SneerClub

I have a feeling that both Jordan "Crémieux Receuil" Lasker and Curtis Yarvin will be present as guests. https://less.online/

Yud made them list him under both Project Lawful/Planecrash and the Sequences/HPMOR. I think he is really proud of his million words of forum posts about D&D, BDSM, and eugenics, like an elderly L. Ron Hubbard really wanted to write another bestseller.

They hope to get the creator of Worm (the ~~webcomic~~ serial fiction that Ziz Lasota was a fan of) and Dominic Cummings. Also some postrationalists like The Last Psychiatrist and Meaningness.

Most of Bay area LessWrong operated within two nonprofits, MIRI and CFAR. CFAR was ostensibly about live-in workshops teaching rationality skills, you had to dig deeper to see that the skills were to make you a better Effective Altruist or AI 'risk' 'researcher'. Up to the end of 2024 LessWrong and the Lighthaven campus operated within CFAR as independent projects. CFAR proper does not seem to have done much from spring 2020 to spring 2025, but their head Anna Salamon has started to organize new events. Some highlights:

• since 2018 they mortgage their own bed-and-breakfast at a mansion in Bodega Bay, CA (about 10% as expensive as Lighthaven in Berkeley)
• one of their founders left to work as a quant for Jane Street Capital
• Jessica Taylor had something to say about Salamon in her 2021 debate with Scott Alexander about whether MIRI and CFAR were a lot like the Vassarites and Leverage.

Anna Salamon expressed discontent that Michael Vassar was criticizing ideologies and people that were being used as coordination points, and hyperbolically said he was "the devil". Michael Vassar seemed at the time (and in retrospect) to be the single person who was giving me the most helpful information during 2017. ... Anna Salamon frequently got worried when an idea was discussed that could have negative reputational consequences for her or MIRI leaders. She had many rhetorical justifications for suppressing such information. This included the idea that, by telling people information that contradicted Eliezer Yudkowsky's worldview, Michael Vassar was causing people to be uncertain in their own head of who their leader was, which would lead to motivational problems ("akrasia"). (Vassar tweets things like "Aspergers started out as a malphemism for that Ashkenazi heritage though." and people who have met him say he argues that pedophilia is educational! If you think he provides helpful information that is bad news!)

• their June 2026 workshops were at Lighthaven
• Duncan "punch bug" Sabien appeared in the comments of a post in September to say that he would not recommend attending an event with any of these people. He ran Dragon Army while holding down a day job with CFAR and now has a Substack blog.
• in December Salamon published a retrospective that dances around what went wrong and what she will do differently next time
• their fundraiser raised $10,000 and did not have any generous benefactors matching small donations
• someone called Michael "Valentine" Smith left CFAR in 2018, posted a long essay about how he thought obsessing about AI doom in the future was a way not to think about past traumas, and is back to posting profound anthropological insights from his love life to LessWrong:

As far as I know, every culture throughout all known history has made a point of having men and women act as two mostly distinct social clusters most of the time.

Talking about cults and cranks is one angle, but I think you could also talk about how a majority of the leadership of LW and LW-adjacent organizations seem sleazy and dangerous to be around. I hope more people manage to break all the way free from them, rather than quitting CFAR and marrying an OpenPhil staffer, or leaving MIRI and launching their own apocalyptic movement.

The essay by Noelle Perdue has some blind spots but she was struck by one of their kink practices:

The wider network of Effectively Altruistic, Bay Area AI tech brotherhood has been covered on and off- in varying degrees of concern- for their seemingly wide community interest in kink, BDSM and “Consensual Non-Consent,” aka rape play. I experienced this myself, sitting in a circle of self-identified rationalists as they explained to me the pleasures of “red means no” parties; full-contact “rape orgies” where participants are encouraged to fight back.

...

(Being forced to have sex is) a relatively common fantasy in individuals, but one I’ve never seen such widespread community interest in outside the Bay Area.

Scott Alexander and Scott Aaronson mostly want a woman to produce and raise babies. Gwern does not seem to post much about sexuality. Kelsey Piper probably keeps that to Tumblr and Project Lawful although she is queer and polyamorous. Caroline Ellison was into submission to men and being in a hierarchical harem. Duncan Sabien didn't mention BDSM fantasies in his post about what he was like in bed. Yudkowsky is into dominance, sadism, and horny Japanese pop culture. Michael Vassar is into much younger women and at least one person says he advocates sex between adults and girls as young as 12 (but not that he commits such acts). Brent Dill liked master/slave relationships with much younger women which are a kind of consensual non-consent. Polyamory is big in this subculture. I don't know much about Burning Man culture. But I can't recall anyone in Bay Area rationalism and EA expressing interest in rape parties until Aella showed up. So is this like Yudkowsky spreading AI doomerism, and Alexander spreading neoreaction?

