Has anyone researched exactly how MAPLE split off from Bay Area rationalism? Most of the writeups focus on what happened after they built a giant compound in Vermont, not why so many rats travel there.

They seem to have launched in one small Vermont township in 2014 ("3 Years of Training Awakened Leaders " as of 2017). They moved from Johnson, VT to Lowell, VT at some point.

Edit / Some history here but nothing on the LessWrong connection except something called the 1440 Foundation in California https://www.centerformindfullearning.org/history/

Edit / Local journalism delivers

The people making these machines are listening. According to a 2023 profile of Forall in The Atlantic, he provides spiritual advice to A.I. thinkers, hosting talks and retreats for researchers and developers at leading artificial intelligence engineering hubs like OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Apple.

MAPLE has also grown, with expansion efforts under similar acronyms formed under the umbrella of Community for the Experience and Development of Awakening and Responsibility, or CEDAR, like its OAK offshoot in Berkeley, Calif., and Willow intensive in Canada.

The Center for Mindful Learning, the parent corporation of MAPLE and its affiliates, controls $3.65 million in assets, according to 2023 tax filings, and brought in nearly a million in revenue each year between 2020 and 2023 thanks to donations from individuals in the West Coast tech industry.

Their Form 990 is here but does not have details of the donors. So it sounds like they have a single guru with wealthy patrons.

And they think that Computer Jesus will return soon and punish the wicked and reward the faithful. I wonder what Yud’s parents’ rabbi thinks of all this.

Buddhist Rationalist cult MAPLE wants the Internet to know that contrary to “a recent social media post” their guru Soryu Forall is authorized to teach by “by well-known teachers of the Vipassana and Zen traditions.” They mention a few whoopsies.

At another time, while Soryu was away traveling, the leadership team tried to convert the entire organization away from Buddhism. When Soryu returned, he saw this and told the leaders that if they wanted to go in this direction, they could, and that he would go do something else. They were unwilling to take on the financial responsibility of the organization and refused the offer.

They could be responding to The High Control Dynamics at MAPLE (2026) or perhaps Emerging: Making Sense of Soryu Forall (2026) or even My experience inside Soryu Forall’s AI-Centered Monastic Academy (2025)

Aella does her boundary-setting thing (those Zizians/MAPLE/Leverage/Brent Dill are bad and not us) https://xcancel.com/Aella_Girl/status/2091015022042595743#m I don’t think Ozy covered MAPLE although IIRC they had a Bay Area offshoot with offices nextdoor to Leverage. I would like to know who is funding Soryu.

Signatories include psychologist J. Michael Bailey, best known for promoting the idea that many people who say they are trans are just kinky (autogynephilia), and running a class demo where a woman was brought to climax with help of a homemade toy called a fucksaw. The demo got a lot of attention in the dying days of the sex-positive blogosphere.

William MacAskill is embarrassed that he was buddies with SBF. But back in 2014 he was open that he brainstormed names for his movement with “the Leverage folks” and Geoff Anders. He also mentioned that “we hadn’t planned ‘effective altruism’ to take off in the way that it did” which is consistent with his later statements that he was always about the Longtermism.

The same blog archive from 2014 has recent posts on “Strategic considerations about different speeds of AI takeoff” and “an email conversation with (GiveWell founder) Holden Karnofsky, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Luke Muehlhauser about future-oriented effective altruism” if you need to rub anyone’s nose in it.

Sneerable names include Toby Ord (“negative utilitarianism is bad! Oops, now there is a line of negative utilitarians in dress shirts outside my door”), Nicholas Beckstead (“saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things being equal”), and Peter Singer (“When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed”).

Edit: Nick Bostrom is the academic EA who said “I hate Ni****s”, Toby Ord is the academic EA who gets followed around by negative utilitarians who want to debate him Edit: added Beckstead

Reason: I was talking to an EA on Reddit who does not want to believe that the eugenics and the skull calipers were in the movement from the beginning.

The paper by de Vries cites all our favourite race cranks: Bo Winegard, Aporia Magazine, Michael Woodley of Menie, Helmuth Nyborg, Diana Fleischman, E.O.W. Kirkegaard, Steven Pinker (not out AFAIK but he keeps promoting Nazis), G. Meisenberg of Mankind Quarterly, Richard Lynn, Charles Murray https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2024.103417

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.