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:
- since 2018 they mortgage their own bed-and-breakfast at a mansion in Bodega Bay, CA (about 10% as expensive as Lighthaven in Berkeley)
- one of their founders left to work as a quant for Jane Street Capital
- Jessica Taylor had something to say about Salamon in her 2021 debate with Scott Alexander about whether MIRI and CFAR were a lot like the Vassarites and Leverage.
Anna Salamon expressed discontent that Michael Vassar was criticizing ideologies and people that were being used as coordination points, and hyperbolically said he was “the devil”. Michael Vassar seemed at the time (and in retrospect) to be the single person who was giving me the most helpful information during 2017. … Anna Salamon frequently got worried when an idea was discussed that could have negative reputational consequences for her or MIRI leaders. She had many rhetorical justifications for suppressing such information. This included the idea that, by telling people information that contradicted Eliezer Yudkowsky’s worldview, Michael Vassar was causing people to be uncertain in their own head of who their leader was, which would lead to motivational problems (“akrasia”). (Vassar tweets things like “Aspergers started out as a malphemism for that Ashkenazi heritage though.” and people who have met him say he argues that pedophilia is educational! If you think he provides helpful information that is bad news!)
- their June 2026 workshops were at Lighthaven
- Duncan “punch bug” Sabien appeared in the comments of a post in September to say that he would not recommend attending an event with any of these people. He ran Dragon Army while holding down a day job with CFAR and now has a Substack blog.
- in December Salamon published a retrospective that dances around what went wrong and what she will do differently next time
- their fundraiser raised $10,000 and did not have any generous benefactors matching small donations
- someone called Michael “Valentine” Smith left CFAR in 2018, posted a long essay about how he thought obsessing about AI doom in the future was a way not to think about past traumas, and is back to posting profound anthropological insights from his love life to LessWrong:
As far as I know, every culture throughout all known history has made a point of having men and women act as two mostly distinct social clusters most of the time.
Talking about cults and cranks is one angle, but I think you could also talk about how a majority of the leadership of LW and LW-adjacent organizations seem sleazy and dangerous to be around. I hope more people manage to break all the way free from them, rather than quitting CFAR and marrying an OpenPhil staffer, or leaving MIRI and launching their own apocalyptic movement.
The Behind the Bastards podcast says that a CFAR workshop or workshops was a big part of Ziz’s story of how she decided to found the Vegan Sith. It drew some connections to rationalist discourse and named the person who taught Effective Altruists that saving the shrimp might be more important than human welfare. Pretty soon that gets into the kind of sexual and emotional abuse that I’m not comfortable sneering about though. Its one thing to say that someone tweets creepy things, another to tell a story about an affair between two people I never met.
I think that many people take the techniques for social and psychological manipulation, and Yudkowsky’s narrative that he is the Chosen One, and ask “could I be the real Messiah?”
Vassar was trying to argue with Robin Hanson on Twitter back in 2024. Funny how the ‘mainstream’ LW posters and the ‘weird scary’ figures keep in contact!
Valentine also asked Where’s the economic incentive for Wokism coming from? in 2022. He was one of the four co-founders of CFAR and left because he had been too close to Brent Dill. Previous discussion here. Someone tried to explain:
The reality is that in the Anglosphere there are lots of progressive people with money to spend on media. You can sell “woke” media to those people, and lots of it. Even more so when there’s controversy and you can get naive lefties to believe paying money to the megacorp to watch a mainstream show is a way to somehow strike back against the mean right-wingers. And to progressive people it doesn’t feel like “being lectured to about politics”, because that’s not what media with a political/values message you agree with feels like. So going woke is 100% a profit-motivated decision.
Rationalists love markets in theory, but not when they give ordinary consumers too much power or when actually making a profit is hard.
Vassar’s Twitter feed is retweets about solar power is awesome, the state should summarily execute murders if they are “drug-addicted parasites,” the UK should attack Iran because Iran attacked the US base on Diego Garcia, and Crémieux Receuil / Jordan Lasker. To me that is clearer and more important than exactly what he said about psychedelics ten years ago!
Who wants to join me in standing up the competing Center For Applied Rationality Techniques
That’s going to have some overlap with the Central Rationality Application Program
CFAR? The ‘We can learn a lot from scientology courses’ guys?
E: No wait that was Lukeprog
Wait, Julia Galef the skeptic married the guy who took Scientology courses and joined their Toastmasters club?