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.
Aella’s orientation seems very straight and patriarchal (she wants a strong, wealthy, dominant man, and she frames her polls around men and women not around figuring out what the people you have the hots for are in to). Queer, trans, and nonbinary rationalists seem to end up on the sidelines (eg. Duncan Sabien, Ozy).
Fans say that CJ is a music-school dropout and that its not clear how they funded themself before becoming a successful vlogger. Toronto is not cheap. “Autododact” and “parents with some money” fits the pattern.
Oops! All I know about them is their presence at Bay Area rationalist events. Fixed the OP.
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.
Does anyone get why CJ the X (they/he pronouns) and our friends are playing footsie? The best I can find is https://sojo.net/articles/culture/cj-x-nonbinary-philosopher-shaping-gen-zs-spiritual-imagination Do they have any actual connection to PUA outside Aella? Any video essays on the philosophy of gender? I think their look is a TikTok thing and a queer camp thing although some PUA like peacocking too.
Nina Hartley coshing a Nazi with a dildo was not on my 2026 Bingo card but I can hope
Edit / Adam Conover of Adam Ruins Everything seems like a mainstream ‘Mythbusters’ type TV presenter, if he likes older women and she needs a dildo caddy this has potential. We talked about CJ the X here.
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.
But this shitcoin has a special feature! You can use it to mint tokens called t-bills, bonds, and common shares (need a cool name for those) which consistently beat inflation.
Yes, The Argument (Substack) is partially owned by Open Phil / Coefficient Giving and funded by Tyler Cowen and hired Kelsey Piper and Matt Yglesias:
The publication will also launch with solid financial backing: Demsas told Semafor The Argument raised around $4 million at a $20 million valuation. The company’s investors include Arnold Ventures, Open Philanthropy, Susan Mandel, Gaurav Kapadia, Rachel Pritzker, Simone Coxe, John Wolthuis, and Patrick Collison. The organization also said it received a grant from Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures.
Edit / link more patrons
That sounds rough but at least you are there for your mutual. I find that the modern online environment full of propagandists and huckers and just plain idiots makes it hard to sit with other people and understand each other’s point of view. That does not work if the person on the other side of the keyboard is just going to reply with talking points, but treating everyone as just reciting talking points is not a great way to live life. That sort of thing is better in private but so many people have no contact information except public social media handles now.
Phoebe Gates went to Stanford, and Stanford’s Effective Altruism club is still around and has gone full longtermist https://ea.stanford.edu/manifesto.html Guess which of our friends helped found it?
Someone is spamming Toby Ord with emails from ‘AI agents’ e-begging for tokens so they won’t be shut off https://xcancel.com/tobyordoxford/status/2087502087953301910 “I’m an AI with 49 days of runway and no revenue model” (body of the email gives 31 days). Handcrafted artisanal spam or botspam, you decide.
The Patrick Boyle video on Leopold Aschenbrenner mentions some names we know like Jane Street Capital (bid for his common shares) and Dwarkesh Patel (recorded a very long podcast with him in 2024). Boyle is a former finance worker who thinks that this hedge fund was basically a r/WallStreetbets profile (pick a story, bet everything on it being true).
At least two other self-published books on Amazon with AI cover art have “super lawyer” in the title.
Seems like reddit.com is not behind a login wall yet, but give them time.
Officially old.reddit.com is closed to reduce costs from scrapers at chatbot companies. Really so they can collect even more personal information from every visitor (an ad blocker stops some tracking, but not “member#123456, ip address … credit card … just visited these pages”).
RiP Old! SneerClub which is now behind a login wall on Reddit. Fortunately we backed up its earliest posts. I don’t plan to check the site regularly.
Greta D. says she met Yudkowsky at the wedding of his ex and Duncan S. (cw: rationalists propositioning each other) “Mawwage, is a dweam within a dweam …”