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/

While we will never know the details until someone publishes a memoir, people in Bay Area LessWrong talk a lot about psychedelics. They were popular in the 1960s counterculture (there was a LSD-and-marijuana fuelled attempt to levitate the Pentagon in 1967). This is a jury-rigged substitute for the on-the-ground reporting, social history, and ethnography which we desperately need. The first part covers events up to 2018, when the movement and movement leaders were mostly sympathetic to better living through chemistry.

Some people who talk about psychedelics might mean LSD and related hallucinogens, others might include other 'hippie drugs' like marijuana. Many of my sources are either casual posts or memories of traumatic experiences hazed by substances and emotional and sexual abuse, so may not be precise and accurate.

The following quotes many posts by Scott Alexander. To my knowledge, he has never publicly encouraged anyone to take a controlled substance without a proscription, and never stated that he himself has used such substances. It might be possible to find similar posts on LessWrong and the parties' Tumblr blogs but I only have so much time.

Early Posts 2011-2015

• 2011: A Shannon F., who lived with her husband, the cofounder of the New York chapter of Less Wrong, and his wife, expresses desire to cut down on substance use:

If I cut down to once/week of pot smoking with possibly the occasional hallucinogen if I can get them working, then that’s only 1-2 nights of altered state/week,” http://choiceful.livejournal.com/970554.html as quoted at BetaBeat.com (the exact link to the LiveJournal is wrong).

F. and her housemates had multiple connections to Peter Thiel. F. at one time dated Yudkowsky. Her Livejournal is not fully archived but it has a "drugs" tag. My understanding is that the most popular hallucinogens in the US are magic mushrooms and psychedelics. Shannon F. was an Internal Family Systems life coach (an interest she shared with Andrew Critch at CFAR) and one of her partners was a libertarian Seasteader. One of her gurus told her she should hire servants and make sure she did not overpay ("So cool...", Nov. 15, 2012"). It sounds like a standard take-my-expensive-classes-and-you-will-get-rich grift.

• September 2012 to March 2013: gwern experiments on himself with LSD microdoses later written up https://gwern.net/lsd-microdosing
• 30 September 2013: Scott Alexander posts Links for Octember. One paragraph is an intrigued but gently skeptical note on psychedelic therapy. David Gerard is in the comments.

Yet another article on the amazing therapeutic and nootropic promise of LSD. But this one has a twist – the idea of LSD micro-dosing! Take a tiny fraction of a regular dose – they suggest – and instead of merging with the Universal Fractal Consciousness, you just feel a little better, calmer, more productive, and more “in tune” during your day. A random person on Reddit reports success, and that’s good enough for me. Too bad I (SlateScott) am in a position of responsibility where I have to serve as a Positive Role Model for others and so probably shouldn’t try it.

He wrote this about the time he moved from the Bay Area to the Chicago area for medical residency. A nootropic is a drug which is supposed to make you smarter. Users of everything from caffeine and alcohol to the latest designer drug tell you it makes them more productive but randomized controlled trials often disagree. I would expect a psychiatrist to be familiar with the perils of self-medication but maybe he was reading racist blogs during that class.

• 2014: while working as a camgirl in Masschusetts, Aella experiments with LSD (10 Months of Acid, 2016). She later says she became addicted so her doses were probably not micro- or not all LSD (her education ended in high school and her parents were fundamentalists in rural Iowa so I don't think she was equipped to make the good stuff or test it herself). https://archive.ph/RvDdI As of time of writing she tweets annual recaps of her substance use and continues to use substances to alter her consciousness.
• 11 April 2014: Scott Alexander posts Going Loopy

One of the most powerful serotonergic drugs in existence is LSD. And as I have learned from – let’s say long boring journal articles – the main effect of LSD is to make you literally loopy. Your thoughts loop in and become about themselves, your sense of time becomes cyclic, everything you see becomes a fractal or a spiral or both. And you end up in an extreme emotional feedback loop to infinity – either a “good trip” or a “bad trip”.

Alexander could be hinting that he learned about the effects of LSD from treating patients, or from other experiences.

• 24 June 2015: Scott Alexander posts Links 6/15: Monsters, Link

Critical Period 2016-2018

Bay Area Rationalists reported a lot of drama between 2016 and 2018. MIRI spent a total of $280k on legal expenses in 2014 and 2015 to deal with Louie Helm and the miricult accusations (about ten times their usual legal budget). In January 2016 CFAR reiterated that its focus was teaching people to be rational, then in December it announced a pivot to preventing AI Doom. Michael Vassar of MIRI and MetaMed is said to have influenced the old CFAR curriculum but was drifting away from Bay Area LW. In 2018 there was another shakeup after various people pushed out Brent D. and the board members who had protected him. Julia Galef who seemed more naive than malicious also left CFAR in 2016 and dropped out of public view. Michael Vassar really needs to be interviewed, two representative links are https://lifeboat.com/ex/bios.michael.vassar and https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Michael_Vassar.

