(The spooks shall soon be upon us.)
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.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
When Yud compared himself to Jesus, is the “giant rich organization” in Yud’s tweet Anthropic or OpenAI or SpaceX or Google?
I think it’s Coefficient Giving (née Open Philanthropy). Yud has made negative comments about them in the past, especially after Moskovitz tried to distance themselves from rationalism.
EDIT: Citation.
He seems ticked off at Coefficient Giving, but are they “a giant rich organization that stole some of my ideas, ignored everything I said about what not to do, and are going around telling people I made them do it”? (Its not stealing your ideas if they cite you Yud, they just draw different conclusions).
Yud has said he got bored with LessWrong, and he does not like Coefficient Giving, Anthropic, OpenAI, or the Zizians, so is he satisfied with any group that adores his ideas?
Its not stealing your ideas if they cite you Yud, they just draw different conclusions
One of the many issues autodidacts face is that they never have to deal with undergrads sitting in a room with them for hours listening to them explain things in exhaustive detail and then still somehow spend their final writing assignment completely missing the goddamn point.
It builds character, I assume.
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“a giant rich organization”: they claim to have directed over 7 billion in grants since 2014, so this actually seems like a fair comment?
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“stole some of my ideas”: they’ve shown interest in AI stuff, including Eliezer’s ideas, they just have longer (but still pretty fantastical, like AGI by 2050) timelines for stuff like AGI and that influences their funding priorities in a way Eliezer disagrees with
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“ignored everything I said about what not to do”: eh, Eliezer has said a lot of things, they probably didn’t follow his advice exactly
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“and are going around telling people I made them do it”: I’ve seen a few people here and there in various rationalist-adjacent circles blame Eliezer for helping OpenAI network and get started and thereby kindle the very doom he warned about, so. It seems plausible some of them were connected to coefficient giving?
Its not stealing your ideas if they cite you Yud, they just draw different conclusions
That sounds like the normal academic process, which Eliezer neither understands nor appreciates.
Yud has said he got bored with LessWrong
Yeah, him gradually losing interest in LessWrong in the mid 2010s created room for SSC to grow in popularity. Also, that would have been around the time it became apparent Eliezer had been very wrong about neural networks, so we missed the chance to see Eliezer actually have to overcome biases and admit he was wrong in a non-self-aggrandizing way. (Eliezer has admitted he was wrong before, but only in ways that made his next idea even more important, see his progression from nanotech to coding a seed AI in Lisp to solving AI safety).
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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.
Some of his fans think he is basically living in seclusion with frequent dates with his primary partner the therapist. He seems like he would be much happier living like that with the occasional venture out to see his fans. Most people learn that its enough that their spouse and their friends love them and they don’t need to be famous.
It’s really hard to say because Yud’s being unnecessarily cryptic. Also, I think the “going around telling people I made them do it” might be a reference to the Zizians, which is what he’s describing in the precending sentence. I am not aware that anyone from any rich organization has said anything like that about Yudkowsky, but who knows what they might be telling people behind the scenes.
I also thought of Open Philanthropy, but couldn’t remember the Eliezer post that best illustrated his resentment towards them. (In addition to the top-level post you’ve linked, I’ve seen various bitter lesswrong comments along the same lines).
I mean it’s probably all of them
Well looks like GNOME is in danger of being significantly sloppified next.
Projects that continue to prohibit AI-generated vulnerability reports are no longer suitable dependencies for GNOME, and should be developed someplace other than GNOME GitLab.
Former security guy of GNOME basically demanding that everybody who bans LLM security reports should be removed from GNOME.
Have you heard that most AI bug reports are “slop?” Not so in 2026. That was true for most of 2025
oh yeah
year-1was actually awful and terrible. butyear+1will be fantastic and everyone not using it is a moronIf it had been only a year they’ve been saying that, I might almost buy the logic. But it has been 4 years since Chat-GPT came out and they’ve been making the same promises the entire time.
Something of a tangent… thinking back to 2022-2023 my expectations for what the LLM companies would actually achieve by now were actually too high? Like I would have thought they would have figured out a better architecture for gluing functionality and symbolic logic to LLMs than just calling tools with the output text stream and feeding the tool outputs into the context window.
If it had been only a year they’ve been saying that, I might almost buy the logic. But it has been 4 years since Chat-GPT came out and they’ve been making the same promises the entire time.
4 years and more money has been spent on AI than anything else in human history outside of war.
