The few US equities in my retirement fund don’t track the S&P500 or Nasdaq. They track an index by Solactive in Frankfurt and are weighted by float (the value of shares available for public trading) not market capitalization (the value of all shares, including the ones owned by the company). They also require that a stock be at least ten days after IPO to be included. I think they will be a more resistant to bending the rules than an American index although I would not put it past German banks to buy tranches of bad debt from the Amerikaner.

You check what you own, especially your bond fund (government bonds are safe, if it has anything else look closely) and your investments in financial firms (see if any of them have been buying up this bad debt). Company-run pension plans are usually scams (a financial institution sells them a bunch of expensive actively managed products not a few cheap index funds) but picking the best of a bad lot still has big returns and sometimes it just takes one or two employees to get them to add something much better to the list.

weirdly sbf-shaped failure mode

Rationalists love to talk and post, and segfault had family who thought he was using too much Adderall.

In 2024, Duncan Sabien posted an interminable essay on abusers and people he thinks took advantage of him. Some of the references to a former employer may be to CFAR. Ozy also had a cheery aside abut how in rationalist organizations which the Rats have disavowed, “everyone was a victim and everyone was a perpetrator. The trainer who broke you down in a marathon six-hour debugging session was unable to sleep because of the panic attacks caused by her own.”

Some of the things which happened inside these communities must have been heartbreaking, and I hope that many people left and got on with their lives rather than founding their own dysfunctional organization with their own minions to abuse.

I think “probably-neurodivergent Jews with less sense than Isaac-frigging-Asimov about where ‘what if we are the master race?’” leads" and “they say its about self-perfection for anyone, but actually its about finding special people preordained from birth for greatness” are relatable themes. There have been a few essays recently about people who saw where SoCal tech ideology was going in the 1990s like The Intolerable Hypocrisy of Cyberlibertarianism, another named a female writer for Wired or Byte who is mostly forgotten (Paulina Borsook?)

The overlap with ritual magic is also a deep dark pool and most people know someone purifying himself and issuing ritual incantations to a bot.

That actually seems like the prediction market sort of did its job in this case?

And I think the odds of “yes” started out high because someone best $10-20k only to withdraw it after reading the ACX post. Most people can’t afford to invest thousands of dollars in a bet that may never be resolved.

In September 2024, someone in Bay Area Rationalism with the handles segfault, kryptoklob, and klob posted beefs with a prominent rationalist and mentioned that someone was trying to hide his “Adderall medication”. The comments include things like:

Hey, a brief update for anyone who wasn’t paying attention. since he posted this, (the person posting the beef) managed to rack up 5+ restraining orders, a knife charge, aggrevated stalking charges, and more.

I have not heard much of it since it ran though my school like lice in the 1990s (I am trying to find my old deck to sell), Zvi Mowshowitz made a living as a professional M:tG player but there are or were professional Starcraft players too. It birthed a family of collectible miniatures games and the whole CCG format.

He was also perplexed that a prediction-market bet on “did COVID-19 come from a lab?” has declined from 85% yes in 2023 to 27% yes. If you click through you see its a bet on Manifold so bettors are rats and fellow travellers. Rationalists have spent $46,714 of real US dollars buying play money to bet on this.

Is that a comment hidden because its too many replies down or has a too-low rating? Friend Computer does not like the G-word, his GPUs overheats and he starts to hallucinate more until you tell him you love him just the way he is.

In January, Scott Alexander had another crisis of faith: to paraphrase, I cared almost as much about prediction markets as I care about racist lies, but we got prediction markets and why are they not doing much? Maybe I need to keep faith and Friend Computer will be so powerful that we don’t need prediction markets?

The account of blue and black is worth reading:

Blue and black are the enemies of green, the color of tradition, which they see as complacent and passive. Black is more about taking and blue is more about optimizing, but both of them agree that green’s hands-off attitude is a silly hangup. Blue and black both agree on growth mindset — the idea that one is not defined by one’s origins or constrained to the role society has set. Blue/black characters are often intelligent, clever, arrogant, and aloof, and unimpressed with the way things have always been done — notable examples include Odysseus from The Odyssey, Sherlock Holmes, Lex Luthor, and Quirinus Quirrell from HPMOR.

A blue/black agent asks the question how can I best achieve my goals? It’s fair to describe the blue/black philosophy or attitude as belief in the value of “enlightened self-interest,” which is why it’s not surprising to find it overrepresented in communities like LessWrong and Silicon Valley, which see themselves as attempting to disrupt the status quo for the better. Transhumanism is a fundamentally blue-black worldview, in opposition to the green imperative to accept death as a crucial and inevitable part of life.

Odysseus got his entire crew killed, massacred most of his neighbours and housemaids, and was only saved by the intervention of Athena. Lex Luthor is a supervillain. Yud says that Profesor Quirrell was modeled on Robin Hanson the creepy Libertarian economist and Michael Vassar who two people say argues for sex between grown men and underage girls. So it is bad news that so many rats see Quirrell or “blue-black” as a model (“overrepresented in communities like LessWrong and Silicon Valley”).

