David Boree

I don't like that I react this way in this situation.

So get me into this sleep pattern and you like talk me through and we'll figure out why I'm doing it.

And we'll, they describe it as using tech to upgrade their mental capabilities, right?

So they're just kind of brainwashing each other.

They're like fucking around with with some pretty potentially dangerous stuff.

And again, drugs are definitely involved in a lot of aspects of this, which which is not usually written up.

But you just have to infer given that there's some disagreement or there's some disagreement.

around all this, but it seems accurate to say that Gwyn is the one who came up with the unihemispheric sleep idea, but a lot of the language around how this tactic was used and what it was supposed to do came from Ziz.

And again, the process is just sleep deprivation, right?

This is cult stuff.

It's part of how cults brainwash people, but it also wouldn't have seemed inherently suspicious to rationalists because part of that subculture

Being part of that subculture and going to those events had already normalized a slightly less radical version of this behavior, as this piece in Bloomberg explains.

At house parties, rationalists spent time debugging each other, engaging in a confrontational style of interrogation that would supposedly yield more rational thoughts.

Sometimes, to probe further, they experimented with psychedelics and tried jailbreaking their minds to crack open their consciousness and make them more influential or agentic.

Several people in Taylor, and this is one of the sources, fear had similar psychotic episodes.

One died by suicide in 2018 and another in 2021.

So in the mainstream rationalist subculture, they are also trying to like consciously hack their brains using a mix of like drugs and meditation and like social abuse.

And people kill themselves as a result of like the outcomes of this.

This is already a problem in the mainstream subculture.

Yeah.