There are a few relevant posts on LessWrong like Yud in 2007 and Lukeprog in 2011. Ayn Rand was in to selfishness and its big with market worshipers like Bryan Caplan.
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, 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.
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.
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!
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).
AFAIK the USA is the only country where programmers make very high wages compared to other college-educated people in a profession anyone can enter. Its a myth that so-called STEM majors earn much more than others, although people with a professional degree often launch their careers quicker than people without (but if you really want to launch your career quickly, learn a trade or work in an extractive industry somewhere remote). So I think for a long time programmers in the USA made peace with FAANG because they got a share of the booty.
Piper's self-described many unpopular beliefs that the rest of society considers loathsome
If Piper ever starts to publish essays on what goals and policy positions she thinks make her or SlateScott "sincere centre-leftists" they are going to be a trip. Just the explanation why she feels more comfortable saying what she believes under Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Big Balls than under Biden's centrist technocrats would require a few doses of my favourite substance to get through.
Edit: I would also love to hear "so you agree that the talking head on Fox News who suggested executing the homeless is despicable, what about your friend Scott Alexander proposing to sterilize the poor and substance users before they receive help?"
When you are running a con like crypto or chatbot companies, it helps to know someone who is utterly naive and can't stop talking about whatever line you feed him. If this were the middle ages Kevin Roose would have an excellent collection of pigges bones and scraps of linen that the nice friar promised were relics of St Margaret of Antioch.
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 and meatspace friend 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. Would the Goldwater Rule have applied? 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.
So Hanson is dissing one of the few movements that supports his pet contrarian policy? After the Defence Department lost interest the only people who like prediction markets seem to be LessWrongers / EAs / tech libertarians / crypto bros / worshippers of Friend Computer.
There are a few relevant posts on LessWrong like Yud in 2007 and Lukeprog in 2011. Ayn Rand was in to selfishness and its big with market worshipers like Bryan Caplan.