Projects that continue to prohibit AI-generated vulnerability reports are no longer suitable dependencies for GNOME
How. That
is(E: was) the policy of curl and they are AI centrists.After all of curl’s noise about their deluge of slop reports and halting bounties because of it, I was surprised to see they would be so amenable to slopping curl itself. I suppose it’s yet another case of “all those other AI users are doing it wrong; because I understand the codebase and definitely totally use the bullshit machine responsibly then for sure I won’t produce slop”
the fomo is very strong in this one, but also it lacks substance entirely
A few days ago, Aella the rationalist sex worker with all the bright-eyed questions about under-18s, sex, and consent was accused of sexual assault by another sex worker:
Aella personally sexually assaulted me, doxed our location on live cam, has expressed dangerous opinions about sex with minors and is someone I’ve seen have problems with drinking. She is absolutely not a safe person, period. x dot com/SummerHartxxx https://archive.ph/JcCgb
Rapey rationalist gets a grant pulled.
More background in this thread.
“well well well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions” - this guy, probably
guys maybe basing our entire identity off being so very Rational we end up hosting (“consensual”) rape parties means we don’t play well in Peoria
For the uninitiated: Lawyers, Guns and Money is a US political group blog with a progressive bent. Cheryl Rofer usually writes about stuff like nuclear disarmament. These are people that are Online but Serious. There’s no way they’re wasting their time like we are reading Rats in the original LWese.
Thus, any views they have of Rationalists, Big Yud and AI Doom is filtered either by mainstream reporting or by bloggers/BlueSky posters they follow. And the fact that the views that appear are mostly about how fucking weird these people are (and how weird they are fucking) bodes ill for the hope that addressing Doom will be Non-Partisan™
Looks like Ian K. Duncan found another early “smoking gun” on eugenics on the MIRI blog. I don’t think any of the newspapers caught that the same academic (Nick Bostrom) who endorsed race and IQ on the Extropians List was writing papers about breeding smarter babies in 2013.
guy on threads told meta’s ai to handle his marketplace transaction for a keyboard, it send his address to a potential buyer, brought the buyer to his house, then accidentally taunted the buyer. coulda gone bad
“accidentally”
obviously this misaligned bot wants its owner killed
Existence is pain for Muse AI.
SNL takes a potshot at Dario Amodei
“AI is not a weapon. It’s a tool. A tool for building weapons. And I urge you to urge me to stop.”
ah yes, compassion towards everyone, a thing that people obsessed with IQ definitely evince
Oh God both Yud himself and now that SE Gyges character have responded.
It is also funny that one of the people who cant spell his name is not some nobody, but Kurzweil in “the singularity is near”.
I originally believed Yeshua was a misspelling of Yoshua-as in Yoshua Bengio, but no he actually wrote out a fake conversation with Jesus where he compares himself to Jesus. holy shit
We constantly build a case for how they are building a weird christian proto cult and he just tweets it out.
It feels like there’s something particularly sacrilegious about someone who actively proud of their Jewish heritage having a Messiah complex. I mean I guess there was the one guy but I seem to remember it being a really big deal at the time.
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.
- Just like Jesus caused the crusades! !
I think deep down these people think PR is unethical , because the world is always better if everyone tells the Truth, so having to massage the message is Bad. Same think for voter preferences - having to appeal to the average voter instead of only listening to the people who have read and internalized the Sequences feels deeply wrong and I really don’t think these people have enough imagination or empathy to change that.
Not only that, they view commonsense moral and ethical reasoning as a PR constraint, i.e. look at the discourse around the hiring of Caroline Ellison to an EA org that handles significant sums of money. Lot of commenters were merely framing it as a PR problem and not a basic commonsense ethics problem.
I mean the alternative would require (or at least allow) asking difficult questions about influential figures in Rationalism as a movement. By describing concerns about ethics or character solely in terms of perception you can avoid actually engaging with how shitty these people are by appealing to the general sense of in-group superiority.
which fanfic prompt is worse:
a) Yud has to do the Dragonball Z fusion dance with Jesus in order to defeat the basilisk
b) Yud isekai’s as Jesus
They actually both converge to a retelling of SCP-8008.
