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SE GygesSeptember 17, 2026 at 10:33 PM EDT

some middle rat history, w/clarifications: 1) I should have titled my previous "AI Safety Is Mostly A Sex Cult In Berkeley, California" so people would stop arguing with me about people who aren't in Berkeley, California. 2) The sex cult part of this is both predatory and integral to what they do. Back in days of yore, anything sex-cult-like involving MIRI was probably not the main event. People believed in the cause, and gave money to that specific org, and &c, &c As time has gone on, many who noticed that "rationalism" was the house of yud, and disgraceful, have rebranded as "EA". So the rationalist tribe has been losing its war for money and attention in the space to EA and Anthropic for a while, and they are getting more desperate, and it kind of seems like Aella specifically is effectively the cultural leader of rationalism right now. Yudkowsky is the major thought-leader about AI and the paperclipper specifically, and Dario/Anthropic are actually a rival faction in their movement. The rationalist "stop research forever" faction at Lighthaven is still the most influential concerning how people think of AI risk, though $$-starved So my first point is that since they use sex as recruitment and ideological enforcement, no, sorry, the sex is relevant. See here clearly using sex as ideological control. Aella offers sex as incentive to quit and blow the whistle on Anthropic. Three days later, someone does. Prob a coincidence

e/acc, distinct from EA, is a rival ideology about technology. (somewhere in this mix someone called me e/acc. i am not. if you're going to classify me in this space, i am something like a Kurzweilian h+ e/acc is a troll ideology for upsetting EA people and scamming pmarca.)

this one is also sex for ideological control but it's actually about overthrowing the current government. i think she's kind of based for this one, sorry. still goes to show the pattern of openly and directly advertising this

anyway, they also advertise for events on fetlife and seem to be having sex with employees + coworkers and are arguably defrauding their nonprofits by giving salaries to their partners and holding sex events at lighthaven so they made this a public concern, and the face of their organizations i would have hoped that "recruiting young idealists via harry potter fan fiction for a non-profit that is mostly concerned with who they can have sex with" clearly indicated that this was a predatory pattern i am pretty sure anyone objecting has developed toxic sex-positivity, which baffles me as it happens i can pretty clearly demonstrate the movement enables and promotes predatory behavior but the story's ugly. consider yourself trigger warned. here's a time magazine article about EA group houses, polyamory, etc if you want prestige news about it. time.com

if you want another example i'm not going to describe what's in this post but if you think it's chill probably fuck you

a cult is also traditionally called a "high control group". this is a long document from nate soares, head of MIRI, about how you should communicate with him. if i recall correctly, it was for employees. i think it proves the point by itself. utterly martian, too docs.google.com

this is from 2024. the cnc parties referred to are, at least some of them, Aella's. someone had to remind me of this. i have read so many things like this that I forgot about this one.

so to jump into rat history in the middle, a whole lot of them moved to the Bay Area in the 2010s, and this worked out very well for some and horribly for others i think of this as sort of a flywheel, where what comes in is raw zeal. people show up, and they believe in the cause, and they give what they can. if you're talented, educated, etc, it is the best professional network on earth. since Peter Thiel is most of the rats' funding, often his ventures so this top strata gets jobs at startups, or companies, or at least pretty good non-profits. they offer their work or salaries. the next tier down ends up paying for classes or something at rationalist stuff, and maybe they end up somehow involved in the community or employed somewhere, at least at the bottom of this strata we have people who are not particularly skilled. a bunch of them are runaways. some of them are teenagers. they are disproportionately trans, at least in part because trans teenagers are prone to getting thrown out of their houses. they have nothing to offer but sex. this flywheel is the whole group of people. tons of the most high-energy, nerdy people on earth are there. it's enough human potential that you can siphon off just a little bit of it and do amazing things. the parts of this that are rotten blow up, of course. Brent Dill is invited to the Bay Area by Scott Alexander. He has a history of posting extreme BDSM and vaguely fascist things. This is chill, though, because he's clever and a good DM. he is handy. willing to volunteer for stuff. so mid-tier. he ends up as the leader for Black Lotus, a Burning Man camp that they run. i understand that the members other than him were lovely the best record for this one is here, because the only good record of rationalism's history is kept by its enemies it is Very Bad reddit.com

note: 1) he exploited his partners' desperation for money and housing 2) he used BDSM concepts to justify doing things that are well over the line into abuse 3) IMHO, it seems likely he would have killed someone at some point 4) everyone seems to have felt CFAR covered it up because he was useful this is the play. all of your friends are rationalists. your housing is rationalist. what you read is rationalist. your job is rationalist, if you have one. you're teenage runaway or a PhD who threw away your career for this but you're saving the world and if they cast you out you have nothing in return for this precarity you have access to the best job network on the planet and a house and friends and if you ever disagree that AI is the most important and scariest thing ever you will lose all of that. you're invited to a rape orgy. your boyfriend wants to do no safeword. can you say no? anyway: CFAR is the Center for Applied Rationality, which offered kind of bullshit "rationalist" self-help classes. to the credit of the community at large, they seem to have recoiled en masse and refused to take stuff at CFAR any more. brent dill happened 2018, and cfar shuttered 2020 they came back in 2025 though. if you can get past the waitlist, you too can attend a four day workshop in applied rationality. business is probably booming. AI actually works now.

the Black Lotus story isn't really mine. i think this is probably the most thorough single telling of it. black lotus the one that blew up and that directly implicated rationalist leadership. it is not, really, unique. i get the impression bad shit was happening rather a lot. x.com

one of the interesting features of the movement is that they are extremely successful at disowning their failures, and getting their failures to disown themselves. SBF, 1000% for sure a rationalist, is willing to fall on his sword and say all his affiliations and everyone he gave money to was fake. oh, right: Brent Dill is the event that drives Ziz Lasota of the Zizians all the way off the deep end single page version skyview.social

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