• 1 March 2016: Scott Alexander posts 2016 Nootropics Survey results 109 out of 850 respondents comment on experiences with LSD microdosing compared to 314 respondents on Adderall

A bit under 15% of users got addicted to Adderall. The conventional wisdom says “recreational users” are more likely to get addicted than people who take it for a psychiatric condition with a doctor’s prescription. There was no sign of this; people who took it legally and people who took it for ADHD were actually much more likely to get addicted than people who described themselves as illegal or recreational users. In retrospect this isn’t surprising; typical psychiatric use is every day; typical recreational use is once in a while.

I am not a MD or pharmacist, but isn't another important difference that recreational users can use as much as they can afford while medical users have a controlled rate of consumption supervised by someone familiar with its effects and no financial interest in how much they consume? There is also a difference between a student popping Adderall during exam season, and a finance worker taking it daily. Most research on substance use distinguishes people who tried a joint once and people who use it every week.

• 28 April 2016: Scott Alexander posts Why Were Early Psychedelicists So Weird? (comments by Aella, Steve Sailer, gwern). Gwern chips in about his experiments:

To drop in my (Gwern's) anecdote: as part of my 2012 LSD microdosing experiment, I (Gwern) had taken a (very short) Big Five inventory (the YourMorals.org one) which put my Openness at 87th percentile several months before; 2 days after my LSD trip (with no mystical experience), I retook it and also got 87th. (That was my first and so far only psychedelic experience, excluding obviously the microdosing itself, which had no perceptible or measured effects. It was enjoyable and helpful, I thought, but I haven’t been able to do another because Reasons.) Several months later, I took it a third time and got a 93rd percentile. So it’s at least directionally consistent. I have not noticed any particular change in my beliefs or ideologies I could ascribe to the one trip, also consistent with the idea that it’s a lot of heroic doses which sends people off into Mullisland.

• 21 August 2016: Aella posts 10 Months of Acid about her self-experimentation in 2014. She assures readers that although her LSD use damaged her, "disclaimer: this is not typical acid use. There are many concretely ‘beneficial’ effects from lower, more infrequent doses"

As time went on, I stopped viewing myself as a being separate from the universe. Sensations became interesting to watch, not motivating. I entered such a permanent state of utter peace and contentment that I stopped wanting anything at all. And by the end of it, I barely got out of bed, barely ate. My sleep schedule became erratic, as I woke and slept as I wished. I had vivid lucid dreams. I had stopped working almost entirely and was living off slowly depleting savings. Why would I work? Why would I do anything? I was…. not happy, not sad, I simply was. I was free of desire. I did not fear death.

(... she decided to turn away from oblivion ...)

I’m mostly normal now(wpl:citationNeeded), with only a few remnants. Sometimes certain types of conversations will trigger it, where I’m sitting there and suddenly the eye of the universe has turned on me and I am melting away. It is very intense. I don’t mind, though. That’s a fundamental part of the feeling, really – that I don’t mind when it’s happening.

• 15 August 2016: Scott Alexander posts Tolerance Troubles, an essay on why you need increasing doses of some substances to get the same effect. Several handles in the comments describe their experiences with LSD.

• 2017: Jessica Taylor says that this was the year when she both got a job with MIRI/CFAR and self-medicated with psychedelics. As she remembered in 2021:

the psychotic break was in October 2017, and involved psychedelic use (as part of trying to “fix” multiple deep mental problems at once, which was, empirically, overly ambitious); although people around me to some degree tried to help me, this “treatment” mostly made the problem worse, so I was placed in 1-2 weeks of intensive psychiatric hospitalization, followed by 2 weeks in a halfway house. This was followed by severe depression lasting months, and less severe depression from then on, which I still haven’t fully recovered from. I had PTSD symptoms after the event and am still recovering. ("My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage)")

In a comment she says that someone close to CFAR hinted that CFAR encouraged people to use psychedelics. The discussion thread contains many of our dear friends all mutually recriminating and contradicting (some want to blame Michael Vassar, others the main faction of CFAR). Taylor posted a second time pushing back against Scott Alexander's attempt to blame Michael Vassar. I talk more about this under A Bad Trip in Berkeley.

