signpost.news gives me error 500 but Ars Technica has an article on Woodard

The (Falun Gong mouthpiece) Epoch Times recently had a front-page story on Larry Sanger’s criticisms of Wikipedia.

Selfishness sounds like it might be his way of thinking about some of this (I don’t think he could allow himself to think “I am a fundraiser and pulp writer and married with no other achievements” but I think he knows he likes to be adored and control things).

When we get a proper history of this subculture, with names and dates and diagrams of the polycules and play parties and group homes, it is going to be wild.

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, 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.

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 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 ™ 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?”

unethical

His post on a woman in the EA/LW world who took her own life after saying she had been sexually harassed is https://archive.is/I85mC and there are discussions on Old! SneerClub here and there. I am not comfortable going into this without training in how to talk about self-harm and first-hand knowledge but yeesh.

The Tumblr he cites belongs to Kelsey Piper, a self-identified journalist who receives donations from people and orgs in the Effective Altruism world and keeps reporting on how EA ideas and people are great.

Good point that SlateScott commented on accusations of abuse in rationalist and adjacent organizations. At least there has been some reporting on those accusations but I don’t know if it was on the ground or just phoning and emailing people from NYC, Chicago, or LA.

Someone with biochem, pharmacy, or psychology training could comment on some things SlateScott has written.

Amanda Marcotte remembers that but I don’t see examples in her link https://www.salon.com/2025/02/24/what-elon-musks-on-workers-owes-to-gamergate/ It looks like the Wikipedia page was written by someone who noticed the slur on Twitter in 2018 or later, and its focused on the meme graphic not the slur “you are just a mindless machine that exists for my pleasure or as an obstacle to overcome.” I think Marcotte served in the Internet Feminism Wars on the feminist side.

The reporting on Gamergate that I can find focuses on the death threats and doxing not insults but “NPC” sounds like the kind of slur that the anti-feminists would have used.

Seems like it only makes sense if you played CRPGS but not TTRPGS, LARP, or participatory fiction online? Yud is in to sex games but maybe he does not see it as playing a role?

HPMOR chapter 88 from 2010 has the line

Harry’s brain flagged this as I’m talking to NPCs again and he spun on his heel and dashed back for the broomstick.

Someone who thinks like that will lose in the long run, but they can do a hell of a lot of damage in the short run.

On the enshittified site someone posted this take on Alexander’s take on the kabbalah and Jewish thought https://ishayirashashem.substack.com/p/unsong-a-study-in-misrepresentation

I think Hallquist had a short-lived blog with criticisms of LessWrong and EA between his time on FreethoughtBlogs/Pantheos and his run for office and Medium blog. Possibly https://topherhallquist.wordpress.com/2015/08/17/reply-to-scott-alexander/ In the original Twitter post, Hallquist described Alexander as “a vague internet acquaintance at the time (when he sent the emails)” and it sounds like after 2014 Hallquist explored LW and EA and decided they were messed up. (Hallquist’s post also suggests that if you want to sound like a bold contrarian, see what a median expert at a university think about a topic rather than reading blogs).

I like to remind myself that I see what happens online, but the offers of money and the sexual propositions probably mostly happen in person or between people who have met in person. So I don’t know as much about the LessWrong or EA communities as I think.

Making general statements about the risks and benefits of medication is different from proscribing them. The George K. Lerner, MD who was FTX’s resident pill-pusher seems to be based in San Francisco and wants potential patients to know that inter alia “Dr. Lerner specializes in the treatment of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD/ADHD) in adults. He has extensive experience in treating adults who have been successful in their professional endeavors but have found attention deficit symptoms to be an impediment to achieving their full potential.” (nudge nudge)

His website does not mention a connection with the hospital in Michigan which is the only one where I know Alexander worked. I would like to know more about possible connections other than their mutual connections to the FTX gang. I have not done shoe-leather reporting in SoCal and almost all of the things we know about Alexander are things he posted voluntarily under his main handle.

Lerner’s site shows what Alexander’s site might look like if he were focused on psychiatry rather than writing and peddling racist lies.

That is very possible although I would guess that was earlier in his career given that he does not advertise as treating ADHD or similar. He has two small children, a writing job, and side projects like writing end-of-the-world stories for AI 2027. His practice has a name drawn from Lord of the Rings like other things in the Thielsphere.

Yes, Scott Alexander is an unusual rationalist blogger who had a credentialed professional career as a psychiatrist. After Substack became his patron, he opened his own medical practice, but the website has said “not accepting new patients at this time” since 2022. So he seems to live off gifts from fellow travelers with a side hustle in psychiatry.

In his early blog posts, Scott Alexander talked about how he was not leaping through higher education in a single bound (he went overseas for medical school, and failed to get medical residency on his first try, ending up in a small Midwestern city). So I wonder why he is sure that in a world with fewer university degrees, he would have gotten as far as he did (medical schools in the USA used to limit admissions from people of his ethnicity).

Likewise with immigration restrictions: he knows that they often blocked Jews, many Europeans. and East Asians not just brown people right?