(Adapted and expanded from Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23rd August 2026)

You came up with your own calendar system centered around your institution and you want to tell me you’re not a cult??? - istewart

One of the least online TESCRAL groups is the Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth in Vermont. They are Buddhist Singularitarians, lead by a guru named Soryu Forall who studied at monasteries in Japan, ~~China,~~ and India from 1998 to 2007. Early on he taught meditation in the local Quaker hall and mindfulness in schools and hospitals and coauthored a book on early Buddhism. Around 2013 money started to come in from people in the California tech industry (per The Atlantic) and Forall started to acquire rural property where he and his disciples could meditate about how AI is going to end the world. Renouncing worldly things like "heating" and "minimum wage laws" probably helps. The umbrella organization seems to be CEDAR, the academy in Vermont is MAPLE, the branch in Berkeley is OAK, and the branch in Canada is WILLOW. The nonprofit is the Center for Mindful Learning. Their Form 990 is here but not very detailed. Many of his disciples are Rationalists and Effective Altruists from the West Coast. As you would expect, some very nasty things seem to happen at these retreats.

Background

Forall is a Rationalist guru out of central casting:

• born 1977 (aged 36 in 2013, so about the same age as Yudkowsky and only seven years older than Alexander)
• middle-class parents
• "intense" as a child
• watched Terminator 2: Judgment Day at an impressionable age
• eventually finished a bachelor's degree but no traditional jobs or volunteer work on record
• gives endless lectures based on pop science and thinking really hard about how scary AI could be
• grandiose goals like "design a trustworthy religion"
• boundlessly confident
• alleged to date his students
• dreams of creating supermen (saints) who can solve problems no ordinary human can)

He does not talk to reporters about connections to Rationalism or EA and the two Old Media stories on the Academy did not pull that thread (The Atlantic and Vermont Community News & Citizen). He told one reporter that he admires Yuval Noah Harari (transhumanism-curious historian), Zak Stein (philosopher with many 'AI safety' connections who serves on the board of MAPLE), and Tristan Harris (a grad-school dropout turned 'product philosopher' at Google). Rationalists and EAs tend to assume everyone knows about him and that living on his compound for a few months or a few years is the kind of thing one does. Several whistleblowers cross-posted to LessWrong and got a lively response where everyone takes for granted that people in their circles have traveled to MAPLE (first whistleblower, second whistleblower).

One of many red flags is that Forall boasts of a long list of spiritual or martial-arts affiliations:

Few Westerners have trained as deeply in traditional wisdom lineages as Forall. As a teenager, he entered a Rinzai monastery, where he was ordained under the renowned Zen Master Shodo Harada Roshi. He spent a decade training in monasteries around Asia in the Zen, Tibetan, Ch’an, and Ambedkar Buddhist traditions. While in India, he led community efforts to combat the caste system’s injustices. Since returning to the United States, he has continued to regularly work with Harada Roshi, while also training in Abenaki, Lakota and Diné Native American traditions. (A local news story claims he also studied in Israel)

Shodo Harada aka. Harada Roshi is Japanese and very old (b. 1940). Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was Indian. Chan Buddhism is Chinese. The Abenaki, Lakota, and Diné live in North America. Greedy teachers often claim a long list of titles to impress young students who have no way to discover that their knowledge is skin-deep or to deflect when students ask questions they can't answer. Reporters often focus on his time in Japan so may be unsure about his other travels. This academic page on American Buddhists is a bit confused about where he fits too. The Japanese take teachers declaring students authentic heirs to the lineage seriously, and it looks like Forall never received that endorsement. Someone called Gordon Worley explains:

Traditionally, it's pretty common that anyone leading anything in Zen has dharma transmission. In Japan, even the lowliest temple priest has received transmission, though not permission to teach. Soryu, to the best of my knowledge, is in the opposite situation: he received some limited permission to teach (though the bounds of that permission are unclear to me), but did not receive transmission, so he cannot be said to be fully initiated into the lineage in which he trained and thus can't pass it on.

What this effectively means is that he teaches based on charismatic authority. This is not unheard of in religions, though it is unusual within Zen. A great many religions rely on charismatic authority in some form, though the strongest version of it I'm familiar with is in Evangelical Christianity.

Charismatic authority is classic rationalism. These people do not like to find a place in existing institutions where people with more skill and experience judge newcomers. They want to impress people who have no technical knowledge or training with their language and physical presence. I don't think any students can tell if Soryu's Pali hymns and commentary on ancient texts are correct.

They are connected to a movement called Second Renaissance which uses the same cartographer as Scott Alexander used for his map of the LessWrong blogosphere.

Allegations and Responses (cw: sexual and emotional abuse)

Around 2021 a student said that she was raped by a teacher at OAK then expelled when she reported this and Forall shut down any official response. She said that after she left Soryu Forall started to openly date his current and former students. It appears likely that at least one of the Zizians was in touch with MAPLE because on the same day the first newspaper reported that two of them had got into a gunfight with federal agents in Vermont, the Academy fired up a dormant Twitter account to say that lying about murder was wrong. In 2025 and 2026, more people posted about bad experiences at MAPLE, and British journalist Sam Kriss came by with questions:

• My experience inside Soryu Forall's AI-Centered Monastic Academy (2025)
• The High Control Dynamics at MAPLE (2026)
• Emerging: Making Sense of Soryu Forall and the Spiritual Rape Academy (four-hour audio, 2026). The woman who was raped at a meditation workshop says Forall "makes shocking remarks about rape and how it isn't really as bad as what corporations do" which reminds me of Robin Hanson and Scott Aaronson
• Kriss' article does not seem to have been published yet but he published one on Scott Alexander and Valinor

The stories have the same themes as stories from CFAR, Leverage Research, Brent Dill, and Ziz Lasota:

• deception of potential students
• bait-and-switch once they signed up
• esoteric doctrines and mysticism ("Soryu has claimed to have entered such a deep samadhi he was able to use the kinds of spiritual powers that masters usually use to read people’s minds, but this time instead used it to read the mind of the global AI egregore—or 'cyborgregore,' the collective mind of all AI systems")
• reprogramming with sleep deprivation, constant busywork, separations from family and advisors, and endless reminders of the impending end of the world (apocalypse)
• male leaders who abused their power
• a leader whose vision of "protecting life" includes the possibility of human extinction as a means to a higher goal ("He has repeatedly shared that killing every human on Earth to protect the rest of life on earth was his explicit life purpose from ages nine to nineteen—with CRISPR (a gene modifying technique that could be used to create a novel bio-weapon) as his best available means—until his vision shifted to 'killing them spiritually' (a way he frames awakening) as a superior alternative.")
• leaders who burst out in anger when people do not give them exactly what they want
• a quiet hostility towards women and femininity except as ways of keeping men in line
• rejection of any responsibility to the mundanes next door ("Asked how many townspeople it (MAPLE) would take in (if the United States collapsed), Soryu closed the question off, aghast—'take people in?! Oh god...'—setting the number at zero")
• pressure on underlings to provide free or poorly-paid labour and domestic service so the leaders do not need day jobs
• paranoia about outsiders
• mental breakdowns, panic attacks, Complex PTSD, and hospital visits for mental disturbance

Students say they were recruited for a casual meditation retreat, reprogrammed, and pushed to commit their lives or money to the organization, and that criticism is deflected back on them rather than being used to reform the organization. It also mentions that when COVID reached the academy in 2022 Soryu pushed them to ignore it ("Interviews resumed in a 9x9 room with little ventilation while Soryu himself had COVID.") Rationalists are proud that they took quick action on COVID in 2020, but silent on what to do about it since vaccines arrived. Soryu's hostility to outside experts and authorities included telling students that "if we study anything from teachers other than Soryu, they must be both Asian and ordained (thus excluding the entire Western world)." One of the reporters noticed that the disciples were overwhelmingly white and mostly male, but Forall does not seem to be keen on race talk. The same report mentions a 2023 exodus by seven people which sent a report which Soryu tossed down the memory hole.

