SneerClub

I’m in a pile of excellent people opposed to the TESCREALists at this trying time in history. We need a name.

featuring Jeremy Ormstein of the Center for AI Safety, i.e. this is the EAs https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/08/irreplaceable-climate-activists-ai-backlash/688404/ archive: https://archive.ph/k0hSY

Originally posted about in the stubsack but decided to make this its own post because what the hell, let’s see how everyone’s favourite scenario is doing!

https://bsky.app/profile/clairewillett.bsky.social/post/3mtpvatugsc2z https://bsky.app/profile/panic.gay/post/3mtoakgupgk2x

Since Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is apparently still a thing, I figured I’d spend a few minutes before fediverse monster-movie night to collect relevant links:

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.

https://gwern.net/guardian-angel - personal digital twins

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

this is a hoot

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/

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.

From the rationalists are a net negative for society dept: Scott Alexander’s latest (that I’m not linking) is all about how you should be using the slop machine to tell you who to vote for.

Hi, Ivy Astrix here. I saw some of my work referenced here so figured I’d pop in and do an AMA. I did harm reduction at Vibecamp 1/2, and Vibegala 1/2. Happy to answer what I can as long as it doesn’t violate confidences or isn’t in service of personal grievances.

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:

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.

I have a feeling that both Jordan “Crémieux Receuil” Lasker and Curtis Yarvin will be present as guests. https://less.online/

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:

The essay by Noelle Perdue has some blind spots but she was struck by one of their kink practices:

Does anyone know what this June 2019 text from Epstein is about? I have added some links to RationalWiki and Wikipedia but not corrected spelling and corrected OCR errors. Was it at one of the institutions he sponsored like MIT Media Lab? Or more like his conference in the Virgin Islands? It seems to mix mainstream figures and people in the Libertarian/LessWrong network.

Its almost the end of the year so most US nonprofits which want to remain nonprofits have filed Form 990 for 2024 including some run by our dear friends. This is a mandatory financial report.

People connected to LessWrong and the Bay Area surveillance industry often cite David Chapman’s "Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths in Subculture Evolution" to understand why their subcultures keep getting taken over by jerks. Chapman is a Buddhist mystic who seems rationalist-curious. Some people use the term postrationalist.

Form 990 for these organizations mentions many names I am not familiar with such as Tyler Emerson. Many people in these spaces have romantic or housing partnerships with each other, and many attend meetups and cons together. A MIRI staffer claims that Peter Thiel funded them from 2005 to 2009, we now know when Jeffrey Epstein donated. Publishing such a thing is not very nice since these are living persons frequently accused of questionable behavior which never goes to court (and some may have left the movement), but does a concise list of dates, places, and known connections exist?

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hun4EaiSQnNmB9xkd/tell-people-as-early-as-possible-it-s-not-going-to-work-out

We often mix up two bloggers named Scott. One of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims says that she was abused by a white-haired psychology professor or Harvard professor named Stephen. In 2020, Vice observed that two Harvard faculty members with known ties to Epstein fit that description (a Steven and a Stephen). The older of the two taught the younger. The younger denies that he met or had sex with the victim. What kind of workplace has two people who can be reasonably suspected of an act like that?

An opposition between altruism and selfishness seems important to Yud. 23-year-old Yud said "I was pretty much entirely altruistic in terms of raw motivations" and his Pathfinder fic has a whole theology of selfishness. His protagonists have a deep longing to be world-historical figures and be admired by the world. Dreams of controlling and manipulating people to get what you want are woven into his community like mould spores in a condemned building.

So seeing the reaction on lesswrong to Eliezer’s book has been interesting. It turns out, even among people that already mostly agree with him, a lot of them were hoping he would make their case better than he has (either because they aren’t as convinced as him, or they are, but were hoping for something more palatable to the general public).

I used to think that psychiatry-blogging was Scott Alexander’s most useful/least harmful writing, because its his profession and an underserved topic. But he has his agenda to preach race pseudoscience and 1920s-type eugenics, and he has written in some ethical grey areas like stating a named friend’s diagnosis and desired course of treatment. He is in a community where many people tell themselves that their substance use is medicinal and want proscriptions. Someone on SneerClub thinks he mixed up psychosis and schizophrenia in a recent post.

Bad people who spend too long on social media call normies NPCs as in video-game NPCs who follow a closed behavioural loop. Wikipedia says this slur was popular with the Twitter far right in October 2018. Two years before that, Maciej Ceglowski warned:

This Bruenig follow up to his recent drubbing of Kelsey Piper was entertaining, but it got me thinking about just what she is now gesturing at.