalist controlled AI) via a ‘pivotal act’ that involves bioweapons. Basically doing the rationalist rhetorical staple of smuggling an extreme position as a given and then just piling on the speculation.
Dedicating a paragraph and a half to the fact that the usually unspoken second part of the pause AI doomer project is to just do eugenics for a few generations until we get an upper class of genetically engineered naturally galaxy brained people that can finally do AI properly isn’t nothing, but at some point you need to segue into how siskind rolled out a red carpet for every semi-literate blood and soil gutter fascist and spurned nice guy to make a home in the ratsphere, you wrote the scott alexander email explainer ffs.
There’s also a weirdly grandstanding section where he writes like he’ll get the rationalists like FBI got Capone for tax-evasion, except it’s Lighthaven committing massive fraud against its investors and donors by knowingly funding events that lead to solicited sex acts in the compound’s premises, which is by far the least objectionable sex related issue in a writeup that’s leading up to the claim that the rationalism in incidental and the real goal is funneling vulnerable minors to sfba based pedophiles.
What the actual fuck? Imagine if Hermann Göring defended himself at Nuremberg by saying, “At least I had fun and got rich and worked on ‘cool tech’ with friends.”
Cool testimonial bro.
If that was all GenAI was being (aggressively and incessantly) pushed as you probably wouldn’t be seeing terms like cognitive surrender and technofeudalism being thrown around as often, and this lemmy instance would still mainly be about dunking on SFBA quasireligious get-smart-quick scams.