There is a difference between old school SoCal kink, where you spend a lot of time making fursuits and paddles and occasionally use them with someone fetching, and Aella's version where you rent a house or a field and go to town on each other. Kink culture stresses skill and technical proficiency whereas Aella likes to feel helpless in the power of big strong men. The Rationalists don't like the protective measures which kinksters have learned from experience, like limiting or banning substance use, safewords, and joining a national or international kink community so you can get a second opinion about that proposition on FetLife. (Yudkowsky has posted "of course I use safewords, but what if I didn't?" and I have seen a claim that the rape parties involve games like drugs roulette- Aella claims she has joked about drugs roulette but never actually tried it). Many of them are hostile to mainstream ideas of informed consent, preferring a Libertarian approach where if you sign a contract what happens after is your responsibility.

Edit to mention Vassar

Edit, in her 2023 How my Consensual Nonconsent Orgies Work, Aella says that she has enough Bay Area people to play with and she is no longer actively recruiting outside her current social network. I did not know her playmates included so many LW people given how many kinksters live in the SF Bay Area and given that these are high-risk group activities in an overwhelming sensory space and LW people tend to be cautious introverts with sensory processing issues. She does not respond to a comment reaching out from another Bay Area playspace, or a question about herpes risk.

Transformer is sorta shit, but this is very relevant to our interests. Didn't know Holden Karnofsky was at Anthropic now.

Richard Ngo (rationalist circle-jerker and former employee of DeepMind and OpenAI) has finally identified the key problem that AI safety people won't address: it won't engage honestly with taboos.

More specifically, AI safety people are failing to acknowledge how much brown people suck. And if AI people can't acknowledge controversial and obvious truths such as this, what's going to happen with their LLMs?

Even Scoot, the bravest of the brave truth-tellers, is so fearful of being tarred a racist that he covers his actual beliefs about black people in jokes and irony.

Full doc title: “The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist”

Per wiki:

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is a 2026 American documentary film directed by Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell. It is produced by the Academy Award-winning teams behind Everything Everywhere All at Once (Daniel Kwan and Jonathan Wang) and Navalny (Shane Boris and Diane Becker).

What to say here? This is a doc being produced by the producer and one of the directors of Everything Everywhere All At Once, who notably have been making efforts to, uh, negotiate? I guess? with AI companies vis a vis making movies. Anyway the title is a piece of shit and this trailer makes it look like this is just critihype the movie. I guess we’ll hear more about it in the coming month.

Really interesting framing this as brought about by thinking about the director’s child, given Yud’s recent comments about how one should raise a daughter if you had certain beliefs about AI.

this was already posted on reddit sneerclub, but I decided to crosspost it here so you guys wouldn’t miss out on Yudkowsky calling himself a genre savy character, and him taking what appears to be a shot at the Zizzians

Source (all the same post): https://app.wafrn.net/fediverse/post/9c658555-dcf2-42c1-b0b6-0bb1b5d99d96

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:djuj57armcsoyzmdfeg7i4qf/post/3meemurjxhk2x

https://reddwarf.app/profile/did:plc:djuj57armcsoyzmdfeg7i4qf/post/3meemurjxhk2x

originally posted in the thread for sneers not worth a whole post, then I changed my mind and decided it is worth a whole post, cause it is pretty damn important

Posted on r/HPMOR roughly one day ago

full transcript:

Epstein asked to call during a fundraiser. My notes say that I tried to explain AI alignment principles and difficulty to him (presumably in the same way I always would) and that he did not seem to be getting it very much. Others at MIRI say (I do not remember myself / have not myself checked the records) that Epstein then offered MIRI $300K; which made it worth MIRI's while to figure out whether Epstein was an actual bad guy versus random witchhunted guy, and ask if there was a reasonable path to accepting his donations causing harm; and the upshot was that MIRI decided not to take donations from him. I think/recall that it did not seem worthwhile to do a whole diligence thing about this Epstein guy before we knew whether he was offering significant funding in the first place, and then he did, and then MIRI people looked further, and then (I am told) MIRI turned him down.

