Yudkowsky denies the accusations! several thousand words in, and ten years after they were made

I haven't looked into the Zizians in a ton of detail even now, among other reasons because I do not think attention should be a reward for crime.

And it doesn't occur to him to look into the Zizians in order to understand how cults keep springing up from the group he is a major thought leader in? Like if it was just one cult, I would sort of understand the desire just to shut ones eyes (but it certainly wouldn't be a truth-seeking desire), but they are like the third cult (or 5th or 6th if we are counting broadly cult-adjacent group) (and this is not counting the entire rationalist project as cult). (For full on religious cults we have: leverage research, and the rationalist-Buddhist cult; for high-demand groups we have: the Vassarites, Dragon Army's group home, and a few other sketchy group living situations (Nonlinear comes to mind)).

Also, have an xcancel link, because screw Elon and some of the comments are calling Eliezer out on stuff: https://xcancel.com/allTheYud/status/1989825897483194583#m

Funny sneer in the replies:

I read the Sequences and all I got was this lousy thread about the glomarization of Eliezer Yudkowsky's BDSM practices

Serious sneer in the replies

this seems like a good time to point folks towards my articles titled "That Time Eliezer Yudkowsky recommended a really creepy sci-fi book to his audience and called it SFW" and "That Time Eliezer Yudkowsky Wrote A Really Creepy Rationalist Sci-fi Story and called it PG-13

Or maybe society would run a prediction market about whether ten years later the 24-year-old would think that it was a terrible terrible idea for them to have microdosed LSD as a kid. If society's rules were that sensible

Wha'the fuuuuuck

This from a man who runs an all-ages Discord to discuss his BDSM teacher-student AI-doom philosophy fanfic, including users who have identified themselves as minors

This is the wildest ride of a tweet I've ever fucking read. Like seriously, I didn't expect a tweet with multiple paragraphs about how he doesn't like lsd or laws against it, to include him not liking age of consent laws but prefers living in a world with them to without them, a casual disclosure of how the underlying opinions behind all that relates to his bdsm practice, all to wind up with the tweet being about how he believes the zizians are wrong about him sleeping with an underage person.

Also he puts rationalist in quotes and asserts its what they call themselves as though he isn't one of the leading members of the ideology.

Hello Yud this is your lawyer speaking. I am advising you today to keep posting this shit

Dril jokes aside, posting this towards a deathcult who maximize reactions to imagined threats seems like a bad idea. Thankfully I think the zizians are gone as a cult. (I mean arent they in jail)

Saying that a 30-year-old cannot have sex with a 17-year-old (in CA) or a 16-year-old (in NY) is not a crazy law; it is the sort of "I would like to live in a civilization" law that I prefer to obey.

age of consent quoting aside, why would you make it sound like you only follow this law because you want to live in a society

He very much wants you to know that he knows that the Zizians are trans-coded and that he's okay with that, he's cool, he welcomes trans folks into Rationalism, he's totally an ally, etc. How does he phrase that, exactly?

That cult began among, and recruited from, a vulnerable subclass of a class of people who had earlier found tolerance and shelter in what calls itself the 'rationalist' community. I am not explicitly naming that class of people because the vast supermajority of them have not joined murder cults, and what other people do should not be their problem.

I mean, yes in the abstract, but would it really be so hard to say that MIRI supports trans rights? What other people do, when those other people form a majority of a hateful society, is very much a problem for the trans community! So much for status signaling.

I understand where he probably got the neologism "glomarize" from (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer) but his willingness to beat you in the face with it until you accept it is a big part of what makes his writing style so offputting. And, uh, this level of enthusiasm for specialized jargon continues to fail to overcome the cult allegations.

And apparently, one of their FOUNDING BELIEFS, is that I had sex with somebody underage (mutually desired sex, according to the Zizians)... and then MIRI, a nonprofit I started, paid money (to a third-party extorter) to hush that up... which payment, according to the Zizians, is in violation of DECISION THEORY... and, therefore, for THAT EXACT REASON (like specifically the decision theory part), everything believed by those normie rationalists who once befriended them is IRRETRIEVABLY TAINTED... and therefore, the whole world is a lie and dishonest... and from this and OTHER PREMISES they recruit people to join their cult.

Yudkowsky is the first person I have ever seen describe this as a load-bearing belief of the Zizians. Offhand, I don't recall the news stories about the murders even mentioning it.

Death Note deleted scene:

Yagami Light: "No you see I couldn't possibly be Kira because if I was I would have replied to your inquiry with `I can neither confirm nor deny that I am Kira`!"

L: "Oh dang that's exactly what Kira wouldn't have not not not said"

Yagami Light: "... which BTW shouldn't be illegal in the first place and also I would give sufficiently needy 14 year olds LSD and this medicine I'm taking fell off the back of a truck."

I have never experienced semantic satiation immediately after encountering a word for the first time in my life, but the word "glomarize" somehow made it happen.

If I was the leader of a community which had to expel someone for plying people with narcotics, having sex with them underage, and pushing them into extreme BDSM scenarios, I would simply not post that each of those acts is OK sometimes and its not my business to investigate them.

Bloomberg names the person I am thinking of and mentions the first and third accusations

Émile Torres asks,

Why did Yudkowsky choose to tweet about this now? Is there an article coming out suggesting that he's had relations with underage women, and he's trying to get ahead of it? Hmm.

My "Will not confirm or deny whether involved in human trafficking" T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.

But if hypothetically you ask me whether I know about any couples currently doing this ill-advised thing, where it has not yet blown up, then I do not confirm or deny; it would not be my job to run their lives. This is true even if all they'd face is a lot of community frowning about BDSM common wisdom, rather than legal consequences. It is very hard to get me to butt into two people's lives, if they are both telling me to get out and mind my own business; maybe even to the point of it being an error on my part, because if I was erring there, I sure do know which side I would be erring on.

This reads a lot like an ixnay on the exualassaultsay admonition towards the broader rationalist community.

Yudkowsky : "I do not think attention should be a reward for crime" :: Siskind : "I’m not okay with giving [Kathy Forth] martyrdom"