She does not say where she got the idea to self-medicate with these substances, or that anyone encouraged her to do so, but the idea of self-medicating with psychedelics was certainly part of LessWrong online culture by 2018 and people tend to be more willing to talk about illegal activities than post about them. 2016-2018 was the period when CFAR switched to focus on AI risk and was run by people close to Brent Dill, and Michael Vassar was still close to MIRI and CFAR although no longer an employee or board member.

• 18 January 2018: Scott Alexander posts about Aella's LSD habit and a site that combines online dating with skin in the game and cryptocurrency in Practically a Book review: Luna Whitepaper. He encourages people to read her blog about self-experimenting and has no other warnings which I can see.

• 6 June 2018: Scott Alexander posts HPPD And The Specter Of Permanent Side Effects

I recently worked with a man who took LSD once in college and never stopped hallucinating. It’s been ten years now and it’s still going. We can control it with medication, but take the meds away and it starts right back up again.

This seems to be the first time that a prominent rationalist warns the Internet that drugs can eff you up for life. Aella was not very influential in the rationalist scene back in 2016, I believe she was still living in New England then.

• 19 June 2018: Jax Romana tweets her breakup with Effective Altruism and LessWrong after spending several years in the Bay Area scene https://xcancel.com/RuffleJax/status/1009141601623474176#m She later accuses a specific rationalist:

I know, personally, two women who have not publicly come out about their abuse but were basically held emotionally hostage by Yud with a mix of LSD, "You will die without me", and kink practiced with or without their consent.

As far as I know nobody who was present in Bay Area Rationalism has publicly accused Yud of similar things.

• 18 September 2018: a pseudonymous Medium account accuses Brent D. of various sexual misconduct. One story begins:

I was 19 when I entered the rationalist community. Brent was 40 when we met each other. I moved into the same house as Brent, dated Brent for 2 months, and then lived with him for a year and a half after. ... With Brent, I did acid and MDMA for the first time. Some of the explicit agenda around me taking MDMA was to restore subconscious faith and attraction in him, which did not work. I came away from this with the story that I was pressured into taking MDMA by Brent.

In this context acid usually means LSD. A post called Quis cancellat ipsos cancellores? says that Brent was expelled from the community and the CFAR organization lost several staff and its position as a central social hub in Bay Area rationalism.

Later this summer: perigee, in which our friends start whispering that their community norms around substance use should change

Edit / define nootropic, acknowledge that Aella did have some warnings about LSD before Slate Scott

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.

I posted some quotes on the Stubsack. I don't know what to do because it looks like some messed up things happened between our friends and unnamed young people, and there were coverups, but the details will only be known if someone gets access to their email and text history and interviews them. Some of the same people are probably victims and perpetrators. We don't need all the details to tell anyone curious about them "these spaces are full of abusers, grifters, and cult recruiters and use a lot of drugs, stay away."

Stories about Dill putting his arm around people and telling them that they were the only two who saw what was really going on in society / their group house remind me of stories about Michael Vassar.

Dill once lived in Idaho where Aella grew up.

In another thread there were some questions about how to reduce your exposure to frauds and bubbles around TESCREAL billionaires and chatbot companies in the USA. Although I cannot give specific advice, the basic approach should not take more than a few days. Here are some simple ways to avoid owning a small part of a money-losing slop peddler.

First, check what you own. Even if someone else manages your investments they should send you a monthly, quarterly, or yearly report with a list of holdings. This will often be some kind of fund which takes money and buys other assets with it.

Second, figure out what you ultimately own under all the wrappers. Most investment funds have a list of top 10 holdings and a breakdown into percentages in different types of assets eg. US stocks (equities). You can find this on their website or as a short document called fund fact sheet or similar. If the top ten holdings are full of American tech stocks, and a high percentage of assets are US equities, that is a sign that they are exposed to the chatbot bubble and might give Sam Altman and Elon Musk some of your money.

Good financial institutions will have a complete list of what that fund holds. Sometimes these will be other financial products, like a stock fund and a bond fund, and you have to recursively look up those products and see what they hold. Other times, you can see the underlying assets directly and often download them as a .csv file. Blackrock shows them under Holdings > Aggregate Underlying Holdings.

At other financial institutions you may need to phone or email to get a complete list of holdings, especially if what you own is only available to clients of your institution.

Six publicly-traded companies which seem especially entangled in the TESCREAL movement and the chatbot bubble are Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, Tesla, and Palantir. Amazon, Microsoft, and Nvidia own large parts of OpenAI, Tesla is entangled with Elon Musk's other businesses, and Palantir is run by a man who issues fascist manifesti. Google has been threatening to replace search results with slop and is heavily investing in cloud infrastructure for its Gemini 'AI' (more here). If a fund invests in these big companies run by nutters, it probably invests in smaller companies from the same milieu.