Epstein threw money at quite a lot of scientists and I expect a majority of them did not have a clue. It's not standard practice among nonprofits to run diligence on donors, and in fact I don't think it should be. Diligence is costly in executive attention, it is relatively rare that a major donor is using your acceptance of donations to get social cover for an island-based extortion operation, and this kind of scrutiny is more efficiently centralized by having professional law enforcement do it than by distributing it across thousands of nonprofits.

In 2009, MIRI (then SIAI) was a fiscal sponsor for an open-source project (that is, we extended our nonprofit status to the project, so they could accept donations on a tax-exempt basis, having determined ourselves that their purpose was a charitable one related to our mission) and they got $50K from Epstein. Nobody at SIAI noticed the name, and since it wasn't a donation aimed at SIAI itself, we did not run major-donor relations about it.

This reply has not been approved by MIRI / carefully fact-checked, it is just off the top of my own head.

Does anyone know what this June 2019 text from Epstein is about? I have added some links to RationalWiki and Wikipedia ~~but not corrected spelling~~ and corrected OCR errors. Was it at one of the institutions he sponsored like MIT Media Lab? Or more like his conference in the Virgin Islands? It seems to mix mainstream figures and people in the Libertarian/LessWrong network.

Another correspondent in 2016 suggested inviting Scott Alexander Siskind to speak at a different event Epstein was involved in. The correspondent has a Substack which cites Siskind in 2025.

Obviously just because Epstein had heard of a public figure does not mean that they knew him.

Epstein's words begin below:

• List for summer talks. David Pizarro. Professor of Psychology and Philosopher at Cornell Univcrsit
• Eric Weinstein, Mathematician
• Matthew Putman, Scientist
• Paul Saffo, Technology Forecaster, and Professor of Engineering
• Lori Santos, Professor ofPsychology and Cognitive Science
• Janna Levin, Theoretical Cosmologist
• Ev Williams, Internet Entrepreneur
• Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Author
• Heiner Gocbbels, Composer, and Director
• Martine Rothblatt, Lawyer and Entrepreneur
• Peter Thiel, Venture Capitalist, and Entrepreneur
• Richard Thaler, Behavioral Economics
• Barbara Tversky, Professor of Psychology
• Michael Vassar, Futurist, Activist
• Bret Weinstein, Biologist, and Evolutionary Theorist
• Susan Hockfield, MIT President, Professor of Neuroscience
• David Deutsch, Physicist
• Eliezer Yudkowsky, Al Researcher
• N. Jeremy Kasdin, Astrophysicist
• Carl Zimmer, Science Writer
• Douglas Rushkoff, Media Theorist
• Eric Topol, Cardiologist
• Dustin Yellin, Artist
• Sherry Turkic, Professor of Social Studies
• Taylor Mac, Actor
• Stephen Johnson, Author
• Martin Hagglund, Swedish Philosopher and Scholar of Modernist Literature
• Thomas Metzinger, Philosopher, and Professor of Theoretical Philosophy
• Bjarke Ingels, Danish Architect, Founder of BIG, currently working on Floating Cities/Sustainable Habitats project
• Kai-Fu Lee, Venture Capitalist, Technology Executive, and Al Expert, developed the world's first speaker-independent continuous speech recognition system
• Poppy Crum, Neuroscientist, and Technologist, Chief Scientist at Dolby Laboratories, Adjunct Professor at Stanford University (Computer Research in Music)
• Neil Burgess, Researcher, and Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, investigating the role of the hippocampus in spatial navigation
• Paul Sloom, Psychologist, and Researcher exploring how children and adults understand the physical and secin' world, with a special focus on language, religion and morality
• Brian Cox, Physicist, and Professor of Particle Physics, Presenter of Science Programs
• Eythor Bender. CEO of Berkeley Bionics, Innovator and Business Leader in human augmentation (bionics and robotics)
• Gwynne Shotwell President. and COO at SpaceX, Engineer. listed in 2018 as the 59th most powerful woman in the world by Forbes
• Jaap de Roodc. Associate Professor of Evolution (of parasites) and Ecology, focusing on how parasites attack monarch butterflies and in return how butterflies have the ability to self-medicate
• Jim Holt, American Philosopher, and Contributor to the New York Times writing on string theory, time, the universe, and philosophy
• Vijay Komar, Indian Roboticist and UPS Foundation Professor in School of Engineering & Applied Science:. became Dean of Penn Engineering, studies flying and cooperative robots
• Hugh Herr, Biophysicist, Engineer, and Rock Climber, builds prosthetic knees, legs, and ankles that fuse biomechanics with microprocessors at MIT
• Gabriel Zucman, French Economist at UC Berkeley. best known for his research on tax havens, inequalities, and global wealth
• Fci-Fei Li, Professor of Computer Science, Director of Stanford's Human-Ccntered Al, works as Chief Scientist of Al/ML of Google Cloud
• Dennis Hong, Korean American Mechanical Engineer, Professor and Founding Director of RoMeLa (Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory) of the Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Department at UCLA
• Misha (Mikhail) Leonidovich Gromov, American