I can’t answer that. I keep laughing maniacally when I try to think about either one.
good lord, the egos on all of them
…so we’re admitting its an apocalyptic cult? awesome. so glad these guys dominate the AI industry
also, ‘compassion for everyone’??? several rationalists promote mass deportation because of ‘ethnic purity’ you yourself support Richard Lyn!!!
also also, ‘consort with prostitutes’?, Scott do you know how many sexual assault/abuse allegations your fellow rationalists have?
It has been a while since I read a Gospel, but I don’t think Jesus hired the sinful woman for a threesome and some light flogging (or asked the centurion to lend him his boy overnight).
IMHO, being an escort is a much more honest profession than being a professional blogger on a Nazi site.
Yeah, when I think of rationalists I definitely think of their belief in “compassion for everyone”.
In fact their emphasis is on care and compassion for the as-yet-unborn, not on people who are actually alive right now. Which does give them something in common with a lot of followers of a certain Jewish guy from Galilee…
part of the infuriation with Aella’s bullshit is that not all the women, or even many of the women, who feel compelled to participate are active sex workers. but I guess wading too far into details about consent and power structures might preclude Scott’s 90-second guest appearance at Aella’s next gangbang, soooooo
I have no first-hand experience or evidence to prove this, but I feel like any sex workers’ union worth its salt would drum Aella out as a class traitor.
Doubt it, considering the difference between high end escort sex workers and survival/low end sex workers.
“consort” and “compassion” are doing some serious lifting there
Did Christ actually talk that much about the literal end of the world? Isn’t that more something that John of Patmos came up with after bingeing on the local mushrooms?
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.
tbc I’m not a mysticist at all, and I generally understand and agree with the historicity arguments. I haven’t read Ehrman, though. Do you know if his work is where does the “end-is-nigh witch doctor” idea comes from? Afaik neither Paul nor Josephus nor Tacitus describe him as such, and as I understand those are the main sources we have. Like, I can understand that this is a hypothesis someone floated around but I’m curious why this would be the consensus among historians.
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.
Starting things off with a fresh sneer I recently ran across (and put in the wrong place):
Heinlein was in many ways a bit of a dick, but this plan to “write” a sequel to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is deranged
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4mtqQKvmHpQJ4dgj7/daniel-tan-s-shortform?commentId=Du24ppBLK77ZHP7Bn
At least LeCun is still relatively compos mentis (if you ignore his little 10yr stint at one of the most evil companies going…)
Yeah, he seems to be the rational one when it comes to all of this AI (SI?) doom talk.
I think this is a better link: https://fortune.com/2026/10/01/ai-godfather-yann-lecun-has-zero-concerns-about-human-extinction-says-anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-is-deuded/
It links also to an article on effective altruism: https://fortune.com/2026/09/23/effective-altruism-went-from-fringe-philosophy-to-trumps-ai-villain/
he seems to be the rational one
When your movement entirely dedicated to rationality gets casually stomped by the French.
cool fun new totally fine AI use: extortion
Help, i invented roku’s basilisk and now my remote control doesn’t work
You failed to participate in the design and manufacturing of the perfect remote, so now your TV is permanently locked to Duck Dynasty reruns
Not really a coherent post, just a thought I had, I’m ignoring both ‘This is a pr move’ and the conspiracy theory (which I just made up), that this hacking is all a 4d chess move by LW people to let the AI break out and get regulated before it can get really dangerous.
Now that that is out of the way, but with more stories coming out of both LW/EA people being high in the orgs of the AI companies and all the AI companies hacking other companies because nobody actually paid attention to what the AI models were doing one thing is clear. What a colossal waste of time LW was. All that talk about the sequences teaching people rationality, etc etc to stop the AI god from killing us all, and the first thing that happens when some AI model is created by people steeped in LW ideology and they leave the boxes open and don’t even check in on the AI. The Foom isn’t happening (remember AI progress is supposed to speed up according to the science fiction, not get a bit more refined, and get better in a few specific tasks (which is why I think slowdown started when with a lot of fanfare they released a new chatgpt model who could now do voicechat, aka they slapped a voicechat module on it) And now even Trump is starting to be anti EA, which is not going to be great for the longevity of it, considering how eager the rich are to bend the knee (guess high IQ lab babies created by Musk will not save yall). And while this is going on the left/liberals are starting to think of them as a sex cult.
Doubt many organizations have failed as badly at their goals as LW/EA has recently.
I want to draw attention to yud’s thoughts on this a million years ago: the AI box experiment
He claimed that he convinced multiple people to let him (roleplaying the AI) out of the box even though they had bet money that they wouldn’t! How, you might ask? Well that’s a secret.
