My own experience is that if someone is eager to give unsolicited life advice, you should ignore it. Whitecollar Americans have a culture of seeking paid advice rather than asking their grandmother, their priest, or their All-Genders, No-Genders Ultimate Frisbee Team and it does not seem to work better than the traditional way. I think this leads to all the Rationalist Coaches.
I imagine there are more horrors within the 'AI' companies and the Effective Altruist grantmaking organizations. There have been a few stories about misogyny and substance use and a few vague social media posts, and they all grow out of the same belief systems like eugenics and Cosmism. Its easier to call out a Buddhist teacher in rural Vermont than the CFO of a company that thinks a billion dollars is petty cash.
I found a story from 2013 which thought the guru had studied in Israel as well as Japan and India. Maybe there are Cha'an or Tibetan Buddhists in Israel but it seems like an odd place for a Buddhist to seek enlightenment. I hope that someone who knows more about contemporary Buddhism can explain where Forall fits.
It seems like Soryu is torn between dreams of world optimization (he launched a branch in Berkeley early) and his artisanal, organic reprogramming. Early on he had a mindfulness program for schools with an online course, but as the years went on he focused on disciples at the compound in Vermont.
It must be very strange to be a staffer at a Quaker Meeting House in a little Vermont town knowing that the man who rented the space for meditation workshops in 2011 is getting ready to fight Humanism and Computer Satan.
During a two-week retreat in 2022, COVID was moving through the community. It began with accommodations—interviews outdoors for ventilation, the sick practicing apart—but Soryu progressively mocked those who needed rest, admonished us for being deterred by “a tiny little cold,” and folded everyone back into the zendo regardless of who was sick. Interviews resumed in a 9x9 room with little ventilation while Soryu himself had COVID. Symptomatic, visibly fatigued people kept the full schedule on heavily reduced sleep.
I am shocked, shocked, that a TESCREAL community had bad COVID praxis after 2020!
Correction: a woman who said she was raped by a MAPLE / OAK executive says that:
since this letter was published it has been reported that, Soryu Forall, the Monastic Academy’s main teacher and “guru” has begun to openly engage in sexual and romantic relationships with his students and former students.
Imagine a Victorian curate beating the village schoolboys, driving his charwoman mad, and pottering about the local antiquarian society with essays about faeries or the customs of India which he has never visited.
Forall is not, by any means, a coder who understands AI at the zeros-and-ones level; he does not have a detailed familiarity with large language models or algorithmic design. I asked him whether he had used some of the popular new AI gadgets, such as ChatGPT and Midjourney. He had tried one chatbot. ... When I asked whom he looks to or reads in order to understand AI, he at first, deadpan, answered, “the Buddha.” He then clarified that he also likes the work of the best-selling historian Yuval Noah Harari and a number of prominent ethical-tech folks, among them Zak Stein and Tristan Harris. And he is spending his life ruminating on AI’s risks, which he sees as far from banal.
Yes, it sounds like Aella has called out some abusers but not acknowledged that abuse and manipulation are central to the LessWrong / EA project. Soryu sounds like a more disciplined, less horny version of Yudkowsky (he got a degree and spent years at a Buddhist temple, but still meditates and reads pop science books to understand Scary AI).
MAPLE sounds kind of Maoist or like a printed-out email about an atheist professor on a fundamentalist church's pinboard:
In the late spring of the 15th year of training at Monastic Academy (MAPLE), a writer named Sam Kriss came to MAPLE. In the last hours of his visit, Soryu Forall guided the community in a workshop on mindful decision making.
Mid-way through the workshop, Sam Kriss shifted the topic of focus from decision making to structures of domination, e.g. hierarchies, with a particular emphasis given to the lens of Marxism. He asked: “What creates mechanisms of domination?” and “In environments [e.g. MAPLE] where people are trying to clear out the attachment to thinking, are there fewer structures of domination?”
To the first question, the community answered: “Attachment to thinking.” Vimoksha engaged with Sam in detail on this to open a way for him to see how structures of domination are caused by mind.
To the second question, the community answered: “There are fewer structures of domination here than in the mainstream.”
As these points were made and as Sam Kriss was beginning to engage with the points more directly, the community sat in agreement and clarity, happy with these teachings.
