ie the eventual safety team reach out included one of their ppl asking me to tell them what investigation vibecamp did, and i found out that they don’t tell ‘junior members’ of the safety team about past things

Anna Salamon confessed to hiding information from subordinates at CFAR before COVID to control them, and Duncan Sabien complained about a former employer (probably CFAR) making promises to keep him onboard then secretly breaking them. One thing that pisses me off about this space that there is the refusal to learn and change after people got hurt. I don’t know what happened between Yudkowsky and his live-in protégé, or him and Jeffrey Epstein, but someone with those experiences should not be talking about sexual misconduct and abuse of power like he talks about it in 2026.

Young, confident men (like Internet Libertarians) and sheltered men (like wealthy tech workers and investors) often convince themselves that rules don’t apply to them because they can prevent any mistakes with their big beautiful minds, whether that is investing or substance use or firearms safety or kink protocols. Sometimes they get a Darwin Award but other times they hurt other people.

I am glad you are in a healthier place now, breaking away from Rationalism communities can be hard.

Thanks so much for telling your story.

Having substance testing and trained medics is definitely important at an event where people want to alter their consciousness. GHB is a new name to me but you definitely need educated staff and clear rules at sexually charged events with substance use. It sounds like these spaces are starting to bring in some harm-reduction practices but terrible things still happen at their events and many leaders still try to cover up and blame victims.

Substance use is hard for me to understand since I have not met these people in person, but some Bay Area Rationalists seemed to think that LSD contributed to some bad situations, and reporters talk about workers and executives using ketamine.

The person who talked about microdosing meth as a substitute for Adderall was writing about Vibecamp (I have not reread this post, please use discretion if anything about Rationalist events could be traumatizing).

Someone called Fran has a story of being sexually harassed at the Center for Effective Altruism (and assaulted in other communities).

Hi, I am so sorry for what happened. I believe you and the other people with stories of abuse in these communities. Nobody should face unwanted sexual contact. I hope you have local support.

Could you tell us how closely the online communities you have met relate to pre-existing communities for kink, non-monogamy, and responsible substance use? Because I never met them in person I don’t have a good feeling for the differences between LessWrong, EA, TPOT, Vibecamp, and Hereticon, but the Bay Area Rationalists don’t seem like people who have a float at Folsom or sign their whole house up for a bondage workshop with people who have rigged for kink.com. It sounds more like a rationalist will sometimes ask a friend who is a kinkster or experienced substance user but not a rationalist for advice.

Is there anything you would like us to change about how we talk about all this?

He also alludes to the Robin Hanson/Scott Alexander guff about the need to distribute sex to needy men. The specific story he links involves an antisemitic edgelord who seems to be planning violence after his last girlfriend leaves him.

LessWrongers, if anyone is reading this, there are spaces where you can be social and not be exposed to these vile ideas which will destroy you and maybe some of the lonely people who give you a chance.

He also launched a paid dating blog on Substack, which is as on-brand as starting a cult. This one uses the Market model which I do not recommend (what I recommend is “attend collaborative activities with people of a gender you find hot, especially creative or physical activities, and if you like them let them know”: this is extremely hard for many of us, but the solution is ‘find someone extroverted who likes local activities and go to the ones he or she recommends’ not reading a blog). https://www.secondperson.dating/p/markets-in-dating

A comment complained about:

• NYT bullying Scott.
• EA cancelling Robin Hanson.

For a few glorious hours there were 69 replies to the Stubsack for 17 May. Nice!

This may be code for “I don’t want to see uppity women, brown people, and queer people in my shows.”

He also has a take on dating:

Nostalgic for the simple days of arranged marriages and/or circa-2013 OkCupid, Rationalists have taken to writing “date me” documents online. … They credit me as inspiration. This is ironic because A, I stole the idea from Aella and B, neither Aella nor I posted dating advertisements. We posted dating applications.

The first comment is by a man who wants the Internet to know that most men have no chance of getting a hu-mon fe-male interested in them and should just give up (Men Going Their Own Way). I thought the incels and PUA mostly moved off SlateStar but they must still be part of the subculture.

In 2017, a LessWronger discovered index investing but decided that most people were doing it wrong: why keep an emergency fund in cash or other safe assets when stocks have the greatest long-term return? He mentions that the US stock market lost half its value in 2007-8, and that if you hold stocks in your employer they may lose value at the same time as you are laid off, but he never uses his business degree to think through “if the stock market crashes, I may lose my job and have to draw on my savings.”

The investment platforms I mentioned can convert your index funds into cash and send it to your bank account in 4-5 days, so you don’t need to hold more cash than you’d need on a 4 day notice. I keep about 50% more than my average monthly credit card bill, so I can pay my cards on time with autopay.

Looks like SCHD is not heavily invested in US financial institutions holding the bad debt which is the potential pitfall I saw. Its hard not to invest in banks since they literally have a license to make money, but a lot of them are going to lose money when the chatbot companies can’t pay back their loans.

Socially responsible investing / ESG also does pretty well at screening out the surveillance industry.

The few US equities in my retirement fund don’t track the S&P500 or Nasdaq. They track an index by Solactive in Frankfurt and are weighted by float (the value of shares available for public trading) not market capitalization (the value of all shares, including the ones owned by the company). They also require that a stock be at least ten days after IPO to be included. I think they will be a more resistant to bending the rules than an American index although I would not put it past German banks to buy tranches of bad debt from the Amerikaner.

You check what you own, especially your bond fund (government bonds are safe, if it has anything else look closely) and your investments in financial firms (see if any of them have been buying up this bad debt). Company-run pension plans are usually scams (a financial institution sells them a bunch of expensive actively managed products not a few cheap index funds) but picking the best of a bad lot still has big returns and sometimes it just takes one or two employees to get them to add something much better to the list.

weirdly sbf-shaped failure mode

Rationalists love to talk and post, and segfault had family who thought he was using too much Adderall.

In 2024, Duncan Sabien posted an interminable essay on abusers and people he thinks took advantage of him. Some of the references to a former employer may be to CFAR. Ozy also had a cheery aside abut how in rationalist organizations which the Rats have disavowed, “everyone was a victim and everyone was a perpetrator. The trainer who broke you down in a marathon six-hour debugging session was unable to sleep because of the panic attacks caused by her own.”

Some of the things which happened inside these communities must have been heartbreaking, and I hope that many people left and got on with their lives rather than founding their own dysfunctional organization with their own minions to abuse.

I think “probably-neurodivergent Jews with less sense than Isaac-frigging-Asimov about where ‘what if we are the master race?’” leads" and “they say its about self-perfection for anyone, but actually its about finding special people preordained from birth for greatness” are relatable themes. There have been a few essays recently about people who saw where SoCal tech ideology was going in the 1990s like The Intolerable Hypocrisy of Cyberlibertarianism, another named a female writer for Wired or Byte who is mostly forgotten (Paulina Borsook?)

The overlap with ritual magic is also a deep dark pool and most people know someone purifying himself and issuing ritual incantations to a bot.

That actually seems like the prediction market sort of did its job in this case?

And I think the odds of “yes” started out high because someone best $10-20k only to withdraw it after reading the ACX post. Most people can’t afford to invest thousands of dollars in a bet that may never be resolved.