In just 12 months, AI timelines have grown 550%. At this rate of growth, timelines will grow 178500% as soon as 2030, and years with the number 1785 in them have historically involved Frenchmen flying across the English channel and people in Mesopotamia doing awesome word problems. For the security of the United States we cannot allow a balloon and/or algebra gap and we propose a new Manhattan Project to sit with our polycule in Berkeley trying to solve cubic equations and designing really cool balloons with lasers and streaming anime.

Didn’t someone come out with AI 2040?

I think as soon as they published it the original authors started to backpedal on timelines.

One more charming detail. In May 2025, Forall told a local reporter that he was unfamiliar with the Zizians and the January shootout and that “I’ve heard of The Rationalists, but I’m no expert in that way of looking at things.” March 2025 graced us with this remarkable chat with a reporter at Wired:

Ask Daniela about it and she says, “I’m not the expert on effective altruism. I don’t identify with that terminology. My impression is that it’s a bit of an outdated term”. Yet her husband, Holden Karnofsky, cofounded one of EA’s most conspicuous philanthropy wings, is outspoken about AI safety, and, in January 2025, joined Anthropic. Many others also remain engaged with EA. As early employee Amanda Askell puts it, “I definitely have met people here who are effective altruists, but it’s not a theme of the organization or anything”. (Her ex-husband, William MacAskill, is an originator of the movement.)

Ekzelent knowledge of ze party line despite your insufficient devotion to materialism tovarich!

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.

Its really common that someone bums around for a few years after undergrad working service and odd jobs then gets a professional certification, and I think he picked M.D. and survived his scatterbrain tendencies to complete residency because of family pressure.

Thank you for sharing your experience! I have been struggling how to write about this since some bad things have clearly happened but the details are not all public. If a lot of people are going to use substances at your event, you need an overdose policy (and ideally trained medics and free substance tests) in advance.

I corrected the post with Kimbal Musk’s departure from the Burning Man board.

Per erika milktea, Aella was in a documentary on her LSD use called Sweet Nothing (2018) https://vimeo.com/280213292 I am not watching that.

Several of his immediate family are MDs and it seems like they nudged him into the profession. Unfortunately, med school made him retreat to his room and read more racist blogs, not take up jogging and meet a cute English major from Vietnam.

I would love to hear more about what getting MDMA or LSD or psiolcybin as a middle-class white person in California is like. When Stross met Yarvin 20 or 30 years ago he was synthesizing drugs in his apartment, but that does not seem like our friends’ usual style. They like words and code not electronics and chemistry and mushroom farming, and they don’t like raves or other scenes where they would meet people with a more hands-on orientation.

It might be worth searching the SlateStar archives for psilocybin or 'shrooms. I get the impression that the substances they use are unlikely to send a middle-class Californian to jail unless someone wants to make an example of them. They don’t connect their desire to experiment with wider communities though, probably because those communities have lefties and working-class people.

Yud tweets and writes in Libertarian magazines about decriminalization, but I don’t think he re-tweets anti-drug-war groups or sex-workers’ groups.

The short version is probably “MetaMed and FTX were a typical rationalist businesses” but there have to be more anecdotes. These are not people who spend less than they earn, own Booglehead portfolios, and take night classes on business to get ready to launch their side hustle next year.

This blog post talks about who funds one EA organization. https://rufuspollock.substack.com/p/what-lightcone-infrastructures-financial. Note that all the foundations like OpenPhil (Moskovitz) and SFF (Tallinn) which are mostly a way to distribute one patron’s funds have well-paid senior staff. They are not squeamish about letting a former CFAR board member join the grants committee that votes money for CFAR either.

I cover all the overlapping organizations at http://effective-altruism.com/ea/gb/the_2014_survey_of_effective_altruists_results/

I think it mostly comes through very wealthy patrons, less from Effective Altruists like Zhang who they persuaded to “earn to give” at the start of their careers (although they hope all their friends at AI startups will donate their shares to the cause). Most of those billionaires were in the software industry before 2008.

• Jaan Tallinn of Skype and Kazaa
• Peter Thiel
• Dustin Moskovitz (turned off the taps a few years ago)
• Elon Musk
• Sam Bankman-Fried (oops)
• some crypto speculator
• Mark Zuckerberg (on the edge)
• Jeff Bezos (on the edge)
• Eric Schmidt (the thing with Zhang is the first I can recall)
• James McClave and his BEMC foundation who funded a whole EA propaganda outlet at Vox

Small donors to EA orgs don’t always know the money will pay Yud $600,000 a year to think great thoughts, or Nonlinear Fund to be digital nomads with a live-in servant, or the European EAs to buy a Czech castle to hold retreats. I have not looked into who funds Effective Altruism after FTX went bankrupt but the pledge drives always have matching donations from a foundation with a billionaire patron.

And then the people who receive the benefits and earn hundreds of thousands a year pass on $50-100k at a time to their friends.

It sounds like a dubious investment because its run by a hedge fund bro:

JueYan is a philanthropic advisor and a grantmaker. He runs the AI Safety Tactical Opportunities Fund (AISTOF), a pooled multi-donor charitable fund which seeks to reduce the probability and severity of catastrophic risks from advanced AI. Since inception in September 2023, the fund has raised more than $10mm and disbursed more than $7mm. JueYan serves on the boards of Family Empowerment Media and Suvita. He also advises Ambitious Impact and is a speculation grantor for the Survival and Flourishing Fund (“Our primary client is philanthropist Jaan Tallinn”). Previously, JueYan spent a decade earning-to-give as a hedge fund manager.

Mr. Zhang is a rare Asian-American in Effective Altruism. FEM helps women access contraception rather than encouraging some women to breed. Suvita helps poor Indians vaccinate their children.

Edit / Schmidt Sciences means “Eric Schmidt of Google.” He clearly has not lost faith in EA!

In the 2008 post about sparky elites, Yud also admits to feeling intimidated and not sure his achievements were so remarkable. So young Yud had a different position on some issues than wealthy, famous Yud. He is not a very clear writer and has trouble spotting weak spots and inconsistencies in his arguments because he never had a scientific education or an editor who was not his fan/employee.

1. People who are awful online and especially on corporate social media generally turn that off in person because ruining the community you actually live in is costly and requires courage. So best practice is to use the Internet as a research library and e Yellow Pages not as a substitute for your local coffeehouse or makerspace.

2. SlateScott was feeling down that he had trouble connecting with women the way many people can. There are a lot of hints that the first year he spent in San Francisco, in 2012-2013, was the first time he had a face-to-face social life, and mysteriously his love live improved thereafter and he stopped posting so many angry things about feminists and women who put out for the wrong guy. “Find some face-to-face activity with the sex you are interested in, especially a virtuous or physical activity,” is really common advice for the loveless. A SlateScott who did some kind of medical volunteering in Cork, say educating partygoers about substance use, might have found a girlfriend and spent less time reading wordy racists.

AFAIK Yud denies he is autistic which is why the community keeps reinventing names like akrasia for things that the neurodivergence movement already named. At one point he told Twitter he had superior Ashkenazi genes not Autistic genes like some Untermensch.

AFAIK, exercise is competitive with SSRIs as a treatment for depression too. I don’t know how to square Dr. Siskind the specialist in people whose depression won’t clear up with exercise, pills, and therapy, and SlateScott encouraging his friends to self-experiment.