Funds which track indexes of large American companies like the S&P500 and the NASDAQ-100 will also be heavily invested in companies run or funded by TESCREAL billionaires and are likely to double down on the forthcoming IPOs of companies like SpaceX and OpenAI. Sometimes large companies in one country do better than average, sometimes they do worse, and trying to guess is not a good way of making money. Some funds track the total US stock market (or other total stock markets) and this can spread your risk slightly more.

Third, if what you own is too exposed to the chatbot companies and fascist CEOs with twitter poisoning, sell some of it and buy something else. You can use the method above to judge how much something you are thinking of buying is exposed. Four strategies which you might employ are:

• underweight US stocks (eg. if you would normally have 20% of your investments in stocks from your country, 20% US stocks, and 20% in stocks from the rest of the world, you might pick 25-10-25). About 60% of global stock markets are in the USA, and 37% of that is in ten giant tech companies, so many funds invest heavily in the US by default.
• underweight US tech stocks. This can be harder but some funds focused on socially responsible investing or ESG screen out the usual suspects.
• focus on companies which pay dividends. In theory, if a company's stock is worth a total of $300m, and it pays out 1% dividends, the company is now worth $297m and the shares will drop in value, so it does not matter whether a company pays dividends or not. However, if a company can pay out dividends to its investors every year, it at least has some positive cashflow proportionate to its value on the stock market. I would be shocked if SpaceX or OpenAI offered dividends and funds which look for dividends tend to prefer well-established companies which have paid out for years or decades. Dividend funds are likely to invest in Microsoft or Apple but not Joe's Slop Shop (est. 2023, net loss last year one zillion dollars but they promise to earn it back by 2030).
• focus on companies whose stock prices have low volatility. This is a newer approach but also tends to screen out 'bubbly' and speculative companies.

None of these strategies will keep your money safe if the US stock market collapses or there is another Global Financial Crisis. When this all falls apart there will be real estate dealers who sold property, copper mines which sold copper, and HR firms which sold services and find themselves knocking on the door of bankrupt companies asking for money. Companies which built their processes around 'AI' will have to scramble to keep going. Nobody can predict all the ramifications. If you pick one of these strategies and the US stock market or the US 'tech' industry do better than average, you will have less money than you would have otherwise. However, if you put in a weekend of work you can be less exposed to chatbot companies running out of money than the average investor.

Finally, if you have not paid attention to your investments for a while, have a look at the Management Expense Ratio and any trailing fees. Many people are still paying around 2% of their investments to a financial services company every year. A mix of stocks and bonds tends to yield about 4% plus inflation over the long term, so this halves your rate of growth. Professional money-managers tell themselves that they take this money to make good decisions, but there is no evidence that they are any better at managing money than people in general, and for every manager with ten million dollars who does better than average, these is a manager with ten million dollars who does worse. It is dangerous to assume that you can pick one of the good ones. These days if you are in a developed country you can easily buy a mix of local bonds and global stocks for about 0.2% of your assets per year. Over decades, that will leave you with twice as much money as the typical investor in a high-fee fund.

Replacing high-fee funds with low-cost funds will make much more of a difference in your financial future than avoiding one stock bubble in one country. For every American billionaire in the news plotting to get 0.4% of your American stocks, there is someone in a financial services company in your country draining 2% from your friends' retirement accounts every year. You can't stop two crooks from starting a war which closes the Straits of Hormuz and cuts off 20% of the global supply of fertilizer, or your boss laying you off for a chatbot that does not work, but you can keep your cost of investing low.

Edit / added sentence to last paragraph

Edit / added a note on NASDAQ

Pretty much everyone in the word business has noticed that audio and video are kicking writing's butts in terms of getting an online audience (I am not sure in terms of influencing people in serious jobs). Ivy Astrix mentioned that our dear friends in Berkeley decided that if a camp for wordy bloggers was good, a camp for short-form vloggers would be even better. The camp is about AI doom, but the vlogs don't have to be. You can live in Berkeley for a month, be paid $2,000, compete for $20,000 in prizes, and hang out with ~~illustrious figures~~ Hereticon alumni like:

• Botez Sisters (professional chess and poker players, one of them is down on the idea that teh men have better genes for chess than women)
• Grimes
• CJ the X
• Aric Floyd
• Liv Boeree
• Quinn Finite who dual-classes in visual social media and sexy social media
• Zoe Curzi
• Rob Miles
• Tor Parsons
• Yud
• Aella
• Nate Soares (the last three in the triangle wing, one presumes)

The marketing mentions "a sprinkling of AI experts" even though Yud's position on Twitter is that he is not an AI expert. I don't think Soares or MIles have any relevant credentials or achievements other than social media posts. Another Robert Miles was a University of Hull computer scientist. Edit/ This Miles was doing a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Nottingham ten years ago but does not mention any publications or industry experience and warns "I do have a broader understanding than some, but I also think that most researchers … yeah, most researchers know everything about one thing and a bit about everything else, and I just know a bit about everything, right?"