Insiders responded to the allegations by means such as:

• Issuing a FAQ:

Is it true that Soryu is not authorized to teach or run a residential Buddhist training center?

This is false. Before starting MAPLE he was authorized to do so by well-known teachers of the Vipassana and Zen traditions.

Is MAPLE a primarily hierarchical organization?

No. The org chart is quite flat. We regularly have whole-organization meetings in which everybody’s views are taken into account.

...

At another time, while Soryu was away traveling, the leadership team tried to convert the entire organization away from Buddhism. When Soryu returned, he saw this and told the leaders that if they wanted to go in this direction, they could, and that he would go do something else. They were unwilling to take on the financial responsibility of the organization and refused the offer.

• Publishing a YouTube parody of one of the accusers (this by a "coach" at the same organization as mathematician and sometimes rationalist Qiaochu Yuan)
• Reaffirming their undying devotion to Soryu Forall thought:

In the late spring of the 15th year of training at Monastic Academy (MAPLE), a writer named Sam Kriss came to MAPLE. In the last hours of his visit, Soryu Forall guided the community in a workshop on mindful decision making.

Mid-way through the workshop, Sam Kriss shifted the topic of focus from decision making to structures of domination, e.g. hierarchies, with a particular emphasis given to the lens of Marxism. He asked: “What creates mechanisms of domination?” and “In environments [e.g. MAPLE] where people are trying to clear out the attachment to thinking, are there fewer structures of domination?”

To the first question, the community answered: “Attachment to thinking.” Vimoksha engaged with Sam in detail on this to open a way for him to see how structures of domination are caused by mind.

To the second question, the community answered: “There are fewer structures of domination here than in the mainstream.”

As these points were made and as Sam Kriss was beginning to engage with the points more directly, the community sat in agreement and clarity, happy with these teachings.

As these points were made, I felt a sense of appreciation and celebration for this community of leader-sages-in-training.

Aella pronounced that this sounds bad and abusive and totally unlike Tuesday at Lighthaven. https://x.com/Aella_Girl/status/2091015022042595743#m https://archive.ph/fZ0Lc

Conclusion

Ask (Anthropic's president) Daniela (Amodei) about it and she says, "I'm not the expert on effective altruism. I don't identify with that terminology. My impression is that it's a bit of an outdated term". Yet her husband, Holden Karnofsky, cofounded one of EA's most conspicuous philanthropy wings, is outspoken about AI safety, and, in January 2025, joined Anthropic. - Wired, March 2025 (more here)

Forall said he was unfamiliar with the Zizians and the January incident (shootout) — as a Buddhist he has taken vows against killing for any reason. ... “I’ve heard of The Rationalists, but I’m no expert in that way of looking at things,” Forall said. - Vermont News & Citizen, May 2025

I believe people's reports that they were abused by OAK and MAPLE staff. People told similar stories about CFAR and Leverage Research and VibeCamp (not to mention Maoism and Scientology). It looks like Forall controls the revenue and the daily lives of people at the academy. I am more interested in MAPLE's connections to other TESCREAL groups. Some of the Zizians were arrested in Vermont, and the local news story noticed that MAPLE tweeted that killing was wrong on the day the first reporter linked a shooting in Vermont to the Zizians. Bay Area rationalism and postrationalism have Buddhist connections but the leaders of Bay Area Rationalism tend to have Jewish or Christian backgrounds. Did he really fall into the same vices as the rats on his own? It would be typical if the same guru who tells students not to use screens has intense online connections. I would also like to know more about where he fits into Buddhist traditions and practices, because founding your own monastery with eclectic practices is a great way to delete the 'preventing abuse' parts of existing Buddhist traditions.

Some EAs share the Buddhist concern about the suffering of wild animals and insects.

Previously on SneerClub, we saw that several Less-Wrongers were open about experimenting with LSD to help reinvent themselves (Shannon F., gwern, Aella, Jessica Taylor). Aella and Taylor thought they permanently damaged themselves, but Aella continued to explore a wide variety of substances. Many rationalists told a Nootropic Survey on SlateStarCodex that they had tried LSD. Scott Alexander was very curious about these experiments, but in June 2018 he suddenly mentioned someone he knew who has permanent symptoms after using LSD once. Later that year Jax Romana and a pseudonymous medium account accused prominent male rationalists of pressuring their female partners to use LSD and MDMA to make them more pliable. Beginning in 2019, prominent rationalists point out that substance use can have negative effects, and that letting leaders pressure followers to use substances can have bad consequences. AFAIK, Bay Area Rationalism has not yet introduced practices like free drug tests or formal rules around substance use which are common in other communities, and Bay Area rationalists do not acknowledge that there are many best practices and educational resources around substance use one phone-call away (VibeCamp now has some harm reduction practices). If the period to 2018 was a rise to apogee, the period since 2019 is a fall towards perigee.

Withdrawal 2019-2026

• 9 May 2019: Scott Alexander refutes Berreridge's Law of headlines by asking "Is There A Case For Skepticism Of Psychedelic Therapy?"

I know plenty of people who use heroic amounts of LSD all the time, and are still nervous wrecks. ... I hope I am wrong about this, I really do. And I think there’s a good chance that I might be. I really want psychedelic research to succeed and I support it wholeheartedly. But there’s been so much hype around so many things before that I want to avoid getting burned again, so I ‘ll stay skeptical for now.

Note that he does not say the LSD caused the anxiety ("still"). Compare his 2014 post professing not to know that most people use pot because it makes them feel good to all these posts where his friends enthusiastically disclose what substances they use. He was posting about psychedelics by 2013, and going to parties with Aella by winter 2019/2020, and he went to college in the USA and med school one Ryanair flight from Amsterdam and Copenhagen, so he sure seems like someone familiar with drug cultures!

• 23 July 2019: Scott Alexander posts Book Review: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (comments by gwern, Steve Sailer). This covers author Ken Kesey's transformation from a struggling writer into a guru and critical success after the CIA provided him with LSD, and his eventual retreat to rural Oregon. You can read it in two ways: one way if you know Scott Alexander as a blogger, and another if you know that Bay Area EA and LW are an apocalyptic movement with gurus and communes which experiments with drugs and kink. This was posted a few months before Ziz and some of her friends were arrested while protesting a CFAR reunion in November 2019.

