Commenter questions the substantive point of the article
7 Sep 17 6:43 AM · 9d ago · 1 comment · 1 source · development 7 of 7
A reader expresses uncertainty about what the original post actually argues beyond documenting that figures in the movement are imperfect and have non-standard personal lives.
“Is there any point besides Yud not being perfect, and having connections to people who openly talk about their sex life?”
perlgeek
Eliezer Yudkowsky AI safety advocate and figure in the movementNina Hartley Adult entertainer referenced in discussion
The whole story articlespostscomments the bright band is this development · numbered dots are the others · click one to jump
Reported in the same hours no headline names this development itself — these 1 claim were published in its stretch
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2 outlets AI Safety Is Mostly a Sex Cult
first by HN Frontpage, 7d ago · also HN Best
What people said 22 voices · verbatim
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J
The social scene around AI and AI safety is more unpleasant than I realized. I'm sure there are other sides to it. But when you get a lot of young men with too much money who think they're building god or saving the world, what do you expect? Read the long Bluesky thread about this, collected on one page: https:// skywriter.blue/@segyges.bsky.s…
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I don't really get why people go on about Yudkowsky in this regard. I mean serious thinking about AI goes back at least to Turing in 1950 with his test and prediction computers would get there in about 50 years and presumably keep improving. And people have worried about it since then.Like in 1949 Norbert Wiener saying of AI type stuff "every…
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H
AI Safety Is Mostly a Sex Cult L: https:// bsky.app/profile/segyges.bsky. social/post/3mvom4b4dn22q C: https:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4 9766911 posted on 2026.09.19 at 10:36:28 (c=1, p=4)
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As far as manifestos go HPMOR is a pretty good one. I think that’s what a lot of the critiques about it miss. Yudkowsky is actually a pretty decent writer, especially in the fan fic scene. Not only is his prose actually acceptable which is pretty rare in fanfic it’s clear that he actually thought through a lot of the plot points ahead of time…
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The ad hominems are tiresome. You think the people who are explicitly trying to replace all humans are any less weird and problematic?The rationalists long predicted that misaligned AI would break out of training environments, this has happened. They believe (among other things) that this will continue to happen, and that creating powerful AI that…
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Someone who hasn't been reading the object-level arguments for 10+ years might reasonably wonder if these are good heuristics. Here's an additional data point: I think polyamory is stupid, I've read the object-level arguments, and this entire thread is ridiculous.Everyone who works at a frontier lab should be in prison, AND ALSO the people talking…
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I wish there was more discussion on HN about the various plans that the various labs have to keep AI aligned or about the various arguments for why alignment will be easy or happen naturally, so there's no need for an elaborate plan for it.Instead HN has mostly discussion of assertions that the AI anti-extinctionists (and Yudkowsky in particular…
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I was invited to a few orgies with them; I politely declined, they were very respectful of my decision and I wasn’t asked again (which in retrospect must have been partly due to deliberate coordination - fairly advanced social technology, imo). This didn’t affect my standing or acceptance with them. It may well be a sex cult, but if it is, my…
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It sort of seems like the community is criticized for truly believing and living what they preach... They're the most sincere - if you thought the world was ending, you'd maybe do your best to stop it while enjoying the last bits left, while spending time with like-minded people. They're being criticized for not being hypocrites? I mean sure seems…
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Why can't detractors of rationalism and AI-doom ever just lay out an argument for why they're wrongIt's always "yudkowsky is a weird guy" or "they had an orgie once" but who gives a fuck?I just want someone to lay out, in impersonal terms, the flaws of their reasoning and why I shouldn't agree with them.My problem is with the whole genre of…
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> His autobiography even opens with a parable: as a small child he threw his favorite squirtgun off a third-floor balcony rather than accept that his mother could lend out what was his, and felt complete when he heard it hit the pavement.What a classic narcissist.> Main character syndrome stops being a character flaw the day you join a religion…
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There are better ways to make this criticism. The main problem I see with this is that it's basically a long ad hominem, followed by some valid concerns about market concentration at the end.Remove all the ad hominem and what remains is two paragraphs long. Valid ones, though.
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As a polyamorous person, it seems quite concerning that effective altruism people are labeled as members of a sex cult, due to their private lives. Intellectuals should be attacked on the basis of their ideas, not based on their private lives.
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This has me wondering if or how FetLife played a role in these communities connecting in the first place…does anyone know of any connection? (FetLife was a combo social network, blogging forum, and dating site back in the day)
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fantastic. I've heard of bits and pieces of this but this is the first article I've read which lays out the entire timeline with all the firsthand sources you could want. thanks for the effort!
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Some of these potshots just cheapen any arguments. "Gretta has no prior experience with non profits" uh, she was a well regarded Google SRE... her making 200k is nothing.
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That was a good read. A little long as you say, but this thing has been around for over 20 years now, it can't be helped.Predictably the original submission got flagged.
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I guess the EA and rationalist cult members are out in force since this got flagged. Not a good look guys, you're just confirming what everyone thinks.
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In case the author is reading this: I’m getting a Cloudflare worker exception when accessing the page using one of my uplinks, possibly because of IPv6.
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Should you care that your heart surgeon is a necrophiliac? Probably. Should you care that some AI researchers are in a sex cult? No.
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Thank you for writing this piece. It was completely worth the length and amount of ground/time covered.
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FYI if you're getting a Worker Exception, using Cloudflare Warp / 1.1.1.1 can get the article
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