As these points were made, I felt a sense of appreciation and celebration for this community of leader-sages-in-training.
Kriss, who is British, has interviewed Rationalists and is the kind of loud feminist whose Wikipedia page would have a section titled "sexual assault allegations" if he had one. It is possible that MAPLE and LessWrong evolved independently but I have a feeling that Soryu is leaving out some lines from his intellectual CV.
Edit / the chela who published a parody video about the abuse allegations wrote "I spent years moving through the communities that publicly claim to be addressing the destruction of life on Earth and the disconnection between people. I spent time in Silicon Valley, in effective altruism, and in adjacent rationalist and existential-risk circles, starting companies and consulting and looking for the place where these problems were being met at the root." The chela is an Internal Family Systems coach which was popular at CFAR. Last two links are to YouTube.
Has anyone researched exactly how MAPLE split off from Bay Area rationalism? Most of the writeups focus on what happened after they built a giant compound in Vermont, not why so many rats travel there.
They seem to have launched in one small Vermont township in 2014 ("3 Years of Training Awakened Leaders
" as of 2017). They moved from Johnson, VT to Lowell, VT at some point.
The people making these machines are listening. According to a 2023 profile of Forall in The Atlantic, he provides spiritual advice to A.I. thinkers, hosting talks and retreats for researchers and developers at leading artificial intelligence engineering hubs like OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Apple.
MAPLE has also grown, with expansion efforts under similar acronyms formed under the umbrella of Community for the Experience and Development of Awakening and Responsibility, or CEDAR, like its OAK offshoot in Berkeley, Calif., and Willow intensive in Canada.
The Center for Mindful Learning, the parent corporation of MAPLE and its affiliates, controls $3.65 million in assets, according to 2023 tax filings, and brought in nearly a million in revenue each year between 2020 and 2023 thanks to donations from individuals in the West Coast tech industry.
Their Form 990 is here but does not have details of the donors. So it sounds like they have a single guru with wealthy patrons.
And they think that Computer Jesus will return soon and punish the wicked and reward the faithful. I wonder what Yud's parents' rabbi thinks of all this.
Buddhist Rationalist cult MAPLE wants the Internet to know that contrary to "a recent social media post" their guru Soryu Forall is authorized to teach by "by well-known teachers of the Vipassana and Zen traditions." They mention a few whoopsies.
At another time, while Soryu was away traveling, the leadership team tried to convert the entire organization away from Buddhism. When Soryu returned, he saw this and told the leaders that if they wanted to go in this direction, they could, and that he would go do something else. They were unwilling to take on the financial responsibility of the organization and refused the offer.
Aella does her boundary-setting thing (those Zizians/MAPLE/Leverage/Brent Dill are bad and not us) https://xcancel.com/Aella_Girl/status/2091015022042595743#m I don't think Ozy covered MAPLE although IIRC they had a Bay Area offshoot with offices nextdoor to Leverage. I would like to know who is funding Soryu.
The Economist pioneered that strategy of teaching 22 year olds to sound like experts to distracted executives and middle-managers. I think their standards are above Vox's and definitely Vox Future Perfect's (eg. I don't think The Economist would have let SBF's private foundation hire them to write a profile of SBF).
Signatories include psychologist J. Michael Bailey, best known for promoting the idea that many people who say they are trans are just kinky (autogynephilia), and running a class demo where a woman was brought to climax with help of a homemade toy called a fucksaw. The demo got a lot of attention in the dying days of the sex-positive blogosphere.
William MacAskill is embarrassed that he was buddies with SBF. But back in 2014 he was open that he brainstormed names for his movement with "the Leverage folks" and Geoff Anders. He also mentioned that "we hadn’t planned ‘effective altruism’ to take off in the way that it did" which is consistent with his later statements that he was always about the Longtermism.
The same blog archive from 2014 has recent posts on "Strategic considerations about different speeds of AI takeoff" and "an email conversation with (GiveWell founder) Holden Karnofsky, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Luke Muehlhauser about future-oriented effective altruism" if you need to rub anyone's nose in it.