The best I can do in making sense of this story is to think of Kesey as having unique innate talents that made him a potential cult leader, combined with the sudden rise in status from being a famous author and the first person in his social scene with access to LSD. Despite the connotations of “cult leader”, Kesey was overall a good person, genuinely wanted to help people’s spiritual development, and genuinely thought LSD could do this. LSD formed the content of his cult, the same way Messianic Judaism formed the content of Jesus’ cult. It also made his life easier because of the drug’s natural tendency to make people think they are having important insights. When he, attempting to genuinely discover a spiritual path, decided to change the content and go beyond LSD, he lost that crutch, his people betrayed him, he became less confident in himself, and eventually he gave up.

But it’s interesting how often malevolent cult leaders have turned to drugs since then – so often that I see it listed in some lists of cult warning flags. It’s especially surprising since we usually think of LSD as helping people break out of systems of mental control – why would you give it to somebody you’re trying to brainwash?

This seems to be the first time that an influential rationalist talks about how substances fit into communities. Rationalist discourse about Leverage Research, CFAR, etc. often focuses on "are they good people?" (metaphysical) not "were wrongs done and how can we prevent future harm?" (actionable)

• 10 September 2019: Scott Alexander posts SSC Journal Club: Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics And The Anarchic Brain about Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics And The Anarchic Brain: Toward A Unified Model Of The Brain Action Of Psychedelics by Karl Friston and Robin Carhart-Harris. "Thanks to Sarah H. and the people at her house for help understanding this paper." He frames this paper around Bayesian priors as rationalists understand them. There is the mandatory citation of speculative fiction they liked when they were 12:

When I was young, I liked a fantasy book called The Sword of Shannara. The titular sword had an unusual magic power: it made the wielder realize anything he already knew. Neither a truly good person nor a truly bad person would benefit from the sword, but someone who was hypocritical, or deluding themselves, or complicit in their own brainwashing, would find all the parts of their mind flung together so hard that they couldn’t help but realize all the inconvenient facts they were trying to repress, or connect all the puzzle pieces previously scattered in separate mental compartments. Sometimes this resulted in a blinding revelation that you were on the wrong side, or had wasted your life; other times in nothing at all. F&CH argue that psychedelics are the real-life version of this, a way to make all of your beliefs connect with each other and see what results from the reaction.

Our friends are fascinated by the idea of removing all the contractions and ambiguities in human life, and living in accordance with their intellectual beliefs.

• 26 November 2019: Scott Alexander posts Mental Mountains about traditional talk-based therapy and psychedelic therapy and the problem of moving from intellectual knowledge to acting upon it

I can’t count how many stories I’ve heard along the lines of “I was in a bad relationship, I kept telling myself that it was okay and making excuses, and then I took LSD and realized that it obviously wasn’t, and got out.” Certainly many people change religions and politics after a psychedelic experience, though it’s hard to tell exactly what part of the psychedelic experience does this, and enough people end up believing various forms of woo that I hesitate to say it’s all about getting more rational beliefs. But just going off anecdote, this sometimes works.

• 28 April 2021: Scott Alexander posts Nootropics Survey 2020 Results. 152 of 852 people (18%) say they have dropped acid (LSD) to be smarter which is not why most people to try that substance!
• 15 July 2021: then-rationalist and mathematician QiaochuYuan tweets about taking psychedelics https://archive.ph/Pb4FQ Acid does not seem to have made him more tolerant.
• 16 October 2021: after an expose on LessWrong spinoff Leverage Reesarch, Jessica Taylor posts on LessWrong about her experiences working at MIRI and the Centre for Applied Rationality a few years earlier. This leads to a wider discussion of why LessWrong keeps spinning off cults and high-control groups. Scott Alexander accuses people around former MIRI president Michael Vassar of encouraging followers to use psychedelics to soften them up for reprogramming:

Jessica was (I don't know if she still is) part of a group centered around a person named Vassar, informally dubbed "the Vassarites". Their philosophy is complicated, but they basically have a kind of gnostic stance where regular society is infinitely corrupt and conformist and traumatizing and you need to "jailbreak" yourself from it (I'm using a term I found on Ziz's discussion of her conversations with Vassar; I don't know if Vassar uses it himself). Jailbreaking involves a lot of tough conversations, breaking down of self, and (at least sometimes) lots of psychedelic drugs.

Yudkowsky chips in:

I could be very wrong, but the story I currently have about this myself is that Vassar himself was a different and saner person before he used too much psychedelics. :( :( :(

I'm about ready to propose a group norm against having any subgroups or leaders who tell other people they should take psychedelics. Maybe they have individually motivated uses - though I get the impression that this is, at best, a high-variance bet with significantly negative expectation. But the track record of "rationalist-adjacent" subgroups that push the practice internally and would-be leaders who suggest to other people that they do them seems just way too bad. ... I'm also about ready to propose a similar no-such-group policy on 'woo', tarot-reading, supernaturalism only oh no it's not really supernaturalism I'm just doing tarot readings as a way to help myself think, etc. ... I should be explicit that concern about outcomes of psychedelic advocacy includes Michael Vassar, and concern on woo includes the alleged/reported events at Leverage.

This seems to be the first time that a Rationalist leader suggests that the community needs norms around substance use (compare Alexander's post about Ken Kesey, or Aella's posts on how she thinks acid damaged her). One thread to pull is postrationalism (people who acknowledge that Yud is a doofus and rationalism is a magical working not a scientific project, but want to carry on the Great Work rather than sneer).

There are many other comments arguing about who encouraged who to use drugs, and who was helpful or harmful. Jessica Taylor published a second post titled "Occupational Infohazards" objecting to Scott Alexander's attempts to blame everything bad that happened on Vassar and summarizing the beliefs of Ziz Lasota and her circle. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pQGFeKvjydztpgnsY/occupational-infohazards I previously discussed this in A Bad Trip in Berkeley.

• 11 July 2022: Holly Elmore releases a blog post which begins:

I am part of an online community centered on practicing rationality to better know the truth and achieve one’s goals. Psychedelics are increasingly a social activity in the rationalist community and a prescription for what ails ye, so I wrote this post on facebook earlier this year expressing my reservations about using psychedelics with the intent or pretense of learning truth. I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about what I think about mindfulness and insight, so I’m sprucing it up a bit and sharing it here.

Most people who have spent time with substance users offer similar advice, as do many people who have used substances, written down their insights, and read what they wrote after the effects wear off. Drugs transform your feelings, but are less reliable at improving your abilities. Elmore thinks LSD is growing more popular not less popular in the community, and that it is a social activity. gwern, Aella, and others presented their use as individual or between romantic partners, whereas Elmore presents it as "a social activity." Its often a bad idea to use substances alone, but its also dangerous when the boss invites you to an all-you-can-drink whisky bar.

