Also a plot point in the erotic horror comics I linked a few weeks ago!

Yes, in the 2016 emails Yudkowsky hints that he knows Epstein has a reputation for pursuing underage girls and would still like his money. We don’t know what he knew about Epstein in 2009, but he sure seemed to know that something was wrong with the man in 2016. And that makes it harder to put Yud’s writings about the age of consent in a good light (hard to believe that he was just thinking of a sixteen-year-old dating a nineteen-year-old, and had never imagined a middle-aged man assaulting fourteen-year-olds).

This is not the worst academics and pundits in Epstein’s network, this virologist named Nathan Wolfe is new to me. If an American academic had their career ended by fraud or misconduct there is a good chance that he or she was trying to make nice with Epstein afterwards.

Joscha Bach introduced Michael Vassar to Epstein in 2018 with:

My friend Michele Reilly asked me to reintroduce her to you; you met her and Michael Vassar a few years ago on the island

Vassar is best known for the MetaMed startup which bet that LessWrong posters were better at diagnosis than MDs. He also founded one of the LessWrong splinter movements that Scott Alexander warns people against.

There is a MIT computer scientist and popularizer called Michele Reilly although he could have meant someone else. My career has not been very successful but at least I never asked a friend to introduce me to a pederast or accepted an invitation to a sex criminal’s private island.

Some names are missing like Sabine Hossenfelder, the GMU economists, Brad Delong, and Hoover Institute staff. And I would not underestimate the number of people in this network who just went to the right university, met the right people, got the right job, and started to climb the ladder of fame.

The Weinstein brothers, Michael Vassar, Peter Thiel, and Yudkowsky were the names that leapt out at me. I don’t know that Vassar has any mainstream intellectual or academic achievements.

Learning that Rebecca Watson emailed Epstein for comment on a quote she was going to discuss, and Lawrence Krauss emailed Epstein because people like Rebecca Watson were outing him as a sex pest, reminds me of what a small world that was.

I don’t plan to link every figure, but will do so if they are sleazy or the name is unfamiliar. Many of them seem like distinguished academics or popularizers.

Also likely to be concentrated in the USA, whose government is helpfully screaming at the rest of the world “disconnect your economies and your IT systems from ust!” Most of us are busy doing that as fast as possible although it takes a while to get everyone on board.

its a very useful skill when reading the internet to learn to see when “in the US and UK” or “in SoCal and London” should be appended to a sentence. Once you see it you can’t unsee it.

Since it comes up on one in 216 characters with random stats rolled on 3d6, shouldn’t INT 18 be three standard deviations above the norm?

Its a surprisingly modest claim about Marty Stu (Cheeliax with 20 million people, most of them poor given stated infant mortality, has 20 equally bright women available for breeding duty).

Some LIbertarians avoid marriage or common-law relationships, not sure if Yud has expressed an opinion on the topic though.

Yud was married to a woman in 2019 and mentions other partners and playmates. He said he met her in 2013. The post from 2013 is an infohazard.

considering his confidence in an AI apocalypse I heavily doubt it

He argues that the way to prevent the AI apocalypse is to breed superbabies from high-IQ stock, and a major plot point of Project Lawful is that the hero wants to prove himself worthy of having more children than average and nation he isekais himself to agrees but wants any future children to use their genes for evil.

I wonder if Yud has biological children? He is mercifully discreet about his home life even if he shares his kinks like he has a five-book contract with Baen Books.

I am starting to suspect that Yud never learned to compartmentalize knowledge and put it in different epistemic categories. To him, AD&D alignments, Large Language Models, and race pseudoscience are all nerdy ideas he read about on the Internet, all equally real and true. He does not seem to file a carpenter telling him how to frame a roof, a rabbi teaching theology, and a random twitter account in different categories like most of us would.

Its Project Lawful, his D&D novel about eugenics and BDSM cowritten on a forum with many of our dear friends

A few people in LessWrong and Effectlve Altruism seem to want Yud to stick in the background while they get on with organizing his teachings into doctrine, dumping the awkward ones down the memory hole, and organizing a movement that can last when he goes to the Great Anime Convention in the Sky. In 2022 someone on the EA forum posted On Deference and Yudkowsky’s AI Risk Estimates (ie. “Yud has been bad at predictions in the past so we should be skeptical of his predictions today”)

A Christopher DiCarlo (cwdicarlo on LessWrong) got AI doomerism into Macleans magazine in Canada. He seems to have got into AI doomerism in the 1990s but hung out being an academic and kept his manifestos to himself until recently. He claims to have clashed with First Nations creationists back in 2005 when he said “we are all African.” His book is called Building a God: The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and the Race to Control It.

There must be many such cases who read the Extropians in the 1990s and 2000s and neither filed them with fiction not turned them into a career.

And its a fable about having to petition a mercurial and brutal authority for resources you need to live! A lesson that anyone who wants to make their living vibe-coding should ponder.

Economist John Quiggin posts a critique of William MacAskill’s type of utilitarianism with confusing logic, has to retract it when a quote with chapter and verse in his main text does not exist:

Even though I have a clear memory of locating the third quotation in the Gutenberg edition, I can’t find it now. So, I;ve edited the post to deleted it. Apologies for this. I’m assuming the quote I found was some kind of AI confabulation, and that I slipped up on the check. I will need to double check more carefully in future.

(quote is from the comments I have not corrected or added sic)

He says he is writing a book against pro-natalism.

Everything depends on the details like what country, what field, and what university. Because this involves specific people, its also inherently unpredictable. I would say that in general, a field that will accept a second go at a PhD, but won’t accept a well documented HR complaint against a supervisor, is not one worth working in.