I think that backwards (like 1950s and earlier) views of autism are common in American psychiatry, but would love to hear more about his ideas from someone with relevant training. AFAIK no peer has ever commented on his biomedical blogging, like experts have commented on his eugenics promotion and cozy relationship with white supremacists and neoreactionaries. He never seems to have written for any professional venue either.
I think magazines like Liberal Currents, for a generally politically and culturally engaged white-collar audience, have been like this since they were printed on rag paper. The only difference between it and fandom drama is that the participants can rationalize it in fancier language.
I don’t understand the American social media and Old Media practice of everyone talking about some representative or candidate for the legislature. The only people who should be talking about a candidate for a district in New York State live in New York State.
The three American ratings agencies all decided that SpaceX bonds meet the minimum standards to be investment grade. https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/spacex-gets-investment-grade-ratings-with-stable-outlook-top-agencies-2026-06-18/ I don’t own any American bonds and many people have a ‘government bonds only’ policy for reasons.
The moderators don’t exist. Sole moderator Oliver Habryka hasn’t commented on Reddit in 3 years, and is extremely busy with vastly more important things like AI safety, Lighthaven, and the actual LessWrong. Spammers continue indefinitely for months until, presumably, they earn a site-wide ban.
The guy who objects to delegating? I guess he decided that nobody on a forum can handle the responsibility of moderation?
Broadcom, Micron Technologies, and Intel too. NVIDIA is on the order of 7.5% of the S&P500 by market cap today. I would not bet real money that it will be there or above in 2029.
A Liberal Currents article talks about Steven Pinker, Dan Dennet, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, and The Edge (a series of talks similar to Thiel’s Dialog).
(sarcasm) I’m saying that just because I get sucked off by guys does not mean I’m one of those queers! I don’t go to pride parades or leather bars or have fashion sense and everyone knows that is what ‘gay’ means. I’m as heterosexual as Ted Haggard. (end sarcasm)
Its like he wrote “many of my friends identify as heterosexual, and they say I might be heterosexual too, but in my work as a forensic psychiatrist my heterosexual patients are accused rapists and sex pests and people who got arrested with a suitcase full of cocaine and a phone full of texts from a 'Brazilian model.” and never tried to reconcile the two or thought through the Bayesian logic.
Scott Alexander is totally neurotypical (2015):
I kind of a have a front-row seat here. On the one hand, about half my friends, my girlfriend, and my ex-girlfriend all identify as autistic. For that matter, people keep trying to tell me I’m autistic. When people say “autistic” in cases like this, they mean “introverted, likes math and trains, some unusual sensory sensitivities, and makes cute hand movements when they get excited.” On the other hand, I work as a psychiatrist and some of my patients are autistic. Many of these patients are nonverbal. Many of them are violent. Many of them scream all the time. Some of them seem to live their entire lives as one big effort to kill or maim themselves which is constantly being thwarted by their caretakers and doctors.
So he can’t be autistic, because then he would have something in common with people who can’t have a respectable upper-middle-class life. And it gets darker:
But even more controversially, absent such certainty that your child will flourish I think if some kind of genetic-engineering autism-cure existed, parents would have a moral obligation to use it.
As a good eugenicist, he knows there are simple ways to stop people from passing on their genes. And Scott Alexander wants children, so Scott Alexander is totally neurotypical. QED losers.
Scott Alexander literally says this before his story about ‘Henry’ the patient who beat his fifth wife because she objected to him cheating with the ex who had left him after he beat her:
I feel obligated to say at this point that the specific details of these patient stories are made up, and several of them are composites of multiple different people, in order to protect confidentiality. I’m preserving the general gist, nothing more)
/s And male rationalists would never, ever hang out with an edgy scary person like Yarvin, Sailer, or Vassar for the thrill and bragging rights! Only teh fe-males would do such a thing. /s
Disgraced artist, TTRPG writer, and porn star Zak Sabbath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zak_Smith tweeted about Brent Dill. Do all the awful Internet celebrities from fifteen years ago know each other? (No links because I delete my xcancel history).
Edit / https://xcancel.com/Alex_A_Guerrero/status/2067067064750047321#m (reply by x dot com/@ZakSmithSabbath)
Wired has a story about Peter Thiel’s Dialogue conference in Ireland. They chickened out of publishing the names who include Tim Urban, Tyler Cowen, Jonathan Haidt, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, “sitting Trump administration officials, two US senators, six members of the Paypal Mafia (hi Jaan! hi Peter! hi Elon!), a former Middle East chief of intelligence, and a sitting ambassador to the United States, along with the founders and directors of many of the country’s largest surveillance, data-broker, and advertising-data companies (hi Doktor Karp!).”
The same data lays out a program of off-the-record sessions, including: “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Navigating WWIII,” “Battlefield Technologies,” and “How’s Your Sex Life?” Other talks include “Build-a-Cult,” moderated by the founder of the Christian networking site Pray.com, and “Build-a-Party,” run by a former White House national security official.