Some of the slogans sound lighthearted if you don't know about the phygs and the sexual abuse: "if we're gonna die we might as well have fun" "sleep is optional, posting is not" "we need better messengers" "31 days of chaos" "the stakes could not be higher"

plzdontkillus is definitely less straight and male than their usual lineup, and some of these people would be interesting to meet or have coffee with, but I would not recommend committing to spend a month with them given all the abuse and negligence in rationalist communities.

The LessWrong crowd don't seem to be worried that subsidies for streaming video are killing the culture of reading and writing and the rational, reflective, slow forms of thinking which it inculates, I don't know if they have talked about the need to cooperate with NIMBYs fighting data centers, or if using law to prevent destruction might involve hiring a law team to make OpenAI's life hell. You can hire a very good lawyer and some paralegals for Yud's salary.

edit/ added full list of celebrity guests

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:

Personalities, organizations, goals, and means can all be thought of in terms of the Magic colors they typify, allowing you to draw interesting connections, make surprisingly useful predictions, identify deficits and growth areas, and increase empathy. I claim that the Magic system, which was designed to be resonant and trope-y and archetypal, does a lot of the same good work that naming things does, and is a richer intuition pump than other popular wrong-but-usefuls like Enneagram or MBTI or chakras or the integral theory colors.

Backlinks show a number of rationalists and one TTRPG designer being excited about it.

Sneerers are having fun riffing on this theory, so lets create a thread for that. https://homosabiens.substack.com/p/the-mtg-color-wheel?open=false#%C2%A7ub

I will begin with the fact that he posted it on Medium in twenty-frigging-eighteen and was offended that they eventually moved it to their "paying members only" section. Who in 2018 could have expected that a 'free' service would shut down or make the experience worse when it ran out of other people's money?

He also makes sure you know that the game designer, who also designed RoboRally, has a PhD. Try to explain Hume to them and they stone you, but invent a CCG which lets a corporation take all your lunch and newspaper-route money and they respect credentials.

The Rationalist web magazine Asterisk published a long article on prediction markets and invested 80 karma to boosting it on Hacker News. It drops the usual names (author has worked for Google and Metaculous, cites Friedrich Hayek, Phil Tetlock, Vitalik Buterin, Scott Alexander, Elon Musk, mentions the tiny prediction market Manifold because its a Rationalist shop). What is notable is that it pivots: so actually existing prediction markets are mostly gambling (he does not say "fraud and insider trading" or "just like cryptocurrency"), but some day soon LLMs will be our superforcasters!

It looks to me like even insiders doubt that prediction markets will be allowed to enable so much corruption for long.

Especially sneerable is the idea that you should ask Grok (the bot trained to praise Melon Husk) whether Melon Husk's latest promise will come to reality.

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.

Since 2022 the rationalists control a $20m event complex called Lighthaven in Berkeley. It is run by organizations with names like Lightcone Infrastructure or the Lightcone Project. They told the taxman that it belonged to CFAR in 2022, 2023, and 2024. CFAR listed a real estate asset and debt liability, so who was the counterparty? You might assume it was a bank, but you would be wrong.

Some facts came out when the FTX estate sued CFAR to recover money which Sam Bankman-Fried gave or loaned them. In 2024, the FTX trustees described the situation thusly:

The complaint alleges that Lightcone got another $20m loan to fund the Rose Garden Inn purchase from Slimrock Investments Pte Ltd, a Singapore-incorporated company owned by Estonian software billionaire, Skype inventor and EA/rationalism adherent Jaan Tallinn. This included the $16.5m purchase price and $3.5m for renovations and repairs.

Slimrock investments has no apparent public-facing website or means of contact. The Guardian emailed Tallinn for comment via the Future of Life Institute, a non-profit whose self-assigned mission is: “Steering transformative technology towards benefiting life and away from extreme large-scale risks.” Tallinn sits on that organization’s board. Neither Tallinn nor the Future of Life Institute responded to the request.

A loan comes with obligation to repay.

