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Rationalists sometimes like to deny that they're hugely intertwined with the current big-money big-tech AI scene, but like, they do come out and admit it a lot, as famed rationalist blogger Scott Alexander did in this 2026 Harpers piece: harpers.org/archive/2026...

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I've never met someone who self describes as "rational" or "logical" who is either of those things. Almost universally they're sociopaths who spend a lot of time and effort justifying their shitty behavior

Famously, Sam Altman Tweeted in February 2023 that he thinks rationalist god-king Eliezer Yudkowsky has "done more to accelerate AGI than anyone else" and "it is possible at some point he will deserve the nobel peace prize for this."

Rationalist overlord Eliezer Yudkowsky sure seems cranky about the fact that Sam Altman explicitly cited him as an inspiration, but oh well!

Rationalist Eliezer Yudkowsky has gone on the record about how he's upset about how OpenAI has gone about building out the AI technology that he fears will kill us all, but TBH, while he says he's been fighting this ever since, he sure seems to be doing a lousy job. www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA1s...

Holden Karnofsky - co-founder of GiveWell, co-founder and former CEO of Open Philanthropy/Coefficient Giving, husband of Anthropic President Daniela Amodei (whose brother is Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei) - claimed in 2024 that he wishes AI development would pause. He works for Anthropic now.

> renamed his blog to a slightly different but more willfully obtuse version of the same name after it started to grow Truly, not a one of these people have an ounce of the poaster’s bushido in them.

I still don't get how a *practicing psychiatrist* is watching all the scrupulosity and compulsive thinking in his circles, especially as they seem to spin each other out as much as pro-ana Tumblr group.

My husband said “so it’s like the evangelicals who shout about the end times but then also sort of want the end times to come bc they think they’ll be saved or whatever and so they do the things that are supposedly going to bring it about”