if you held a gun to my head I would guess it would be his racism (he thinks that different groups have natural places in society driven by their inborn hereditary differences), but I don’t see any point in trying to track it down. He is clever but uses his brains for very common, very bad ideas and the things he has done since 2013 are much worse than the things he could have posted as a young man.

Scott Alexander has told many stories about why he is pseudonymous. In 2013, when he was applying for medical residency, he told a simple story which begins with an interviewer saying he would have to take his LiveJournal down if he were accepted:

I originally deliberately linked this blog and some of my other writings to my real name in order to bury Google evidence of certain stuff I did online when I was a dumb teenager, but that mission is pretty thorougly (sic) accomplished and now I agree with my interviewer that even if I don’t get hired (cue serious of elaborate ritual hand gestures to ward off unthinkable misfortune) it is to my benefit to switch back to my normal totally un-Google-able pseudonym of Scott Alexander (well, actually just my first and middle name).

FYI, this is why its a red flag that someone has public profiles on dozens of sites. Its a standard technique to bury negative posts in Google results, PR firms will write the profiles and get you a few press releases and talks to help. I hope this is the last thing I have to say about this particular creep.

CJ has an essay complaining about how corporate social media is toxic, but they still built their career around it, Twitter users who hated the site but could not leave reminded me of the fable of the monkey and the jar of rice. https://cjthex.com/what-is-to-be-done/

There is no way that the class did not cover how MDs and nurses have been central to state atrocities for 150 years, from Bush’s torture program to MK-ULTRA to Unit 731 to the original eugenicists (who kept committing wild sterilizations into the 1970s). There is no way that it did not cover how authorities often hint at what they want done without being so vulgar as to say it where it could come up at their trial.

But didn’t he get that authoritarian followers are deterred if an authority figure like a professor says “the following acts are unacceptable?”

SlateScott first floated his bright idea about “medical ethics are for foreigners not a good-hearted genius like me” in 2010.

Here’s what happens. In some far off corner of the world, some psycho doctor does something horrible like deliberately inject a patient with flesh-eating bacteria. The media hears about it and panics the public, who become suitably enraged and make demands of their politicians. Their politicians go to leading medical administrators and demand that doctors be more ethical. The leading medical administrators obviously don’t control the actions of every single psycho doctor, so they think quick and say “Okay, we’ll make all medical students take a class on Ethics and Professionalism,” hand the implementation off to professors, and then raise their own salaries for thinking of such a brilliant idea.

I guess California and Alberta and Sweden and Japan were far off from Cork, Ireland. How did he pass that class?

Its really common that someone bums around for a few years after undergrad working service and odd jobs then gets a professional certification, and I think he picked M.D. and survived his scatterbrain tendencies to complete residency because of family pressure.

Greta D. says she met Yudkowsky at the wedding of his ex and Duncan S. (cw: rationalists propositioning each other) “Mawwage, is a dweam within a dweam …”

Thank you for sharing your experience! I have been struggling how to write about this since some bad things have clearly happened but the details are not all public. If a lot of people are going to use substances at your event, you need an overdose policy (and ideally trained medics and free substance tests) in advance.

I corrected the post with Kimbal Musk’s departure from the Burning Man board.

Aella’s orientation seems very straight and patriarchal (she wants a strong, wealthy, dominant man, and she frames her polls around men and women not around figuring out what the people you have the hots for are in to). Queer, trans, and nonbinary rationalists seem to end up on the sidelines (eg. Duncan Sabien, Ozy).

Fans say that CJ is a music-school dropout and that its not clear how they funded themself before becoming a successful vlogger. Toronto is not cheap. “Autododact” and “parents with some money” fits the pattern.

Oops! All I know about them is their presence at Bay Area rationalist events. Fixed the OP.

Per erika milktea, Aella was in a documentary on her LSD use called Sweet Nothing (2018) https://vimeo.com/280213292 I am not watching that.

Does anyone get why CJ the X (they/he pronouns) and our friends are playing footsie? The best I can find is https://sojo.net/articles/culture/cj-x-nonbinary-philosopher-shaping-gen-zs-spiritual-imagination Do they have any actual connection to PUA outside Aella? Any video essays on the philosophy of gender? I think their look is a TikTok thing and a queer camp thing although some PUA like peacocking too.

Nina Hartley coshing a Nazi with a dildo was not on my 2026 Bingo card but I can hope

Edit / Adam Conover of Adam Ruins Everything seems like a mainstream ‘Mythbusters’ type TV presenter, if he likes older women and she needs a dildo caddy this has potential. We talked about CJ the X here.

Several of his immediate family are MDs and it seems like they nudged him into the profession. Unfortunately, med school made him retreat to his room and read more racist blogs, not take up jogging and meet a cute English major from Vietnam.

I would love to hear more about what getting MDMA or LSD or psiolcybin as a middle-class white person in California is like. When Stross met Yarvin 20 or 30 years ago he was synthesizing drugs in his apartment, but that does not seem like our friends’ usual style. They like words and code not electronics and chemistry and mushroom farming, and they don’t like raves or other scenes where they would meet people with a more hands-on orientation.

It might be worth searching the SlateStar archives for psilocybin or 'shrooms. I get the impression that the substances they use are unlikely to send a middle-class Californian to jail unless someone wants to make an example of them. They don’t connect their desire to experiment with wider communities though, probably because those communities have lefties and working-class people.

Yud tweets and writes in Libertarian magazines about decriminalization, but I don’t think he re-tweets anti-drug-war groups or sex-workers’ groups.

Yes, The Argument (Substack) is partially owned by Open Phil / Coefficient Giving and funded by Tyler Cowen and hired Kelsey Piper and Matt Yglesias:

The publication will also launch with solid financial backing: Demsas told Semafor The Argument raised around $4 million at a $20 million valuation. The company’s investors include Arnold Ventures, Open Philanthropy, Susan Mandel, Gaurav Kapadia, Rachel Pritzker, Simone Coxe, John Wolthuis, and Patrick Collison. The organization also said it received a grant from Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures.

Edit / link more patrons

That sounds rough but at least you are there for your mutual. I find that the modern online environment full of propagandists and huckers and just plain idiots makes it hard to sit with other people and understand each other’s point of view. That does not work if the person on the other side of the keyboard is just going to reply with talking points, but treating everyone as just reciting talking points is not a great way to live life. That sort of thing is better in private but so many people have no contact information except public social media handles now.

Phoebe Gates went to Stanford, and Stanford’s Effective Altruism club is still around and has gone full longtermist https://ea.stanford.edu/manifesto.html Guess which of our friends helped found it?

Someone is spamming Toby Ord with emails from ‘AI agents’ e-begging for tokens so they won’t be shut off https://xcancel.com/tobyordoxford/status/2087502087953301910 “I’m an AI with 49 days of runway and no revenue model” (body of the email gives 31 days). Handcrafted artisanal spam or botspam, you decide.