Edit: Nick Bostrom is the academic EA who said "I hate Ni****s", Toby Ord is the academic EA who gets followed around by negative utilitarians who want to debate him Edit: added Beckstead
Reason: I was talking to an EA on Reddit who does not want to believe that the eugenics and the skull calipers were in the movement from the beginning.
The paper by de Vries cites all our favourite race cranks: Bo Winegard, Aporia Magazine, Michael Woodley of Menie, Helmuth Nyborg, Diana Fleischman, E.O.W. Kirkegaard, Steven Pinker (not out AFAIK but he keeps promoting Nazis), G. Meisenberg of Mankind Quarterly, Richard Lynn, Charles Murray https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2024.103417
if you held a gun to my head I would guess it would be his racism (he thinks that different groups have natural places in society driven by their inborn hereditary differences), but I don't see any point in trying to track it down. He is clever but uses his brains for very common, very bad ideas and the things he has done since 2013 are much worse than the things he could have posted as a young man.
My own experience is that if someone is eager to give unsolicited life advice, you should ignore it. Whitecollar Americans have a culture of seeking paid advice rather than asking their grandmother, their priest, or their All-Genders, No-Genders Ultimate Frisbee Team and it does not seem to work better than the traditional way. I think this leads to all the Rationalist Coaches.
I imagine there are more horrors within the 'AI' companies and the Effective Altruist grantmaking organizations. There have been a few stories about misogyny and substance use and a few vague social media posts, and they all grow out of the same belief systems like eugenics and Cosmism. Its easier to call out a Buddhist teacher in rural Vermont than the CFO of a company that thinks a billion dollars is petty cash.
I found a story from 2013 which thought the guru had studied in Israel as well as Japan and India. Maybe there are Cha'an or Tibetan Buddhists in Israel but it seems like an odd place for a Buddhist to seek enlightenment. I hope that someone who knows more about contemporary Buddhism can explain where Forall fits.
A Medium post from 2025 says that Soryu Forall is not authorized to teach Zen. This post feels a bit odd. There is another dubious spiritual teacher with the same government name.
It seems like Soryu is torn between dreams of world optimization (he launched a branch in Berkeley early) and his artisanal, organic reprogramming. Early on he had a mindfulness program for schools with an online course, but as the years went on he focused on disciples at the compound in Vermont.
It must be very strange to be a staffer at a Quaker Meeting House in a little Vermont town knowing that the man who rented the space for meditation workshops in 2011 is getting ready to fight Humanism and Computer Satan.
Someone noted that "white guy in Japanese robes with mystical powers and dreams of world conquest" is a typical JRPG villain
The Dalai Lama has endorsed a Forall tract https://www.amazon.ca/Buddhism-All-Joyful-Path-Enlightenment/dp/B0CLJZKX52
I am going to create a summary post on MAPLE, but one of the open letters criticizing them has a section on COVID:
I am shocked, shocked, that a TESCREAL community had bad COVID praxis after 2020!
Correction: a woman who said she was raped by a MAPLE / OAK executive says that:
That sounds a lot like Yud in the 2010s.
Imagine a Victorian curate beating the village schoolboys, driving his charwoman mad, and pottering about the local antiquarian society with essays about faeries or the customs of India which he has never visited.
Yes, it sounds like Aella has called out some abusers but not acknowledged that abuse and manipulation are central to the LessWrong / EA project. Soryu sounds like a more disciplined, less horny version of Yudkowsky (he got a degree and spent years at a Buddhist temple, but still meditates and reads pop science books to understand Scary AI).
MAPLE sounds kind of Maoist or like a printed-out email about an atheist professor on a fundamentalist church's pinboard:
Kriss, who is British, has interviewed Rationalists and is the kind of loud feminist whose Wikipedia page would have a section titled "sexual assault allegations" if he had one. It is possible that MAPLE and LessWrong evolved independently but I have a feeling that Soryu is leaving out some lines from his intellectual CV.
Edit / the chela who published a parody video about the abuse allegations wrote "I spent years moving through the communities that publicly claim to be addressing the destruction of life on Earth and the disconnection between people. I spent time in Silicon Valley, in effective altruism, and in adjacent rationalist and existential-risk circles, starting companies and consulting and looking for the place where these problems were being met at the root." The chela is an Internal Family Systems coach which was popular at CFAR. Last two links are to YouTube.