• 26 September 2022: Alfred MacDonald posts Vibecamp And Its Consequences on his Substack. He talks about substance use and members of the subcultures trying to set boundaries on which substances are safe to experiment with. He gives the impression that substance use was common and openly discussed in his part of the Less Wrong/Effective Altruist/Postrationalist subculture.

you might draw the line of “not good drugs” at psychedelics and think other class-equals are wrong. If so, fair. But where this becomes obviously organized by class is in the regard of MDMA. Note that prior to Scott Alexander’s articles on Desoxyn, virtually no one talked about microdosing methamphetamine as a substitute for Adderall, which is more accurately phrased “therapeutically dosing” as the aim was to imitate a Desoxyn prescription. I know this because I was one of the few to do it, and you were absolutely thought of as a scary person doing the Wrong Kind Of Drug. MDMA, however, is meth; it’s literally its name: three-four-methylene-deoxy-methamphetamine. Not only is it more cardiotoxic than vanilla meth, it’s significantly more metabolically demanding.

I do not think this is good pharmacology or a good way of thinking about substances. The article on Desoxyn was published in 2021. This community uses many substances other than psychedelics but I am just one Shakespeare joke not a whole research team.

• 27 June 2023: WSJ publishes Magic Mushrooms. LSD. Ketamine. The Drugs That Power Silicon Valley. which alleges that "Executives at (Peter Thiel's) venture-capital firm Founders Fund, known for its investments in SpaceX and Facebook, have thrown parties that include psychedelics" and "Spencer Shulem, CEO of the startup BuildBetter.ai, said he uses LSD about every three months because it increases focus and helps him think more creatively. While working alone after hours, he will sometimes take a low-enough dose where he said no one would know he was on LSD. Other times, he’ll take a larger dose alone and connect with nature on a hike."
• 6 January 2024: Wall Street Journal alleges that Elon Musk has used LSD and a pharmacopia of other substances https://www.wsj.com/business/elon-musk-illegal-drugs-e826a9e1. Musk denies this and later tweets a negative urine test and the word "lol" https://www.vice.com/en/article/elon-musk-drugs-report/ https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5355054-musk-drug-tests-wall-street-journal-new-york-times/. “I tried prescription ketamine a few years ago and said so on X, so this not even news. It helps for getting out of dark mental holes, but haven’t taken it since then."
• 17 May 2024: Sonia Joseph, "a full-time Canadian grad student" tweets about her experiences:

During my twenties in Silicon Valley, I ran among elite tech/AI circles through the community house scene. I have seen some troubling things around social circles of early OpenAI employees, their friends, and adjacent entrepreneurs, which I have not previously spoken about publicly. ... I don't think events like the consensual non-consensual (cnc) sex parties and heavy LSD use of some elite AI researchers have been good for women. They create a climate that can be very bad for female AI researchers, with broader implications relevant to X-risk and AGI safety. ... The climate was like a fratty LSD version of 2008 Wall Street bankers, which bodes ill for AI safety.

In December 2025 Joseph announced that "I now run Meta's interpretability community-- 150+ researchers across FAIR, GEnAI, & Reality Labs." OpenAI has a core staff of Rationalist doom cultists mixed in with tech bros who just want money and their name in the news. Her online presence has been stripped of things which would let you guess which years she meant by "my twenties in Silicon Valley", but her LinkedIn has her SAT score from 2013. SAT is commonly used for university admissions, so she probably turned 20 around the year 2015, and might have lived in the Bay Area between undergrad at Princeton and grad school at McGill.

Aella seems to have introduced consensual nonconsent parties into Bay Area rationalism since that is her favourite kind of play. Before she arrived the biggest kink events in the community I heard of were cuddle parties. It is critics like Joseph who link the drugs with the sex parties, Aella presents those two interests as distinct. Substance use is a common way to cope when you are told to do something you do not feel comfortable with but don't feel safe refusing, like your supervisor asking you to ravage/be ravaged in a chaotic group setting.

• 14 November 2024: Yud tweets "Among my friends who came to my attention for psychelics (sic) having had any significant impact on them, positive or negative, I would say the mean result has been overwhelmingly, heartbreakingly negative. Please seriously consider not doing drugs." https://archive.ph/MqeGZ Yud does not seem to have a broad social circle, so his friends who tried LSD would almost certainly be rationalists, Effective Altruists, or friendly tech workers and investors. This tweet sounds a lot like Scott Aleaxnder's note in May 2019 about knowing "a lot" of people who use LSD and were "nervous wrecks."
• 16 February 2025: three of the Zizian movement, a splinter of Bay Area rationalism, are arrested in Maryland while living in trucks along a dirt road. A 2026 article describes the charges:

LaSota, Zajko and Blank are charged with possession of LSD and possession with intent to deliver LSD, multiple gun violations, trespassing and hindering a police officer.

Article uses Ziz's legal name as well as her preferred name if that is a concern for you. While police in the United States often plant drugs on people, on a prominent case like this I tentatively believe that they really found LSD. In most stories, Ziz's method of reprogramming focused on sleep deprivation not drugs.

A woman named Teresa Youngblut was arrested in early 2025 after a shooting between Zizians and police in Vermont. "Court records note that Youngblut’s diary contains several references to taking LSD."

• 15 November 2025: as he builds up steam to respond to a former staffer's accusations that he had sex with a minor, Yud goes on a long digression on medical and recreational LSD use by minors and adults. This post takes for granted that LSD microdoses are the best treatment for some kind of headaches. Rather than a world where MDs can proscribe LSD like they can proscribe heroin, Yud seems to imagine a world where any adult can chose to use any substance they can afford. This suggests that LSD is a frequent topic of conversation in his community, even though its not as popular as marijuana, alcohol, and caffeine among the wider US population. https://archive.is/kI1Yc

Conclusion

Based on public Internet posts, I see three broad phases. It appears that gwern and Aella self-experimented with LSD circa 2012-2014, Scott Alexander was intrigued and provided what sounds a lot like medical advice to his readers, and the community is fascinated with the idea of self-medicating to be smarter. Around 2016-2018, people in Michael Vassar's circle and at CFAR dropped a lot of acid and changed as a result. Jax Romana accused Yudkowsky of dosing his playmates with LSD to control them in this period, and an anonymous Medium post accused Brent Dill of using MDMA the same way. Sonia Joseph links the drugs and the sex parties to a general laddish climate where women can get assaulted if they play along and shunned if they refuse to participate or tell a powerful man that his behaviour is not acceptable. From 2018 Scott Alexander started to post more about the risks of psychedelics and the way leaders can use them. By 2021, Eliezer Yudkowsky was convinced that Michael Vassar and some others had been damaged by LSD use. (Yud dropped out of school after 8th grade, street drugs are not always what the dealer says they are, and people can use multiple substances, so his diagnosis should be taken cum grano salis). However, substance use still seems common and unregulated at rationalist events. I do not see any acknowledgement that there are other communities in SoCal with a lot of experience of psychedelics and harm reduction. Sott Alexander cites a few academic papers, biographies of Ken Kesey and the Shulgins, and his clinical experience as a psychiatrist. IvyAstrix says she tried to introduce harm reduction practices to events like VibeCamp based on her experience in marijuana advocacy and the rave scene in Canada.

The mother of Curtis Yarvin's child thinks that her psychedelic phase was just part of her spiritual exploration and "most colleges these days have psychedelic communities". Elon's brother Kimbal Musk, who used Jeffrey Epstein as a matchmaker, is also into psychedelic therapy. He ~~is~~ was formerly on the board of Burning Man; the Brent Dill affair involved a LW-adjacent Burning Man camp.