Also (Case 22-11068-JTD):

Throughout 2022, FTX Foundation and CFAR were in discussions to purchase the Rose Garden Inn in Berkeley, California as a retreat center for the Effective Altruist community. ... Lightcone RG closed on the purchase of the hotel on or about November 4, 2022. ... The property is subject to a deed of trust and assignment of rents in favor of Slimrock Investments Pte. Ltd., which provided Lightcone with a $20 million loan for the purchase and renovation of the property

Such a deed means that if Lightcone fails to repay the loan, Slimrock owns Lighthaven, much as when someone fails to pay a mortgage and the bank reposesses their house.

When people asked if this endangered the Lighthaven property, Habryka said:

100% of the equity in Lighthaven is owned by a Jaan Tallinn owned company, so it's not really at risk, though the details are a bit messy. I think it's a relevant consideration but not a big one compared to just basic profitability.

In late 2025 he threatened to sell Lighthaven if people did not donate several million dollars.

If we fundraise less than $1.4M (or at least fail to get reasonably high confidence commitments that we will get more money before we run out of funds), I expect we will shut down. We will start the process of selling Lighthaven. I will make sure that LessWrong.com content somehow ends up in a fine place, but I don't expect I would be up for running it on a much smaller budget in the long run.

To help with this, the Survival and Flourishing Fund is matching donations up to $2.6M at an additional 12.5%! This means if we raise $2.6M, we unlock an additional $325k of SFF funding.

SFF does not seem to actually control money, it just recommends that third parties donate money. One of these is probably the Survival and Flourishing Corp, a public-benefit corporation. "Our primary client is philanthropist Jaan Tallinn."

My hypothesis is that Lighthaven is security for a $20m loan from Tallinn's Slimrock company (much like a house is security for a mortgage). That means that donors to Lightcone pay Slimrock, and if they can't keep up Slimrock keeps $20m of freshly renovated real estate in Berkeley (or the value of selling that real estate). That would also imply that Tallinn is collecting tax deductions for giving to a charity whose greatest single expense is repaying money he lent them.

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

Yud made them list him under both Project Lawful/Planecrash and the Sequences/HPMOR. I think he is really proud of his million words of forum posts about D&D, BDSM, and eugenics, like an elderly L. Ron Hubbard really wanted to write another bestseller.

They hope to get the creator of Worm (the ~~webcomic~~ serial fiction that Ziz Lasota was a fan of) and Dominic Cummings. Also some postrationalists like The Last Psychiatrist and Meaningness.

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.

Go read Alice Evans on the great gender divergence Michael.

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

The wider network of Effectively Altruistic, Bay Area AI tech brotherhood has been covered on and off- in varying degrees of concern- for their seemingly wide community interest in kink, BDSM and “Consensual Non-Consent,” aka rape play. I experienced this myself, sitting in a circle of self-identified rationalists as they explained to me the pleasures of “red means no” parties; full-contact “rape orgies” where participants are encouraged to fight back.

...

(Being forced to have sex is) a relatively common fantasy in individuals, but one I’ve never seen such widespread community interest in outside the Bay Area.

Scott Alexander and Scott Aaronson mostly want a woman to produce and raise babies. Gwern does not seem to post much about sexuality. Kelsey Piper probably keeps that to Tumblr and Project Lawful although she is queer and polyamorous. Caroline Ellison was into submission to men and being in a hierarchical harem. Duncan Sabien didn't mention BDSM fantasies in his post about what he was like in bed. Yudkowsky is into dominance, sadism, and horny Japanese pop culture. Michael Vassar is into much younger women and at least one person says he advocates sex between adults and girls as young as 12 (but not that he commits such acts). Brent Dill liked master/slave relationships with much younger women which are a kind of consensual non-consent. Polyamory is big in this subculture. I don't know much about Burning Man culture. But I can't recall anyone in Bay Area rationalism and EA expressing interest in rape parties until Aella showed up. So is this like Yudkowsky spreading AI doomerism, and Alexander spreading neoreaction?

There is a difference between old school SoCal kink, where you spend a lot of time making fursuits and paddles and occasionally use them with someone fetching, and Aella's version where you rent a house or a field and go to town on each other. Kink culture stresses skill and technical proficiency whereas Aella likes to feel helpless in the power of big strong men. The Rationalists don't like the protective measures which kinksters have learned from experience, like limiting or banning substance use, safewords, and joining a national or international kink community so you can get a second opinion about that proposition on FetLife. (Yudkowsky has posted "of course I use safewords, but what if I didn't?" and I have seen a claim that the rape parties involve games like drugs roulette- Aella claims she has joked about drugs roulette but never actually tried it). Many of them are hostile to mainstream ideas of informed consent, preferring a Libertarian approach where if you sign a contract what happens after is your responsibility.

