Post by @timnitGebru@dair-community.social

@timnitGebru@dair-community.social 5 hr. ago

"I am aware, that if you are not lurking on the internet as much as I do, of how utterly insane that paragraph sounds. However, every bit of it is heavily documented by numerous sources. The people in this story are not a secret society coordinating over dinner. They are a social scene: overlapping friendship groups, funding relationships, and sexual and romantic relationships, all of it threaded through the institutions asking you to trust them about AI regulation."

https://www.iankduncan.com/personal/2026-09-16-sex-ai-and-the-apocalypse

Ian Duncan

Full-stack developer and functional programming enthusiast

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Resuna

@resuna@ohai.social 2 hr. ago

@timnitGebru

Don't see why a sex cult is any worse than any other kind of cult. At least the motivation is straightforward and human. The LLM cult is freakier.

Legit_Spaghetti

@Legit_Spaghetti@mastodo.neoliber.al 5 hr. ago

@timnitGebru I still don't understand how anyone ever took Yurkowski seriously. That idiot tried to make Bayesian statistics his whole personality ffs.

Also:

How a community devoted to thinking clearly

Even critical reporting gets it wrong. The rationalists were never "devoted to thinking clearly." They were always a bunch of weirdos who misread philosophy and had an online circlejerk going. Without their equally delusional billionaire backers, they have nothing.

Timnit Gebru (she/her).

@timnitGebru@dair-community.social 5 hr. ago

When its all said and done, if these people end up being exposed like Epstein and his associates, everyone will pretend that it wasn't out in the open like this and that they had made it so difficult for us to expose them. The mainstream media will pretend that they weren't constantly platforming these people (hello TIME MAGAZINE, NYT, Atlantic etc), hello everyone else recently?

Timnit Gebru (she/her).

@timnitGebru@dair-community.social 3 hr. ago

"Yarvin was not an outsider to the rationalist community; he had been posting in the community’s own forums before he started his own blog, and by 2011 LessWrong’s annual survey was asking members whether they had been influenced by him, because enough of them had that the question seemed worth tabulating."

Curtis Yarvin is in there too.

Timnit Gebru (she/her).

@timnitGebru@dair-community.social 2 hr. ago

"In 2021, co-founder Anna Salamon, by then CFAR’s president, acknowledged that at least three employees had effectively been compelled to undergo “debugging,” the community’s term for intervention in a person’s own psychology."

Nothing to see here.

Dr. Bruce Simpson

@bms@mastodon.bsd.cafe 3 hr. ago

@timnitGebru I'm still disgusted with the BBC describing Yarvin as an "ageing rock-star like figure" or even platforming his "ideas".

The similarity of his surname to the word "Yarbles" in Anthony Burgess' Nadsat dialect: priceless.

peachfront

@peachfront@mas.to 3 hr. ago

@timnitGebru

same as they all pretended they never noticed that Reagan had Alzheimer's