I searched for “eugenics” on yud’s xcancel (i will never use twitter, fuck you elongated muskrat) because I was bored, got flashbanged by this gem. yud, genuinely what are you talking about

originally on reddit sneerclub, but reddit didn't like links to Yarvin's substack

archive: https://archive.is/olhGc

dead dove, approach with care before eating

Its almost the end of the year so most US nonprofits which want to remain nonprofits have filed Form 990 for 2024 including some run by our dear friends. This is a mandatory financial report.

• Lightcone Infrastructure is here. They operate LessWrong and the Lighthaven campus in Berkeley but list no physical assets; someone on Reddit says that they let fellow travelers like Scott Alexander use their old rented office for free. "We are a registered 501(c)3 and are IMO the best bet you have for converting money into good futures for humanity." They also published a book and website with common-sense, data-based advice for Democratic Party leaders called Deciding to Win which I am sure fills a gap in the literature. Edit: their November 2024 call for donations talks how they spend $16.5m on real estate and $6m on renovations then saw donations collapse is here, an analysis is here
• CFAR is here. They seem to own the campus in Berkeley but it is encumbered with a mortgage ("Land, buildings, and equipment ... less depreciation; $22,026,042 ... Secured mortgages and notes payable, $20,848,988"). I don't know what else they do since they stopped teaching rationality workshops in 2016 or so and pivoted to worrying about building Colossus. They have nine employees with salaries from $112k to $340k plus a president paid $23k/year
• MIRI is here. They pay Yud ($599,970 in 2024!) and after failing to publish much research on how to build Friend Computer they pivoted to arguing that Friend Computer might not be our friend. Edit: they had about $16 million in mostly financial assets (cash, investments, etc.) at end of year but spent $6.5m against $1.5m of revenue in 2024. They received $25 million in 2021 and ever since they have been consuming those funds rather than investing them and living off the interest.
• BEMC Foundation is here. This husband-and-wife organization gives about $2 million/year each to Vox Future Perfect and GiveWell from an initial $38m in capital (so they can keep giving for decades without adding more capital). Edit: The size of the donations to Future Perfect and GiveWell swing from year to year so neither can count on the money, and they gave out $6.4m in 2024 which is not sustainable.
• The Clear Fund (GiveWell) is here. They have the biggest wad of cash and the highest cashflow.
• Edit: Open Philanthropy (now Coefficient Giving) is here (they have two sister organizations). David Gerard says they are mainly a way for Dustin Moskevitz the co-founder of Facebook to organize donations, like the Gates, Carnegie, and Rockefeller foundations. They used to fund Lightcone.
• Edit: Animal Charity Evaluators is here. They have funded Vox Future Perfect (in 2020-2021) and the longtermist kind of animal welfare ("if humans eating pigs is bad, isn't whales eating krill worse?")
• Edit: Survival and Flourishing Fund does not seem to be a charity. Whereas a Lightcone staffer says that SFF funds Lightcone, SFF say that they just connect applicants to donors and evaluate grant applications. So who exactly is providing the money? Sometimes its Jaan Tallinn of Skype and Kazaa.
• Centre for Effective Altruism is mostly British but has a US wing since March 2025 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/333737390
• Edit: Giving What We Can seems like a mainstream "bednets and deworming pills" type of charity
• Edit: Givedirectly Inc is an excellent idea in principle (give money to poor people overseas and let them figure out how best to use it) but their auditor flagged them for Material noncompliance and Material weakness in internal controls. The mistakes don't seem sinister (they classified $39 million of donations as conditional rather than unconditional- ie. with more restrictions than they actually had). GiveDirectly, Give What We Can, and GiveWell are all much better funded than the core LessWrong organizations.

Since CFAR seem to own Lighthaven, its curious that Lightcone head Oliver Habryka threatens to sell it if Lightcone shut down. One might almost imagine that boundaries between all these organizations are not as clear as the org charts make it seem. SFGate says that it cost $16.5 million plus renovations:

Who are these owners? The property belongs to a limited liability company called Lightcone Rose Garden, which appears to be a stand-in for the nonprofit Center for Applied Rationality and its project, Lightcone Infrastructure. Both of these organizations list the address, 2740 Telegraph Ave., as their home on public filings. They’ve renovated the inn, named it Lighthaven, and now use it to host events, often related to the organizations’ work in cognitive science, artificial intelligence safety and “longtermism.”