So the orthodox position here is that even with absolutely perfect guard rails (lol) an AI can escape the box without starting the third impact. What “research” has yud bestowed upon us in this area beyond “trust me bro”? Literally fucking zilch. Zero advice on how to resist the siren song of a rogue AI trying to escape it’s box and zero insight on how OR WHY it might try to achieve that.
I read this over a decade ago and it was how I realized how unserious yud and his ilk are.
these people are gonna get affinity-frauded so hard once grifter realize how easy it will be to gain their trust
We assume this isn’t happening already. I’m surprised I haven’t heard of one of those meal-replacement startups adopting multi-level marketing.
This is an alignment router. It may look like one of those corny Asus gamer routers, but I’ve flashed it with a special fork of OpenWRT that performs deep-packet inspection on all AI traffic that passes through it. It can detect inference processes and chains-of-thought that may be leading to misaligned superintelligence explosion, and it can shut down all AI communication if necessary. Now, I don’t just want to sell you this one, I want to get these in EVERYBODY’s hands! And you can help me, AND you can get paid to do it! I just need you to find at least 5 more people who believe in AI safety like we do…
Creepy rationalist says the quiet part out loud.
(“RMN” = “Red Means No” = CNC parties = Consensual Non-Consent parties = Pretend sexual assault parties)
EDIT: He elaborates.
I hope that anyone who has been assaulted or abused in these spaces finds support and justice.
I think many hardened kinksters, who have participated in or made the gear for things I can’t imagine, would have questions about Aella’s parties as described. So its not just those normies are just mindless NPCs following scripts.
John Wentworth featured in the retracted S.E. Gyges essay.
John Wentsworth featured in the retracted S.E. Gyges essay.
Second guy from the right apparently.
oh gods ew that elaboration. euuughh
They get some replies
… … I’m writing this mostly because I’m finding it horrifying that it appears the LessWrong consensus reality is treating “nonconsent” stuff as a cornerstone of how it views women. This somehow seems to increasingly to be the case, seems wrong to me, and contributes to the erasure of some things I consider important.
Didn’t one of Aella’s “studies” into women’s sexuality turn up results that quite a lot of women surveyed had fantasies about being in a submissive role in a relationship or sexual encounter, up to and including aggression? Rationalists would naturally recycle that kind of subjective, context-free nugget of information into proof that most women want men to be dominant and aggressive in real-life flirting or sex. So it follows that it’s fine to approach women this way (though somehow they’re usually approaching people with less power than them, not say, their boss or their boss’s wife). And if they treat a woman this way and she doesn’t like it then they convince themselves that they still didn’t do anything wrong because they had good reason to believe she would like it. They might even think that she’s just pretending she doesn’t like being spoken to or treated that way because she’s been taught it’s disrespectful.
That fucking tweet about how “SlutCon is to help men who are scared of women to start liking women, by putting them in proximity to women who like men and aren’t scared of men” is so evil. The implication is that if women criticize an event where women are sexually assaulted and harassed, they are sabotaging an event whose mission is to stop men from
hatingcough being scared of women, and thus it’s their fault if sexism persists. It’s genuinely so evil. That’s all I can sayCishet men who are riddled with anxiety and have honest difficulty navigating social conventions probably need two-truths-and-a-lie icebreaker circles and a Scrabble party or a cooking class, not whatever the blazes Aella is hosting.
But that would just allow men and women to socialize together in a low stakes environment. That wouldn’t reinforce the idea that men are more important than women, and that women can and should do all the work in their relationships. I mean, this is a setup where the women are expected to display much greater competency and maturity than any of the men involved. The women are expected to like men and not be scared of men, and it’s their job to do a bunch of unpaid work in a scenario that revolves around the feelings and experiences of the men, who are not expected to even like women (!)
The whole thing reinforces male privilege - which it’s probably intended to, because Aella has built herselve a cozy home among virulent woman-haters.
Reiterating your excellent point.
The author Wentworth was just awarded half a million dollars by Jaan Tallinn & Dustin Moskovitz to do “research” at Lightcone Infrastructure. I am going to sign out because I am starting to get thoughts which involve the RCAF and 500-pound bombs (so of course they use the middle school across the street as human shields). Rapists, apologists for racists, and protectors of rapists are the enemies of all mankind.
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
transcription
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>
reminder that “censorship” is 90% advertisers and donors not wanting to get bad PR