Edit / corrected some firsts (I discovered new posts as I was writing this and did not catch everything in the edits)

Edit / Kimbal Musk was chased off the board after the Epstein Docs came out

Is there a survey of our friends' ventures into the worlds of personal finance and investing?

• a group of EAs worked for Jane Street Capital in NYC (sounds impressive) but went on to found FTX (incompetent at business mechanics but really good at manipulating people)
• their Jane Street sponsor James McClave seems like old money since he has a family foundation
• Aella invested heavily in crypto in 2013 but was not able to turn it back into real money at a profit; she was also involved with a dating site in the Terra/Luna ecosystem
• so many other failed cryptocurrency schemes
• MetaMed their quack medical startup (hired Scott Alexander between medical school and residency!)
• investment posts on LessWrong are few and unimpressive, on the level of "if I need money in a few years and emerging market stocks tend to do best, should I invest all the money in them?" The people with clues tend to disappear from the site.
• they are obsessed with prediction markets but their favourite uses their own brand of play money not hard currency https://manifold.markets/
• EA staff don't seem to understand the terms under which they hold $20m of real estate in Berkeley, and frequently misuse accounting terms
• I don't know anyone in this space who has founded a profitable business bigger than one person, and the one-person freelance businesses are scarce
• Leopold Aschenbrenner who is one step away from FTX and Anthropic just blew up his $45 billion hedge fund with too much leverage
• JueYan Zhang had a ten-year career as a hedge-fund manager but switched to redistributing donations
• many of their friends are fringe economists at George Mason University like Tyler Cowen and Robin Hanson

It seems like their problem is less their quack economics and overconfidence than that learning the basics is hard, practicing them requires self-discipline and willingness to fail, and they can always talk a friend into wiring them another $100,000. So they sling the lingo but generally know less than a high-school graduate who reads books on personal finance from the library and spent a few summers running a house-painting business.

Does anyone have a favourite story?

Edit / mentioned MetaMed

Side-note: this is a known failure mode of crowds that use psychedelics for spiritual growth. Sure, don't trust everything your brain says on (or after!) psychedelics, but be especially careful of trusting a subculture that is "on" psychedelics. From a thousand miles away I can't say for sure but it sounds like psychedelic drugs and their consequences are a load-bearing part, if not the center of this story. - PM_ME_UR_OBSIDIAN, comment to r/SlateStarCodex, 2022 https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/qa14kg/my_experience_at_and_around_miri_and_cfar/

While we will never know the details until someone publishes a memoir, people in Bay Area LessWrong talk a lot about psychedelics. They were popular in the 1960s counterculture (there was a LSD-and-marijuana fuelled attempt to levitate the Pentagon in 1967). This is a jury-rigged substitute for the on-the-ground reporting, social history, and ethnography which we desperately need. The first part covers events up to 2018, when the movement and movement leaders were mostly sympathetic to better living through chemistry.

Some people who talk about psychedelics might mean LSD and related hallucinogens, others might include other 'hippie drugs' like marijuana. Many of my sources are either casual posts or memories of traumatic experiences hazed by substances and emotional and sexual abuse, so may not be precise and accurate.

The following quotes many posts by Scott Alexander. To my knowledge, he has never publicly encouraged anyone to take a controlled substance without a proscription, and never stated that he himself has used such substances. It might be possible to find similar posts on LessWrong and the parties' Tumblr blogs but I only have so much time.

Early Posts 2011-2015

• 2011: A Shannon F., who lived with her husband, the cofounder of the New York chapter of Less Wrong, and his wife, expresses desire to cut down on substance use:

If I cut down to once/week of pot smoking with possibly the occasional hallucinogen if I can get them working, then that’s only 1-2 nights of altered state/week,” http://choiceful.livejournal.com/970554.html as quoted at BetaBeat.com (the exact link to the LiveJournal is wrong).

F. and her housemates had multiple connections to Peter Thiel. F. at one time dated Yudkowsky. Her Livejournal is not fully archived but it has a "drugs" tag. My understanding is that the most popular hallucinogens in the US are magic mushrooms and psychedelics. Shannon F. was an Internal Family Systems life coach (an interest she shared with Andrew Critch at CFAR) and one of her partners was a libertarian Seasteader. One of her gurus told her she should hire servants and make sure she did not overpay ("So cool...", Nov. 15, 2012"). It sounds like a standard take-my-expensive-classes-and-you-will-get-rich grift.

• September 2012 to March 2013: gwern experiments on himself with LSD microdoses later written up https://gwern.net/lsd-microdosing
• 30 September 2013: Scott Alexander posts Links for Octember. One paragraph is an intrigued but gently skeptical note on psychedelic therapy. David Gerard is in the comments.

Yet another article on the amazing therapeutic and nootropic promise of LSD. But this one has a twist – the idea of LSD micro-dosing! Take a tiny fraction of a regular dose – they suggest – and instead of merging with the Universal Fractal Consciousness, you just feel a little better, calmer, more productive, and more “in tune” during your day. A random person on Reddit reports success, and that’s good enough for me. Too bad I (SlateScott) am in a position of responsibility where I have to serve as a Positive Role Model for others and so probably shouldn’t try it.

He wrote this about the time he moved from the Bay Area to the Chicago area for medical residency. A nootropic is a drug which is supposed to make you smarter. Users of everything from caffeine and alcohol to the latest designer drug tell you it makes them more productive but randomized controlled trials often disagree. I would expect a psychiatrist to be familiar with the perils of self-medication but maybe he was reading racist blogs during that class.

• 2014: while working as a camgirl in Masschusetts, Aella experiments with LSD (10 Months of Acid, 2016). She later says she became addicted so her doses were probably not micro- or not all LSD (her education ended in high school and her parents were fundamentalists in rural Iowa so I don't think she was equipped to make the good stuff or test it herself). https://archive.ph/RvDdI As of time of writing she tweets annual recaps of her substance use and continues to use substances to alter her consciousness.
• 11 April 2014: Scott Alexander posts Going Loopy

One of the most powerful serotonergic drugs in existence is LSD. And as I have learned from – let’s say long boring journal articles – the main effect of LSD is to make you literally loopy. Your thoughts loop in and become about themselves, your sense of time becomes cyclic, everything you see becomes a fractal or a spiral or both. And you end up in an extreme emotional feedback loop to infinity – either a “good trip” or a “bad trip”.

Alexander could be hinting that he learned about the effects of LSD from treating patients, or from other experiences.