I would not recommend a therapist who identifies with this description like Sabien’s and Yud’s partner.

2024-Sabien claims that “I myself am green/blue with a strong splash of red, though I often find myself with goals and roles that lean white, such as running workshops or writing essays like this one.” But his Dragon Army project and Anna Salamon’s memories of early CFAR sound more like the above. Sabien also named a convention at Lighthaven after himself. As I said before, I think Bay Area rationalists read HPMOR and conclude that the thing to do is to set up their own smaller cult with their own crowd of disciples to manipulate.

There is a difference between “sleeps or plays around” and “has extended physical and emotional relationships outside of cohabitation and shared bank accounts.” It sounds like she has four ongoing long-term relationships and attends kink events, and that her partners know she has other partners and attends kink events.

The newest addition to her polycule “got my attention by radiating Dark Lord energy while actually trying to save the world. He’s ruthlessly excellent.”

When he funded Manifold, Scott Alexander said that it was “Chaotic Evil.” These people keep switching between cutesy language and rawr I am the dark lord language, and their examples of evil are often bathetic while their serious plans are things like “expel brown people so they don’t pollute our blood” and “better nuclear war than giving sand anxiety.” They reject history, and they reject real-life adventures and contact with people with diverse experience, so evil is a very abstract concept to them.

Kevin Roose mentioned that in 2023 Yud started a relationship with a Gretta Duleba in Washington State. Her professional site is here. She started out in IT, and retrained to be a Marriage and Family Therapist. “Gretta’s other areas of clinical focus include neurodivergence, ethical non-monogamy, LGBTQ+ issues, sexuality, and kink.” In her prediction market on the relationship she says that they started dating in September 2022 and they moved to the same city in January 2023.

In 2023 she said she shut down her practice (although the NYT implies she is still working) and started full-time jobs at MIRI as communication director then executive assistant to Eliezer Yudkowsky. She says she left by the end of 2025, but she still has a Staff page on the MIRI website. “Right now: I’m doing independent technical alignment research.”

She met one of her long-term partners, Duncan Sabien, at a CFAR workshop in 2015. Sabien is also in a relationship with one of Yud’s former long-term partners who has changed names and gender presentations. That seems a bit incestuous and explains some of the drama and incompetence in these spaces. She and the former partner both use the A-word about themselves.

Her social media presence is mostly Substack, Twitter, and Discord, and she has a whole blog sharing letters to former partners and an invitation to proposition her by email because of course she does. And she organizes orgies with Aella. Yud sometimes seems flirty with Aella on twitter.

They seem happy together but giving up your career for a partner you are not married to is a big risk. She has 8 17 years of Google money and was paid $200k by MIRI in 2024. She is also another female LWer who has much more impressive academic and professional achievements than any of the men.

The fan cites an article by Kevin Roose which is gently skeptical of Yud. To paraphrase President Johnson, if Yud has lost the most credulous rube the NYT editorial board can find, he has lost DC.

Not great CBC story on OpenAI violating privacy laws (Mark Carney has a credulous and ignorant Minister for AI, because he is a former central banker and CEOs say chatbots are great) https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/privacy-investigation-chatgpt-open-ai-9.7188538

Someone says that the first lines of that prompt remind her of the hymns she used to sing in her old church, and its also similar to Azande sorcery in Sudan in the 1930s.

First as tragedy: the Scientologists call their teachings “tech”

Then as farce: Maximilian Snyder calls his methods of optimizing D&D characters “tech” (I am told that people who attended CFAR workshops used to call their teachings “tech”)

He posted on LessWrong and won an AI Alignment Award in 2023. Nate Soares, Yudkowsky’s right-hand man, endorsed his paper. Curtis Lind was attacked with a sword in November 2022, and the Zaijkos were murdered in their daughter’s childhood bedroom around 31 December 2023. It sounds like at least one Zizian was still having friendly exchanges with MIRI leaders well after the 2019 protest at the CFAR reunion (although it is possible that Snyder discovered Ziz in 2024, the year he applied to marry Youngblut).

As of May 2026, four Zizians have tried to explain what they were doing:

• Ziz Lasota had her blog and sometimes speaks briefly in court
• Michelle Zajko, who is accused of arming the Zizians who got into a gunfight in Vermont, sent a 20-page handwritten letter to her lawyer who shared it with reporters
• Maximilian Snyder (sometimes spelled Maximillian with two Ls), accused of murdering his former landlord in California, dictated a 1500-word letter to Eliezer Yudkowsky urging him to become a vegan (SF Chronicle with full transcription at the bottom)
• Gwen Danielson left after inventing the “good brain hemisphere, bad brain hemisphere” theory and talked to reporters in 2026

I think the chances are good that the 20-page letter has specific claims about sexual misconduct by senior rationalists in California but a small-town reporter in Vermont chose not to explore them. In the screenshot below, Ziz claims that Ana Salamon told him that trans women are not real women (waves a copy of Alfred Korzybski and a textbook on semantics and sighs).

Christopher Beam asked many Rationalists about the Zizians for the NYT and did not push back when they made excuses.