David Boree

Although it's also one of those things where if you're just trying to explain a story, you can just say it's a cult.

You can say it's this weird Bay Area cult about science and AI and shit.

Like that's probably close enough.

A few things happen in quick succession after this point.

One is that a story broke later in 2018 confirming Ziz's suspicion that the rationalist community was rife with abuse.

Two people accused an influential rationalist who worked at CIFAR, a guy named Brent Dill, of abuse while they were dating him.

Both were 19 and he was close to 40.

The allegations here remind me a little of the ones against Neil Gaiman.

You've got a very powerful man accused of coercing much younger women into extreme BDSM situations and plying them with drugs.

Obviously, none of this is I don't think any of this has been litigated.

So I will continue to refer to them as allegations.

I don't know exactly what happened here, but this breaks.

Right.

And it's a big deal within the community.

Rumors spread that CIFAR had kind of tried to like hush the whole mess down in order to protect this guy.

They conducted an internal investigation.

We all know like when the cops do an internal investigation.

Right.

That's always reliable.

No, trust us to figure it out.