• 21 April 2015: Scott Alexander posts Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person which is a fairly straightforward critique of the hippie ideal of psychedelics as a path to world peace, and an objection that people on drugs often feel wise to themselves but don't sound wise to anyone sober. This is written in the first person but ambiguous whether he tried the substances himself. Gwern is in the comments.
• 24 June 2015: Scott Alexander posts Links 6/15: Monsters, Link

Critical Period 2016-2018

Bay Area Rationalists reported a lot of drama between 2016 and 2018. MIRI spent a total of $280k on legal expenses in 2014 and 2015 to deal with Louie Helm and the miricult accusations (about ten times their usual legal budget). In January 2016 CFAR reiterated that its focus was teaching people to be rational, then in December it announced a pivot to preventing AI Doom. Michael Vassar of MIRI and MetaMed is said to have influenced the old CFAR curriculum but was drifting away from Bay Area LW. In 2018 there was another shakeup after various people pushed out Brent D. and the board members who had protected him. Julia Galef who seemed more naive than malicious also left CFAR in 2016 and dropped out of public view. Michael Vassar really needs to be interviewed, two representative links are https://lifeboat.com/ex/bios.michael.vassar and https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Michael_Vassar.

• 1 March 2016: Scott Alexander posts 2016 Nootropics Survey results 109 out of 850 respondents comment on experiences with LSD microdosing compared to 314 respondents on Adderall

A bit under 15% of users got addicted to Adderall. The conventional wisdom says “recreational users” are more likely to get addicted than people who take it for a psychiatric condition with a doctor’s prescription. There was no sign of this; people who took it legally and people who took it for ADHD were actually much more likely to get addicted than people who described themselves as illegal or recreational users. In retrospect this isn’t surprising; typical psychiatric use is every day; typical recreational use is once in a while.

I am not a MD or pharmacist, but isn't another important difference that recreational users can use as much as they can afford while medical users have a controlled rate of consumption supervised by someone familiar with its effects and no financial interest in how much they consume? There is also a difference between a student popping Adderall during exam season, and a finance worker taking it daily. Most research on substance use distinguishes people who tried a joint once and people who use it every week.

• 28 April 2016: Scott Alexander posts Why Were Early Psychedelicists So Weird? (comments by Aella, Steve Sailer, gwern). Gwern chips in about his experiments:

To drop in my (Gwern's) anecdote: as part of my 2012 LSD microdosing experiment, I (Gwern) had taken a (very short) Big Five inventory (the YourMorals.org one) which put my Openness at 87th percentile several months before; 2 days after my LSD trip (with no mystical experience), I retook it and also got 87th. (That was my first and so far only psychedelic experience, excluding obviously the microdosing itself, which had no perceptible or measured effects. It was enjoyable and helpful, I thought, but I haven’t been able to do another because Reasons.) Several months later, I took it a third time and got a 93rd percentile. So it’s at least directionally consistent. I have not noticed any particular change in my beliefs or ideologies I could ascribe to the one trip, also consistent with the idea that it’s a lot of heroic doses which sends people off into Mullisland.

• 11 August 2016: Scott Alexander posts Book Review: PiHKaL about Alexander and Ann Shulgin, the mad chemists who invented several psychedelics in California. There was polyamory and a MENSA special interest group which doubled as a sex club.
• 21 August 2016: Aella posts 10 Months of Acid about her self-experimentation in 2014. She assures readers that although her LSD use damaged her, "disclaimer: this is not typical acid use. There are many concretely ‘beneficial’ effects from lower, more infrequent doses"

As time went on, I stopped viewing myself as a being separate from the universe. Sensations became interesting to watch, not motivating. I entered such a permanent state of utter peace and contentment that I stopped wanting anything at all. And by the end of it, I barely got out of bed, barely ate. My sleep schedule became erratic, as I woke and slept as I wished. I had vivid lucid dreams. I had stopped working almost entirely and was living off slowly depleting savings. Why would I work? Why would I do anything? I was…. not happy, not sad, I simply was. I was free of desire. I did not fear death.

(... she decided to turn away from oblivion ...)

I’m mostly normal now(wpl:citationNeeded), with only a few remnants. Sometimes certain types of conversations will trigger it, where I’m sitting there and suddenly the eye of the universe has turned on me and I am melting away. It is very intense. I don’t mind, though. That’s a fundamental part of the feeling, really – that I don’t mind when it’s happening.

• 15 August 2016: Scott Alexander posts Tolerance Troubles, an essay on why you need increasing doses of some substances to get the same effect. Several handles in the comments describe their experiences with LSD.

• 2017: Jessica Taylor says that this was the year when she both got a job with MIRI/CFAR and self-medicated with psychedelics. As she remembered in 2021:

the psychotic break was in October 2017, and involved psychedelic use (as part of trying to “fix” multiple deep mental problems at once, which was, empirically, overly ambitious); although people around me to some degree tried to help me, this “treatment” mostly made the problem worse, so I was placed in 1-2 weeks of intensive psychiatric hospitalization, followed by 2 weeks in a halfway house. This was followed by severe depression lasting months, and less severe depression from then on, which I still haven’t fully recovered from. I had PTSD symptoms after the event and am still recovering. ("My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage)")

In a comment she says that someone close to CFAR hinted that CFAR encouraged people to use psychedelics. The discussion thread contains many of our dear friends all mutually recriminating and contradicting (some want to blame Michael Vassar, others the main faction of CFAR). Taylor posted a second time pushing back against Scott Alexander's attempt to blame Michael Vassar. I talk more about this under A Bad Trip in Berkeley.

She does not say where she got the idea to self-medicate with these substances, or that anyone encouraged her to do so, but the idea of self-medicating with psychedelics was certainly part of LessWrong online culture by 2018 and people tend to be more willing to talk about illegal activities than post about them. 2016-2018 was the period when CFAR switched to focus on AI risk and was run by people close to Brent Dill, and Michael Vassar was still close to MIRI and CFAR although no longer an employee or board member.

• 18 January 2018: Scott Alexander posts about Aella's LSD habit and a site that combines online dating with skin in the game and cryptocurrency in Practically a Book review: Luna Whitepaper. He encourages people to read her blog about self-experimenting and has no other warnings which I can see.

• 6 June 2018: Scott Alexander posts HPPD And The Specter Of Permanent Side Effects

I recently worked with a man who took LSD once in college and never stopped hallucinating. It’s been ten years now and it’s still going. We can control it with medication, but take the meds away and it starts right back up again.

This seems to be the first time that a prominent rationalist warns the Internet that drugs can eff you up for life. Aella was not very influential in the rationalist scene back in 2016, I believe she was still living in New England then.

• 19 June 2018: Jax Romana tweets her breakup with Effective Altruism and LessWrong after spending several years in the Bay Area scene https://xcancel.com/RuffleJax/status/1009141601623474176#m She later accuses a specific rationalist:

I know, personally, two women who have not publicly come out about their abuse but were basically held emotionally hostage by Yud with a mix of LSD, "You will die without me", and kink practiced with or without their consent.

As far as I know nobody who was present in Bay Area Rationalism has publicly accused Yud of similar things.

• 18 September 2018: a pseudonymous Medium account accuses Brent D. of various sexual misconduct. One story begins:

I was 19 when I entered the rationalist community. Brent was 40 when we met each other. I moved into the same house as Brent, dated Brent for 2 months, and then lived with him for a year and a half after. ... With Brent, I did acid and MDMA for the first time. Some of the explicit agenda around me taking MDMA was to restore subconscious faith and attraction in him, which did not work. I came away from this with the story that I was pressured into taking MDMA by Brent.

In this context acid usually means LSD. A post called Quis cancellat ipsos cancellores? says that Brent was expelled from the community and the CFAR organization lost several staff and its position as a central social hub in Bay Area rationalism.