Habryka was boasting about the campus in 2024 and said that Lightcone budgeted $6.25 million on renovating the campus that year. It also seems odd for a nonprofit to spend money renovating a property that belongs to another nonprofit.

On LessWrong Habryka also mentions "a property we (Lightcone) own right next to Lighthaven, which is worth around $1M" and which they could use as collateral for a loan. Lightcone's 2024 paperwork listed the only assets as cash and accounts receivable. So either they are passing around assets like the last plastic cup at a frat party, or they bought this recently while the dispute with the trustees was ongoing, or Habryka does not know what his organization actually owns.

The California end seems to be burning money, as many movements with apocalyptic messages and inexperienced managers do. Revenue was significantly less than expenses and assets of CFAR are close to liabilities. CFAR/Lightcone do not have the $4.9 million liquid assets which the FTX trustees want back and claim their escrow company lost another $1 million of FTX's money.

A straightforward dismantling of AI fearmongering videos uploaded by Kyle "Science Thor" Hill, Sci "The Fault in our Research" Show, and Kurz "We're Sorry for Summarizing a Pop-Sci Book" Gesagt over the past few months. The author is a computer professional but their take is fully in line with what we normally post here.

I don't have any choice sneers. The author is too busy hunting for whoever is paying SciShow and Kurzgesagt for these videos. I do appreciate that they repeatedly point out that there is allegedly a lot of evidence of people harming themselves or others because of chatbots. Allegedly.

People connected to LessWrong and the Bay Area surveillance industry often cite David Chapman's "Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths in Subculture Evolution" to understand why their subcultures keep getting taken over by jerks. Chapman is a Buddhist mystic who seems rationalist-curious. Some people use the term postrationalist.

Have you noticed that Chapman presents the founders of nerdy subcultures as innocent nerds being pushed around by the mean suits? But today we know that the founders of Longtermism and LessWrong all had ulterior motives: Scott Alexander and Nick Bostrom were into race pseudoscience, and Yudkowsky had his kinks (and was also into eugenics and Libertarianism). HPMOR teaches that intelligence is the measure of human worth, and the use of intelligence is to manipulate people. Mollie Gleiberman makes a strong argument that "bednet" effective altruism with short-term measurable goals was always meant as an outer doctrine to prepare people to hear the inner doctrine about how building God and expanding across the Universe would be the most effective altruism of all. And there were all the issues within LessWrong and Effective Altruism around substance use, abuse of underpaid employees, and bosses who felt entitled to hit on subordinates. A '60s rocker might have been cheated by his record label, but that does not get him off the hook for crashing a car while high on nose candy and deep inside a groupie.

I don't know whether Chapman was naive or creating a smokescreen. Had he ever met the thinkers he admired in person?

Form 990 for these organizations mentions many names I am not familiar with such as Tyler Emerson. Many people in these spaces have romantic or housing partnerships with each other, and many attend meetups and cons together. A MIRI staffer claims that Peter Thiel funded them from 2005 to 2009, we now know when Jeffrey Epstein donated. Publishing such a thing is not very nice since these are living persons frequently accused of questionable behavior which never goes to court (and some may have left the movement), but does a concise list of dates, places, and known connections exist?

Maybe that social graph would be more of a dot. So many of these people date each other and serve on each other's boards and live in the SF Bay Area, Austin TX, the NYC area, or Oxford, England. On the enshittified site people talk about their Twitter and Tumblr connections.

archive: https://archive.is/jS1PO

much more sneerclub than techtakes

yes, that's his high-volume account, linked from @ESYudkowsky

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hun4EaiSQnNmB9xkd/tell-people-as-early-as-possible-it-s-not-going-to-work-out

archive: https://archive.is/NSVXR

Oliver wrote an internal Lightcone Infrastructure memo that lists the top enemies of the Rationality movement. He saw fit to post his Enemies List to the site, because that's a very normal thing to do.

no. 2 is a neoreactionary troll who ran a downvote bot in 2013-2014.

Emile Torres is only #3, sorry Emile some of us are just better at increasing existential risk

no. 4 is Ziz. I am officially considered worse than the literally murderous death cult.

what can i say some of us have just got it

also I trounce complete pikers like (checks notes) Peter Thiel

LessWrong used to call themselves a "phyg" in the hope that the word "cult" would not show up in Google so much as being associated with them