TvTropes says that the Yudkowsky-insert protagonist of Project Lawful/Planecrash! is driven by desire to have 144 children (and prove his society wrong for not paying him to have 144) which sounds like Scott Aaaronson? Did they know each other in those days?
I am glad that all I knew about Yud in 2022 was "wrote a Harry Potter fanfic that I did not finish, and runs a website where people pretend to be experts."
From RationalWiki: Yud claims that the only women he gave orgasms for completing math homework was his future wife. If he ever denied dating / playing with people from his foundation or making people who wanted to play with him fill out an IQ test I can't find it.
We have some threads of Vaccinations in Book/Article Form which try to share good pop science and textbooks without the cult shit and Dunning-Kruger. People who think they know everything and are mysteriously underemployed tend to have the most time to post though.
On the enshittified site someone posted this take on Alexander's take on the kabbalah and Jewish thought https://ishayirashashem.substack.com/p/unsong-a-study-in-misrepresentation
In his early blog posts, Scott Alexander talked about how he was not leaping through higher education in a single bound (he went overseas for medical school, and failed to get medical residency on his first try, ending up in a small Midwestern city). So I wonder why he is sure that in a world with fewer university degrees, he would have gotten as far as he did (medical schools in the USA used to limit admissions from people of his ethnicity).
Likewise with immigration restrictions: he knows that they often blocked Jews, many Europeans. and East Asians not just brown people right?
Hossenfelder seemed like a normal science blogger and critic of string theory until some recent videos, and most people don't update their blogroll every year. And Woit links her sensible (but defunct) blog, not her out-there videos.
A lot of people in this world have connections going back 15 or 30 years but ended up on opposite sides (eg. Charlie Stross and Curtis Yarvin, or Laurie Penny and Scott Aaronson)
The Independent has yet another profile of the Collinses which finally starts to map their network (a brother is in DOGE). Just who is their PR person would be good to know. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trump-musk-ai-pronatalists-collins-b2777577.html
There’s a Collins Rotunda at Harvard, a physical testament to the amount of money Malcolm’s family has donated over the years. His uncle was the former president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas. In fact, pretty much every relative has been to an elite Ivy League institution and runs a successful startup or works in government.
Larry Niven had a fixed idea about cetacean intelligence, and it showed up in mass-audience SF like Star Trek IV.
The story below is another example of really creepy things being done in the name of science in the postwar era.
I wonder if Matthew Yglesias, author of One Billion Americans, has figured out that some of his co-authors think the USA has too many useless eaters already? I can't tell you which they are, but when an organization has Effective Altruism money and a lead author who is close friends with Scott Alexander and Yud, it will have people ready to sterilize and deport poor brown people.
Brunig's argument that Piper is ignorant of the founding arguments for the welfare state and just knows a neoliberal argument for something kind of like a welfare state reminds me of an exchange with someone of her class where I tried a basic Green argument and they fell into it like I was the first guy trying a Judo throw on an American in 1940something. They flailed wildly as if they had never encountered that move and did not have a response ready.
Yud once debated Massimo Pigliucci and did poorly. He tried and failed to publish academic research in a journal not controlled by his groupies (desk reject? failed to pass peer review?).
Have there been any other times when he engaged with someone with actual education and experience who was not his fan? It sounds like he was on twitter.
Just this week Scott Alexander wrote a long 'joke' about how the fe-males just want to attach themselves to a high-status man like (guess who) Curtis Yarvin (bonus self-own: the joke implies that Curtis Yarvin is not inviting the narrator to parties any more) https://archive.is/akSnc
Yud has distanced himself from some of the things he posted before LessWrong, but he keeps citing the Pathfinder fic on twitter (here in 2022) (here in 2025)