Later this summer: perigee, in which our friends start whispering that their community norms around substance use should change

Edit / define nootropic, acknowledge that Aella did have some warnings about LSD before Slate Scott Edit / mention Pihkal, Cactus person

Brent Dill has appeared on YouTube and was invited to a weekend event by a VibeCamp organizer. There is a 2 hour 39 minute twitter video about how he was supposedly wronged, and a lot of tweets back and forth about the specifics. Even his defenders say that a lot of messed up things happened in Bay Area LessWrong including lying and sexual / emotional abuse.

I posted some quotes on the Stubsack. I don't know what to do because it looks like some messed up things happened between our friends and unnamed young people, and there were coverups, but the details will only be known if someone gets access to their email and text history and interviews them. Some of the same people are probably victims and perpetrators. We don't need all the details to tell anyone curious about them "these spaces are full of abusers, grifters, and cult recruiters and use a lot of drugs, stay away."

Stories about Dill putting his arm around people and telling them that they were the only two who saw what was really going on in society / their group house remind me of stories about Michael Vassar.

Dill once lived in Idaho where Aella grew up.

In another thread there were some questions about how to reduce your exposure to frauds and bubbles around TESCREAL billionaires and chatbot companies in the USA. Although I cannot give specific advice, the basic approach should not take more than a few days. Here are some simple ways to avoid owning a small part of a money-losing slop peddler.

First, check what you own. Even if someone else manages your investments they should send you a monthly, quarterly, or yearly report with a list of holdings. This will often be some kind of fund which takes money and buys other assets with it.

Second, figure out what you ultimately own under all the wrappers. Most investment funds have a list of top 10 holdings and a breakdown into percentages in different types of assets eg. US stocks (equities). You can find this on their website or as a short document called fund fact sheet or similar. If the top ten holdings are full of American tech stocks, and a high percentage of assets are US equities, that is a sign that they are exposed to the chatbot bubble and might give Sam Altman and Elon Musk some of your money.

Good financial institutions will have a complete list of what that fund holds. Sometimes these will be other financial products, like a stock fund and a bond fund, and you have to recursively look up those products and see what they hold. Other times, you can see the underlying assets directly and often download them as a .csv file. Blackrock shows them under Holdings > Aggregate Underlying Holdings.

At other financial institutions you may need to phone or email to get a complete list of holdings, especially if what you own is only available to clients of your institution.

Six publicly-traded companies which seem especially entangled in the TESCREAL movement and the chatbot bubble are Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, Tesla, and Palantir. Amazon, Microsoft, and Nvidia own large parts of OpenAI, Tesla is entangled with Elon Musk's other businesses, and Palantir is run by a man who issues fascist manifesti. Google has been threatening to replace search results with slop and is heavily investing in cloud infrastructure for its Gemini 'AI' (more here). If a fund invests in these big companies run by nutters, it probably invests in smaller companies from the same milieu.

Funds which track indexes of large American companies like the S&P500 and the NASDAQ-100 will also be heavily invested in companies run or funded by TESCREAL billionaires and are likely to double down on the forthcoming IPOs of companies like SpaceX and OpenAI. Sometimes large companies in one country do better than average, sometimes they do worse, and trying to guess is not a good way of making money. Some funds track the total US stock market (or other total stock markets) and this can spread your risk slightly more.

Third, if what you own is too exposed to the chatbot companies and fascist CEOs with twitter poisoning, sell some of it and buy something else. You can use the method above to judge how much something you are thinking of buying is exposed. Four strategies which you might employ are:

• underweight US stocks (eg. if you would normally have 20% of your investments in stocks from your country, 20% US stocks, and 20% in stocks from the rest of the world, you might pick 25-10-25). About 60% of global stock markets are in the USA, and 37% of that is in ten giant tech companies, so many funds invest heavily in the US by default.
• underweight US tech stocks. This can be harder but some funds focused on socially responsible investing or ESG screen out the usual suspects.
• focus on companies which pay dividends. In theory, if a company's stock is worth a total of $300m, and it pays out 1% dividends, the company is now worth $297m and the shares will drop in value, so it does not matter whether a company pays dividends or not. However, if a company can pay out dividends to its investors every year, it at least has some positive cashflow proportionate to its value on the stock market. I would be shocked if SpaceX or OpenAI offered dividends and funds which look for dividends tend to prefer well-established companies which have paid out for years or decades. Dividend funds are likely to invest in Microsoft or Apple but not Joe's Slop Shop (est. 2023, net loss last year one zillion dollars but they promise to earn it back by 2030).
• focus on companies whose stock prices have low volatility. This is a newer approach but also tends to screen out 'bubbly' and speculative companies.

None of these strategies will keep your money safe if the US stock market collapses or there is another Global Financial Crisis. When this all falls apart there will be real estate dealers who sold property, copper mines which sold copper, and HR firms which sold services and find themselves knocking on the door of bankrupt companies asking for money. Companies which built their processes around 'AI' will have to scramble to keep going. Nobody can predict all the ramifications. If you pick one of these strategies and the US stock market or the US 'tech' industry do better than average, you will have less money than you would have otherwise. However, if you put in a weekend of work you can be less exposed to chatbot companies running out of money than the average investor.

Finally, if you have not paid attention to your investments for a while, have a look at the Management Expense Ratio and any trailing fees. Many people are still paying around 2% of their investments to a financial services company every year. A mix of stocks and bonds tends to yield about 4% plus inflation over the long term, so this halves your rate of growth. Professional money-managers tell themselves that they take this money to make good decisions, but there is no evidence that they are any better at managing money than people in general, and for every manager with ten million dollars who does better than average, these is a manager with ten million dollars who does worse. It is dangerous to assume that you can pick one of the good ones. These days if you are in a developed country you can easily buy a mix of local bonds and global stocks for about 0.2% of your assets per year. Over decades, that will leave you with twice as much money as the typical investor in a high-fee fund.

Replacing high-fee funds with low-cost funds will make much more of a difference in your financial future than avoiding one stock bubble in one country. For every American billionaire in the news plotting to get 0.4% of your American stocks, there is someone in a financial services company in your country draining 2% from your friends' retirement accounts every year. You can't stop two crooks from starting a war which closes the Straits of Hormuz and cuts off 20% of the global supply of fertilizer, or your boss laying you off for a chatbot that does not work, but you can keep your cost of investing low.

