Real EA thinking there. Using spurious logic to provide a rational-sounding explanation for doing something bad you wanted to do anyway.

Everything written by AI boosters tracks much more clearly if you simply replace “AI” with “cocaine”. I shall demonstrate! (Not linking to OP, because it’s trash.)

“Let’s pretend you’re the only person at your company using cocaine. You decide you’re going to impress your employer, and work for 8 hours a day at 10x productivity. You knock it out of the park and make everyone else look terrible by comparison. […] In this scenario, you capture 100% of the value from your adopting cocaine.”

JWZ.org, February 2026

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.

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…

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.

Way back in 2008 someone proposed a “project” where women at sci-fi conventions would wear pins indicating whether they were open to random strangers asking them if they could grope them. This caused much angry commentary and suggestions of a “swift kick to the balls” project. That disaster was still…still…somehow more consent conscious than what the Rationalists are doing

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 hating cough being scared of women, and thus it’s their fault if sexism persists. It’s genuinely so evil. That’s all I can say

A ritual relying on a terribly eurocentric history of humanity, that quotes Nick Bostrom alongside Galileo and Thomas Edison? Why, LessWrongers, you shouldn’t have…no really, you shouldn’t have.

Also they do the “that’s a nice quote isn’t it…it’s from Hitler!” bit, which seems like kind of a cheap routine to have in your ritual.

Looking at the course page, it seems like the students might have chosen the subjects themselves. I did not know Aella was Chicana. Is she? I guess technically she wouldn’t have to be, but all the other topics students have chosen are about Chicanos.

Émile Torres writing last year:

[…] Nick Beckstead, a noted EA, argued in 2013 that, given the “overwhelming” moral importance of the far future — “millions, billions, and trillions” of years from now — we should prioritize saving the lives of people in rich countries over those in poor countries, other things being equal. The reason is that people in rich countries are better positioned to influence the far future.

And that about sums it up. They don’t care. They simply don’t care. Beckstead explains that it’s better to focus on the rich countries because “rich countries have substantially more innovation” and “their workers are more economically productive”. He apparently presented these ideas in a graduate thesis: I hope he got a bad grade.

What the fuck is this and why am I getting emails from avaaz about it

https://humanstatement.org/

I feel like every time I turn around there’s another baffling anti/ai project

They’re tarnishing the Alpha course’s¹ hard-won cult branding.

¹ They might not seem too culty based on that Wikipedia page but if I remember correctly Private Eye printed some very critical stuff about the courses and people associated with them in recent years. Details not forthcoming until I flick through my big stack of old magazines…

If someone is scared that if they criticize someone they will be “retaliated against”, that seems like a sign that something is really bad. I’ve had to deal with some situations like this myself while organizing events (and I haven’t always done a good job) but surely you should at least ask some more questions and err on the side of caution.

Having said all that, this guy has done some research and has exposed an awful EA workplace, which is a good thing.

From that post about Nonlinear:

I reached out to some references Kat listed, which were positive to strongly positive. However I also got a strongly negative reference — someone else who I informed about the decision told me they knew former employees who felt taken advantage of around things like salary. However the former employees reportedly didn’t want to come forward due to fear of retaliation and generally wanting to get away from the whole thing, and the reports felt very vague and hard for me to concretely visualize, but nonetheless the person strongly recommended against inviting Kat and Drew.

I didn’t feel like this was a strong enough reason to bar someone from a space — or rather, I did, but vague anonymous descriptions of very bad behavior being sufficient to ban someone is a system that can be straightforwardly abused, so I don’t want to use such a system.

This pretty much explains how and why the workplace culture in so many TESCREAL orgs is so, so bad.

Edit: OH MY GOD, Emerson is the Emerson from Mugglenet dot com??? I used to read that site when I was a little Harry Potter fan. Jesus. He should have stuck to correcting people’s punctuation in the Hall of Shame.

I dunno, I didn’t get much out of it because I found all the connections hard to follow. That article might actually need a diagram showing all the connections between the people featured, but that probably wouldn’t help with the claims that TESCREAL critics are conspiracy theorists…

Remove one or two of those reward circuits, especially if they’re poorly adapted to the modern environment, and the human becomes more generally capable. I suspect that my own inability to feel love is one example, the amygdalectomy is another, and the general pattern of high-IQ people being somewhat autistic is a third.

I managed not to click on the linked blog post about the author’s inability to feel love.

I’m sure there’s someone out there!

I will admit I was imagining a grumbling LessWronger reading this and going “oh, so it’s wrong to care about malaria?!?!” I probably need to take some time off social media.

Thank you, that’s very interesting. To be clear I am not pro-malaria, but sometimes groups are against bad things for weird reasons. Like Scientologists campaigning against abusive psychiatric practices because L. Ron Hubbard was mad at psychologists for not taking him seriously.

Watching this online economic lecture thing for college and it just got mentioned that repeated bouts of malaria in children can cause mental disability (wikipedia says “brain damage” and “increased risk of neurological and cognitive deficits”). I have to admit I did not know this.

…is the only reason EAs were ever into “malaria nets” because of their obsession with g and their conviction that increasing it is a panacea?