Edit to mention Vassar

Edit, in her 2023 How my Consensual Nonconsent Orgies Work, Aella says that she has enough Bay Area people to play with and she is no longer actively recruiting outside her current social network. I did not know her playmates included so many LW people given how many kinksters live in the SF Bay Area and given that these are high-risk group activities in an overwhelming sensory space and LW people tend to be cautious introverts with sensory processing issues. She does not respond to a comment reaching out from another Bay Area playspace, or a question about herpes risk.

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.

Another correspondent in 2016 suggested inviting Scott Alexander Siskind to speak at a different event Epstein was involved in. The correspondent has a Substack which cites Siskind in 2025.

Obviously just because Epstein had heard of a public figure does not mean that they knew him.

Epstein's words begin below:

• List for summer talks. David Pizarro. Professor of Psychology and Philosopher at Cornell Univcrsit
• Eric Weinstein, Mathematician
• Matthew Putman, Scientist
• Paul Saffo, Technology Forecaster, and Professor of Engineering
• Lori Santos, Professor ofPsychology and Cognitive Science
• Janna Levin, Theoretical Cosmologist
• Ev Williams, Internet Entrepreneur
• Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Author
• Heiner Gocbbels, Composer, and Director
• Martine Rothblatt, Lawyer and Entrepreneur
• Peter Thiel, Venture Capitalist, and Entrepreneur
• Richard Thaler, Behavioral Economics
• Barbara Tversky, Professor of Psychology
• Michael Vassar, Futurist, Activist
• Bret Weinstein, Biologist, and Evolutionary Theorist
• Susan Hockfield, MIT President, Professor of Neuroscience
• David Deutsch, Physicist
• Eliezer Yudkowsky, Al Researcher
• N. Jeremy Kasdin, Astrophysicist
• Carl Zimmer, Science Writer
• Douglas Rushkoff, Media Theorist
• Eric Topol, Cardiologist
• Dustin Yellin, Artist
• Sherry Turkic, Professor of Social Studies
• Taylor Mac, Actor
• Stephen Johnson, Author
• Martin Hagglund, Swedish Philosopher and Scholar of Modernist Literature
• Thomas Metzinger, Philosopher, and Professor of Theoretical Philosophy
• Bjarke Ingels, Danish Architect, Founder of BIG, currently working on Floating Cities/Sustainable Habitats project
• Kai-Fu Lee, Venture Capitalist, Technology Executive, and Al Expert, developed the world's first speaker-independent continuous speech recognition system
• Poppy Crum, Neuroscientist, and Technologist, Chief Scientist at Dolby Laboratories, Adjunct Professor at Stanford University (Computer Research in Music)
• Neil Burgess, Researcher, and Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, investigating the role of the hippocampus in spatial navigation
• Paul Sloom, Psychologist, and Researcher exploring how children and adults understand the physical and secin' world, with a special focus on language, religion and morality
• Brian Cox, Physicist, and Professor of Particle Physics, Presenter of Science Programs
• Eythor Bender. CEO of Berkeley Bionics, Innovator and Business Leader in human augmentation (bionics and robotics)
• Gwynne Shotwell President. and COO at SpaceX, Engineer. listed in 2018 as the 59th most powerful woman in the world by Forbes
• Jaap de Roodc. Associate Professor of Evolution (of parasites) and Ecology, focusing on how parasites attack monarch butterflies and in return how butterflies have the ability to self-medicate
• Jim Holt, American Philosopher, and Contributor to the New York Times writing on string theory, time, the universe, and philosophy
• Vijay Komar, Indian Roboticist and UPS Foundation Professor in School of Engineering & Applied Science:. became Dean of Penn Engineering, studies flying and cooperative robots
• Hugh Herr, Biophysicist, Engineer, and Rock Climber, builds prosthetic knees, legs, and ankles that fuse biomechanics with microprocessors at MIT
• Gabriel Zucman, French Economist at UC Berkeley. best known for his research on tax havens, inequalities, and global wealth
• Fci-Fei Li, Professor of Computer Science, Director of Stanford's Human-Ccntered Al, works as Chief Scientist of Al/ML of Google Cloud
• Dennis Hong, Korean American Mechanical Engineer, Professor and Founding Director of RoMeLa (Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory) of the Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Department at UCLA
• Misha (Mikhail) Leonidovich Gromov, American

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.