…
Dialog also plays matchmaker. Its participant form asks registrants whether they are “looking for love” and offers to include “Single Man,” “Single Woman,” or “Other” respondents in “future matchmaking.” A separate site, dating.dialog.org, hosts an app pitched as “meaningful connections for exceptional people.”
So like a rationalist event, but the guests skew very rich not professional middle class.
A lot of people want to know if the Law of Armed Conflict has a “wicked advisors” or “misogynist influencers” clause.
Did you see the Brent Dill stuff today?
No, it seems to be on the Nazi bar? So Brent Dill now has a YouTube channel and gave a talk about sasquatch.
Some Vibecamp organizer tweeted that he organized a weekend event with young women and Brent Dill. He agrees with Scott Alexander that figures like Curtis Yarvin are sexy and attract women to your events!
(ProTip: if you aren’t getting enough feminine energy at your events, advertising it as an opportunity to meet a reputedly DANGEROUS man is a fantastic way to fix that … Like wait…this guy who’s rumored to be <every_bad_male_coded_thing> is the same guy holding space generously and openly with no ‘grabby’ or fearful / aversive energy towards anyone? When was the last time a rationalist guy showed aptitude at THAT?! (For those who don’t know, rat-adjacent women tolerate --or, darkly, cultivate-- bizarre behavior from men as a matter of course, so it was startling that the supposed exemplar of rat-man badness was so far from that energy).
…
I love my friends, of course. But many live in this bubble, have never meaningfully connected outside the bubble, and don’t know how: highly unskilled at basic normie relational skills. In a way that reads as very rude if you’re not accustomed to the norms (rather, the lack thereof) in the ffgk bubble. And they have better visibility into the OUTRAGEOUS behavior of the truly danger characters in the scene --the sexual violence, the fraud, the lying, more lying…so much lying.
…
AND TO BE ABUNDANTLY CLEAR: sometimes Brent still says he needs outrageous amounts of power and control that no sane person should ever give a person so wounded. To which I say…DON’T DO THAT. THAT WAS REALLY STUPID WHEN BLACK LOTUS DID IT, AND IT WOULD BE BEYOND PROFOUNDLY STUPID TO REPEAT.
A vibecamp peson replied with screenshots of a chat with with Dill where he claimed that during 2014-2018 he was living in a rationalist group home and had his expenses paid in exchange for serving as an “emotional support dom” for a barely-legal person who had had sex with housemates while under 18, and that drama inside the house lead to the accusations against him (reminder, Dill confessed to doing some very disturbing things to much younger partners on his blog).
Yuan tweeted in response:
i was heavily involved with brent dill for a substantial chunk of 2018, when he was embedded in the bay area rationality community. based on those experiences i never want to get involved with him ever again and i highly recommend none of you ever do so either. please note that this is the strongest condemnation i have ever written publicly about anybody
…
when this is happening to you, from the inside it feels like finally you’ve found someone who’s saying things that make sense, that matter, who’s bravely pointing out the elephants in the room nobody else is willing to, who is being unfairly persecuted by the popular monkeys, who’s showing you all the social rot and promising in so many words that maybe, just maybe, you and him can fix it together, because you get it, right? you’re not like the others. you see the truth. you’re so special. or whatever. he will tailor different versions of this pitch to different people based on what he’s figured out about you. the pitch includes, among other things, a sophisticated defense against any attempts to warn you about him, which look like confirmation of his persecution thesis
There is a 2 hour 39 minute YouTube video called “The Legend of Brent Dill: An Outsider’s Perspective on the Human Sacrifice Rituals of the Rationalist Cult.” I ain’t watching that.
Can we just take off and drop a small asteroid on Oakland?
Geoffrey Miller could do with a RationalWiki entry https://www.primalpoly.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Miller_(psychologist)
Qiaochu Yuan (no relationship to the man accused of soliciting a child) left his PhD program to become an “emotional coach.” If his old tweets are any guide then Doctor, heal thyself. G. Duleba and Ozy picked similar careers rather than coaching a soccer team or teaching freshman English like most people who want to be teachers and mentors.
Edit / Ozy also does not like the PUA advice of Geoffrey Miller and Tucker Max. I think this is less sneering at a stranger than sneering at someone Ozy’s friends know and admire (Miller and Fleischman attend TESCREAL events).
When I emailed Denecke, he told me Bootstrap Bio had ceased operations due to lack of funding. (The company’s former chief science officer, Qichen Yuan, was indicted for attempted sex trafficking of a child in September 2025. His case is ongoing.) But before the company unraveled, its early investors included Malcolm and Simone Collins, whom you may have heard of.
A migrant from the San Francisco Bay Area returned for a software conference and was creeped out by the ads on billboards and public transit. “VIDEO CREATES SHAREHOLDER VALUE” “YOU DO NOT EXIST WITHOUT VIDEO” https://www.simplermachines.com/something-is-very-wrong-in-san-francisco/
Scott Alexander funded a prediction-market startup which uses points not dollars. I think many of our friends lack the ovaries to bet significant numbers of real dollars on Kalshi or Polymarket.