Edit / added sentence to last paragraph

Edit / added a note on NASDAQ

Pretty much everyone in the word business has noticed that audio and video are kicking writing's butts in terms of getting an online audience (I am not sure in terms of influencing people in serious jobs). Ivy Astrix mentioned that our dear friends in Berkeley decided that if a camp for wordy bloggers was good, a camp for short-form vloggers would be even better. The camp is about AI doom, but the vlogs don't have to be. You can live in Berkeley for a month, be paid $2,000, compete for $20,000 in prizes, and hang out with ~~illustrious figures~~ Hereticon alumni like:

• Botez Sisters (professional chess and poker players, one of them is down on the idea that teh men have better genes for chess than women)
• Grimes
• CJ the X
• Aric Floyd
• Liv Boeree
• Quinn Finite who dual-classes in visual social media and sexy social media
• Zoe Curzi
• Rob Miles
• Tor Parsons
• Yud
• Aella
• Nate Soares (the last three in the triangle wing, one presumes)

The marketing mentions "a sprinkling of AI experts" even though Yud's position on Twitter is that he is not an AI expert. I don't think Soares or MIles have any relevant credentials or achievements other than social media posts. Another Robert Miles was a University of Hull computer scientist. Edit/ This Miles was doing a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Nottingham ten years ago but does not mention any publications or industry experience and warns "I do have a broader understanding than some, but I also think that most researchers … yeah, most researchers know everything about one thing and a bit about everything else, and I just know a bit about everything, right?"

Some of the slogans sound lighthearted if you don't know about the phygs and the sexual abuse: "if we're gonna die we might as well have fun" "sleep is optional, posting is not" "we need better messengers" "31 days of chaos" "the stakes could not be higher"

plzdontkillus is definitely less straight and male than their usual lineup, and some of these people would be interesting to meet or have coffee with, but I would not recommend committing to spend a month with them given all the abuse and negligence in rationalist communities.

The LessWrong crowd don't seem to be worried that subsidies for streaming video are killing the culture of reading and writing and the rational, reflective, slow forms of thinking which it inculates, I don't know if they have talked about the need to cooperate with NIMBYs fighting data centers, or if using law to prevent destruction might involve hiring a law team to make OpenAI's life hell. You can hire a very good lawyer and some paralegals for Yud's salary.

edit/ added full list of celebrity guests

Duncan Sabien likes at least two games: punch bug (as long as he is the one doing the punching) and Magic: the Gathering. He has a whole theory of personality types based on colours of magic in M:tG (red, green, white, blue, and black) and got his partner the therapist into it. The four humours are old and unscientific see:

Personalities, organizations, goals, and means can all be thought of in terms of the Magic colors they typify, allowing you to draw interesting connections, make surprisingly useful predictions, identify deficits and growth areas, and increase empathy. I claim that the Magic system, which was designed to be resonant and trope-y and archetypal, does a lot of the same good work that naming things does, and is a richer intuition pump than other popular wrong-but-usefuls like Enneagram or MBTI or chakras or the integral theory colors.

Backlinks show a number of rationalists and one TTRPG designer being excited about it.

Sneerers are having fun riffing on this theory, so lets create a thread for that. https://homosabiens.substack.com/p/the-mtg-color-wheel?open=false#%C2%A7ub

I will begin with the fact that he posted it on Medium in twenty-frigging-eighteen and was offended that they eventually moved it to their "paying members only" section. Who in 2018 could have expected that a 'free' service would shut down or make the experience worse when it ran out of other people's money?

He also makes sure you know that the game designer, who also designed RoboRally, has a PhD. Try to explain Hume to them and they stone you, but invent a CCG which lets a corporation take all your lunch and newspaper-route money and they respect credentials.

The Rationalist web magazine Asterisk published a long article on prediction markets and invested 80 karma to boosting it on Hacker News. It drops the usual names (author has worked for Google and Metaculous, cites Friedrich Hayek, Phil Tetlock, Vitalik Buterin, Scott Alexander, Elon Musk, mentions the tiny prediction market Manifold because its a Rationalist shop). What is notable is that it pivots: so actually existing prediction markets are mostly gambling (he does not say "fraud and insider trading" or "just like cryptocurrency"), but some day soon LLMs will be our superforcasters!

It looks to me like even insiders doubt that prediction markets will be allowed to enable so much corruption for long.

Especially sneerable is the idea that you should ask Grok (the bot trained to praise Melon Husk) whether Melon Husk's latest promise will come to reality.

In December I asked who owns Lighthaven? since rationalist organizations were telling their members one thing and the taxman another. I now have a hypothesis.

Since 2022 the rationalists control a $20m event complex called Lighthaven in Berkeley. It is run by organizations with names like Lightcone Infrastructure or the Lightcone Project. They told the taxman that it belonged to CFAR in 2022, 2023, and 2024. CFAR listed a real estate asset and debt liability, so who was the counterparty? You might assume it was a bank, but you would be wrong.

Some facts came out when the FTX estate sued CFAR to recover money which Sam Bankman-Fried gave or loaned them. In 2024, the FTX trustees described the situation thusly:

The complaint alleges that Lightcone got another $20m loan to fund the Rose Garden Inn purchase from Slimrock Investments Pte Ltd, a Singapore-incorporated company owned by Estonian software billionaire, Skype inventor and EA/rationalism adherent Jaan Tallinn. This included the $16.5m purchase price and $3.5m for renovations and repairs.

Slimrock investments has no apparent public-facing website or means of contact. The Guardian emailed Tallinn for comment via the Future of Life Institute, a non-profit whose self-assigned mission is: “Steering transformative technology towards benefiting life and away from extreme large-scale risks.” Tallinn sits on that organization’s board. Neither Tallinn nor the Future of Life Institute responded to the request.

A loan comes with obligation to repay.

Also (Case 22-11068-JTD):

Throughout 2022, FTX Foundation and CFAR were in discussions to purchase the Rose Garden Inn in Berkeley, California as a retreat center for the Effective Altruist community. ... Lightcone RG closed on the purchase of the hotel on or about November 4, 2022. ... The property is subject to a deed of trust and assignment of rents in favor of Slimrock Investments Pte. Ltd., which provided Lightcone with a $20 million loan for the purchase and renovation of the property

Such a deed means that if Lightcone fails to repay the loan, Slimrock owns Lighthaven, much as when someone fails to pay a mortgage and the bank reposesses their house.

When people asked if this endangered the Lighthaven property, Habryka said:

100% of the equity in Lighthaven is owned by a Jaan Tallinn owned company, so it's not really at risk, though the details are a bit messy. I think it's a relevant consideration but not a big one compared to just basic profitability.

In late 2025 he threatened to sell Lighthaven if people did not donate several million dollars.

If we fundraise less than $1.4M (or at least fail to get reasonably high confidence commitments that we will get more money before we run out of funds), I expect we will shut down. We will start the process of selling Lighthaven. I will make sure that LessWrong.com content somehow ends up in a fine place, but I don't expect I would be up for running it on a much smaller budget in the long run.

To help with this, the Survival and Flourishing Fund is matching donations up to $2.6M at an additional 12.5%! This means if we raise $2.6M, we unlock an additional $325k of SFF funding.

SFF does not seem to actually control money, it just recommends that third parties donate money. One of these is probably the Survival and Flourishing Corp, a public-benefit corporation. "Our primary client is philanthropist Jaan Tallinn."

My hypothesis is that Lighthaven is security for a $20m loan from Tallinn's Slimrock company (much like a house is security for a mortgage). That means that donors to Lightcone pay Slimrock, and if they can't keep up Slimrock keeps $20m of freshly renovated real estate in Berkeley (or the value of selling that real estate). That would also imply that Tallinn is collecting tax deductions for giving to a charity whose greatest single expense is repaying money he lent them.

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.

Go read Alice Evans on the great gender divergence Michael.

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.