I’d never heard of him but this curriculum for a class about futurology seems great and pointed.

Both ranting and raving will be involved.

Hmm…how about R.A.V.I.N.G: Rise Against Voracious IT Nazi Ghouls?

Hmmm…

• Reaction Watch (like retraction watch but, you know. reactionaries)

• Mad At Reactionary Techies

• Action Against Computer Cults

• Computer Users Against Reactionary Losers

• Silicon Valley Antifa

• ???

I think anything with language about advocacy, speaking out, justice, fairness etc. is good because it contrasts with the EA belief that public policy must only be discussed in a totally values neutral way with any personal standpoints optimized out.

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…

A fantasy you’re ultimately in control of, versus an unpredictable real life scenario involving people you have to have as coworkers? Surely, they can’t be that different /s

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

What We Tell AI, a project collecting anonymous confessions about people’s AI use. Project was created by Synthetic Wisdom, a “emerging practice” dedicated to “public sense-making” about AI. It’s not clear who’s funding them (or if anyone is). The confessions are interesting even if I’m a little skeptical of the framing (chatbot use might be ubiquitous but it’s not inevitable).

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.

Finally read Watchmen for the first time recently and yeah, it is really good. Having the plot spoiled for me years ago took some of the enjoyment out of it for me, but there was still a lot in there to enjoy and think about. And anyone who’s read it will know how it chimes with TESCREAL criticism…

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.

This NY newspaper still makes slop the old fashioned way

And he still works there! I guess it might be hard to get a new job with “presided over largest theft of labor in human history” on your CV.

#3 suggests that people in tech have gotten way wayyy too comfortable with saying “hey, I know that company’s evil, but it’s a really good job” about companies that make software for arms manufacturers or ICE or surveillance, so of course people who think AI might kill us all think it’s ok to work for AI companies even if it might cause an extermination.

I’m already thinking about complaining about some of the stuff he’s said¹, so that might be a good idea. However I think my university’s policy for students is that you can use AI to start research, summarise notes etc. so he might not be breaking any rules.

¹ Inappropriate questions to students. Not sexually inappropriate, just inappropriate.