• Lightcone Infrastructure is here. They operate LessWrong and the Lighthaven campus in Berkeley but list no physical assets; someone on Reddit says that they let fellow travelers like Scott Alexander use their old rented office for free. "We are a registered 501(c)3 and are IMO the best bet you have for converting money into good futures for humanity." They also published a book and website with common-sense, data-based advice for Democratic Party leaders called Deciding to Win which I am sure fills a gap in the literature. Edit: their November 2024 call for donations talks how they spend $16.5m on real estate and $6m on renovations then saw donations collapse is here, an analysis is here
• CFAR is here. They seem to own the campus in Berkeley but it is encumbered with a mortgage ("Land, buildings, and equipment ... less depreciation; $22,026,042 ... Secured mortgages and notes payable, $20,848,988"). I don't know what else they do since they stopped teaching rationality workshops in 2016 or so and pivoted to worrying about building Colossus. They have nine employees with salaries from $112k to $340k plus a president paid $23k/year
• MIRI is here. They pay Yud ($599,970 in 2024!) and after failing to publish much research on how to build Friend Computer they pivoted to arguing that Friend Computer might not be our friend. Edit: they had about $16 million in mostly financial assets (cash, investments, etc.) at end of year but spent $6.5m against $1.5m of revenue in 2024. They received $25 million in 2021 and ever since they have been consuming those funds rather than investing them and living off the interest.
• BEMC Foundation is here. This husband-and-wife organization gives about $2 million/year each to Vox Future Perfect and GiveWell from an initial $38m in capital (so they can keep giving for decades without adding more capital). Edit: The size of the donations to Future Perfect and GiveWell swing from year to year so neither can count on the money, and they gave out $6.4m in 2024 which is not sustainable.
• The Clear Fund (GiveWell) is here. They have the biggest wad of cash and the highest cashflow.
• Edit: Open Philanthropy (now Coefficient Giving) is here (they have two sister organizations). David Gerard says they are mainly a way for Dustin Moskevitz the co-founder of Facebook to organize donations, like the Gates, Carnegie, and Rockefeller foundations. They used to fund Lightcone.
• Edit: Animal Charity Evaluators is here. They have funded Vox Future Perfect (in 2020-2021) and the longtermist kind of animal welfare ("if humans eating pigs is bad, isn't whales eating krill worse?")
• Edit: Survival and Flourishing Fund does not seem to be a charity. Whereas a Lightcone staffer says that SFF funds Lightcone, SFF say that they just connect applicants to donors and evaluate grant applications. So who exactly is providing the money? Sometimes its Jaan Tallinn of Skype and Kazaa.
• Centre for Effective Altruism is mostly British but has a US wing since March 2025 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/333737390
• Edit: Giving What We Can seems like a mainstream "bednets and deworming pills" type of charity
• Edit: Givedirectly Inc is an excellent idea in principle (give money to poor people overseas and let them figure out how best to use it) but their auditor flagged them for Material noncompliance and Material weakness in internal controls. The mistakes don't seem sinister (they classified $39 million of donations as conditional rather than unconditional- ie. with more restrictions than they actually had). GiveDirectly, Give What We Can, and GiveWell are all much better funded than the core LessWrong organizations.

Since CFAR seem to own Lighthaven, its curious that Lightcone head Oliver Habryka threatens to sell it if Lightcone shut down. One might almost imagine that boundaries between all these organizations are not as clear as the org charts make it seem. SFGate says that it cost $16.5 million plus renovations:

Who are these owners? The property belongs to a limited liability company called Lightcone Rose Garden, which appears to be a stand-in for the nonprofit Center for Applied Rationality and its project, Lightcone Infrastructure. Both of these organizations list the address, 2740 Telegraph Ave., as their home on public filings. They’ve renovated the inn, named it Lighthaven, and now use it to host events, often related to the organizations’ work in cognitive science, artificial intelligence safety and “longtermism.”

Habryka was boasting about the campus in 2024 and said that Lightcone budgeted $6.25 million on renovating the campus that year. It also seems odd for a nonprofit to spend money renovating a property that belongs to another nonprofit.

On LessWrong Habryka also mentions "a property we (Lightcone) own right next to Lighthaven, which is worth around $1M" and which they could use as collateral for a loan. Lightcone's 2024 paperwork listed the only assets as cash and accounts receivable. So either they are passing around assets like the last plastic cup at a frat party, or they bought this recently while the dispute with the trustees was ongoing, or Habryka does not know what his organization actually owns.

The California end seems to be burning money, as many movements with apocalyptic messages and inexperienced managers do. Revenue was significantly less than expenses and assets of CFAR are close to liabilities. CFAR/Lightcone do not have the $4.9 million liquid assets which the FTX trustees want back and claim their escrow company lost another $1 million of FTX's money.