David Boree
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
So she like ethically can't square herself with doing anything she needs to succeed in this industry where she has the skill to succeed.
And this is another trait she's got in common with the rest of the rationalist EA subculture.
That Bloomberg article interviewed a guy named Quao-Chu Yuan, a former rationalist and PhD candidate who dropped out of his PhD program in order to work in AI risk.
He stopped saving for retirement and cut off his friends so he could donate all of his money to EA causes and because his friends were distracting him from saving the world.
And these are all โ this is all cult stuff, right?
Cults want you to cut off from your friends.
They want you to give them all your money.
He's doing, but he's doing it like independently.
Like he's not, there's not like a single leader.
He's not like living on a compound with them.
It's just once you kind of take these beliefs seriously, the things that you will do to yourself are the things people in cults
have done to them, right?
In an interview with Business Insider, Yuan said, you can really manipulate people into doing all kinds of crazy stuff if you can convince them this is how you can prevent the end of the world.
Once you get into that frame, it really distorts your ability to care about anything else.
Yeah, that's kind of the thing.
It's harder to talk about this than like could people talk about Ziz as like, oh, it's a cult leader.
And she had her, you know, vegan trans AI death cult or something.
And, you know, I I feel like that's not close enough to the truth to get what's like to get how this happened.
Right.
Because what happens with Ziz.