Has anyone researched exactly how MAPLE split off from Bay Area rationalism? Most of the writeups focus on what happened after they built a giant compound in Vermont, not why so many rats travel there.
They seem to have launched in one small Vermont township in 2014 ("3 Years of Training Awakened Leaders " as of 2017). They moved from Johnson, VT to Lowell, VT at some point.
Edit / Some history here but nothing on the LessWrong connection except something called the 1440 Foundation in California https://www.centerformindfullearning.org/history/
Edit / Local journalism delivers
Their Form 990 is here but does not have details of the donors. So it sounds like they have a single guru with wealthy patrons.
And they think that Computer Jesus will return soon and punish the wicked and reward the faithful. I wonder what Yud's parents' rabbi thinks of all this.
Buddhist Rationalist cult MAPLE wants the Internet to know that contrary to "a recent social media post" their guru Soryu Forall is authorized to teach by "by well-known teachers of the Vipassana and Zen traditions." They mention a few whoopsies.
They could be responding to The High Control Dynamics at MAPLE (2026) or perhaps Emerging: Making Sense of Soryu Forall (2026) or even My experience inside Soryu Forall's AI-Centered Monastic Academy (2025)
Aella does her boundary-setting thing (those Zizians/MAPLE/Leverage/Brent Dill are bad and not us) https://xcancel.com/Aella_Girl/status/2091015022042595743#m I don't think Ozy covered MAPLE although IIRC they had a Bay Area offshoot with offices nextdoor to Leverage. I would like to know who is funding Soryu.
At one point Yudkowsy raised money for Arbital, "an attempted successor to Wikipedia and/or Tumblr and/or peer review" Cw attempts to suck up to J.K. Rowling, Elon Musk, John Paulson
The Economist pioneered that strategy of teaching 22 year olds to sound like experts to distracted executives and middle-managers. I think their standards are above Vox's and definitely Vox Future Perfect's (eg. I don't think The Economist would have let SBF's private foundation hire them to write a profile of SBF).
Signatories include psychologist J. Michael Bailey, best known for promoting the idea that many people who say they are trans are just kinky (autogynephilia), and running a class demo where a woman was brought to climax with help of a homemade toy called a fucksaw. The demo got a lot of attention in the dying days of the sex-positive blogosphere.
William MacAskill is embarrassed that he was buddies with SBF. But back in 2014 he was open that he brainstormed names for his movement with "the Leverage folks" and Geoff Anders. He also mentioned that "we hadn’t planned ‘effective altruism’ to take off in the way that it did" which is consistent with his later statements that he was always about the Longtermism.
The same blog archive from 2014 has recent posts on "Strategic considerations about different speeds of AI takeoff" and "an email conversation with (GiveWell founder) Holden Karnofsky, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Luke Muehlhauser about future-oriented effective altruism" if you need to rub anyone's nose in it.
Sneerable names include Toby Ord ("negative utilitarianism is bad! Oops, now there is a line of negative utilitarians in dress shirts outside my door"), Nicholas Beckstead ("saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things being equal"), and Peter Singer ("When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed").
Edit: Nick Bostrom is the academic EA who said "I hate Ni****s", Toby Ord is the academic EA who gets followed around by negative utilitarians who want to debate him Edit: added Beckstead
Reason: I was talking to an EA on Reddit who does not want to believe that the eugenics and the skull calipers were in the movement from the beginning.
The paper by de Vries cites all our favourite race cranks: Bo Winegard, Aporia Magazine, Michael Woodley of Menie, Helmuth Nyborg, Diana Fleischman, E.O.W. Kirkegaard, Steven Pinker (not out AFAIK but he keeps promoting Nazis), G. Meisenberg of Mankind Quarterly, Richard Lynn, Charles Murray https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2024.103417
if you held a gun to my head I would guess it would be his racism (he thinks that different groups have natural places in society driven by their inborn hereditary differences), but I don't see any point in trying to track it down. He is clever but uses his brains for very common, very bad ideas and the things he has done since 2013 are much worse than the things he could have posted as a young man.