Just this week Scott Alexander wrote a long 'joke' about how the fe-males just want to attach themselves to a high-status man like (guess who) Curtis Yarvin (bonus self-own: the joke implies that Curtis Yarvin is not inviting the narrator to parties any more) https://archive.is/akSnc
Yud has distanced himself from some of the things he posted before LessWrong, but he keeps citing the Pathfinder fic on twitter (here in 2022) (here in 2025)
I also don't understand why he objects to that story given that it gets people talking about him as weird but able to get what he wants? But the claim that he dated women at MIRI and wanted them to provide free labour attacks the narrative that MIRI is nothing like Leverage Research or the Zizians.
Missionary voice Have you tried Mastodon? That is where you find people like DeadSimpleTech and Baldur Bjarnason who think that corporate social media was always messed up and current web-development practices are a joke.
TvTropes says that the Yudkowsky-insert protagonist of Project Lawful/Planecrash! is driven by desire to have 144 children (and prove his society wrong for not paying him to have 144) which sounds like Scott Aaaronson? Did they know each other in those days?
I am glad that all I knew about Yud in 2022 was "wrote a Harry Potter fanfic that I did not finish, and runs a website where people pretend to be experts."
He does not admit "I was wrong" very often does he? And if I were a kinky polyamorist, I would be much quicker to respond to "have you dated staff at the organization that funds your life?" than "did you play a specific scene?"
Planecrash seems to be the 1.8 million word Pathfinder fic with tumblr's UnitOfCaring
And how the eff does someone claim to love Pterry in his dating profile but see people as things? Greg Egan is basilisk-unfriendly too.
From RationalWiki: Yud claims that the only women he gave orgasms for completing math homework was his future wife. If he ever denied dating / playing with people from his foundation or making people who wanted to play with him fill out an IQ test I can't find it.
I think that is why he trains his followers to believe that science is corrupt and incompetent, its institutions and customs are irrelevant, and a gifted child can easily outdo the whole scientific community. He is on board with the eugenics so the EAs and LessWrongers with educations and achievements can tell themselves "at least he is good for the cause." And his playmates have a fetish that needs filling.
A clinical psychologist in a EU country looked at Lorien Psychology and said that the writing looked like typical American biomedical psychiatry with some self-promotion. In the UK and EU you can find psychiatrists who say things like "psychiatric diagnoses are scientifically worthless as tools to identify discrete mental health disorders," I think Scott Alexander blogged about Thomas Szasz at some point https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190708131152.htm
I am not comfortable exploring the question "did he violate professional ethics?" further because that seems like an unhealthy parasocial relationship like cyberstalking or swatting. I never met him or anyone who met him. More shoeleather reporting on these communities would help!
Even Ozy talked about someone converting zir to eugenics around the time that zi was moving from feminist blogging to LessWrong (although zi no longer endorsed eugenics two years later) https://web.archive.org/web/20141127052857/http://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2014/10/31/an-argument-against-eugenics-that-doesnt-involve-calling-anyone-a-nazi/
I wish they had not literally called their ideology rationality (tm) because I can't call it that with a straight face, but eighteenth-century rationalists would go through them like a galleon through a fleet of canoes. I don't know if teenaged-Yud was already a Libertarian or if he reinvented Objectivism from first principles. Political movements on the American right also rely on the same rhetorical move: "we are for freedom! How could anyone be against freedom?"
The commentator who thinks that USD 120k / year is a poor income for someone with a PhD makes me sad. That is what you earn if you become a professor of physics at a research university or get a good postdoc, but she aged out of all of those jobs and was stuck on poorly paid short-term contracts. There are lots of well-paid things that someone with a PhD in physics can do if she is willing to network and work for it, but she chose "rogue intellectual."
A German term to look up is WissZeitVG but many academic jobs in many countries are only offered to people no more than x years after receiving their PhD (yep, this discriminates against women and the disabled and those with sick spouses or parents).
Jon Evans is the only person I know who has read Yud's early mailing-list posts, and he was already an AI cultist and went on to work for Metaculus and Meta Superintelligence. There is probably interesting material in there but clearly Yud already thought highly of himself, already believed he was the Chosen One, already got defensive and wordy when someone criticized his ideas, and already posted voluminous pseudo-intellectual screeds which are not as consistent and logical as he believed.
Evans loves chatbot-summaries, but some science writers spent year at it and could not make the bot spit out useful abstracts. And he says he can skim a scientific paper in 5 minutes.