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SneerClub@awful.systemsbyCinnasVerses@awful.systems
2 months

MAPLE, the Buddhist Singularity Cult, is Having a Moment

awful.systems English

(Adapted and expanded from Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23rd August 2026)

You came up with your own calendar system centered around your institution and you want to tell me you’re not a cult??? - istewart

One of the least online TESCRAL groups is the Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth in Vermont. They are Buddhist Singularitarians, lead by a guru named Soryu Forall who studied at monasteries in Japan, China, and India from 1998 to 2007. Early on he taught meditation in the local Quaker hall and mindfulness in schools and hospitals and coauthored a book on early Buddhism. Around 2013 money started to come in from people in the California tech industry (per The Atlantic) and Forall started to acquire rural property where he and his disciples could meditate about how AI is going to end the world. Renouncing worldly things like “heating” and “minimum wage laws” probably helps. The umbrella organization seems to be CEDAR, the academy in Vermont is MAPLE, the branch in Berkeley is OAK, and the branch in Canada is WILLOW. The nonprofit is the Center for Mindful Learning. Their Form 990 is here but not very detailed. Many of his disciples are Rationalists and Effective Altruists from the West Coast. As you would expect, some very nasty things seem to happen at these retreats.

Background

Forall is a Rationalist guru out of central casting:

  • born 1977 (aged 36 in 2013, so about the same age as Yudkowsky and only seven years older than Alexander)
  • middle-class parents
  • “intense” as a child
  • watched Terminator 2: Judgment Day at an impressionable age
  • eventually finished a bachelor’s degree but no traditional jobs or volunteer work on record
  • gives endless lectures based on pop science and thinking really hard about how scary AI could be
  • grandiose goals like “design a trustworthy religion”
  • boundlessly confident
  • alleged to date his students
  • dreams of creating supermen (saints) who can solve problems no ordinary human can)

He does not talk to reporters about connections to Rationalism or EA and the two Old Media stories on the Academy did not pull that thread (The Atlantic and Vermont Community News & Citizen). He told one reporter that he admires Yuval Noah Harari (transhumanism-curious historian), Zak Stein (philosopher with many ‘AI safety’ connections who serves on the board of MAPLE), and Tristan Harris (a grad-school dropout turned ‘product philosopher’ at Google). Rationalists and EAs tend to assume everyone knows about him and that living on his compound for a few months or a few years is the kind of thing one does. Several whistleblowers cross-posted to LessWrong and got a lively response where everyone takes for granted that people in their circles have traveled to MAPLE (first whistleblower, second whistleblower).

One of many red flags is that Forall boasts of a long list of spiritual or martial-arts affiliations:

Few Westerners have trained as deeply in traditional wisdom lineages as Forall. As a teenager, he entered a Rinzai monastery, where he was ordained under the renowned Zen Master Shodo Harada Roshi. He spent a decade training in monasteries around Asia in the Zen, Tibetan, Ch’an, and Ambedkar Buddhist traditions. While in India, he led community efforts to combat the caste system’s injustices. Since returning to the United States, he has continued to regularly work with Harada Roshi, while also training in Abenaki, Lakota and Diné Native American traditions. (A local news story claims he also studied in Israel)

Shodo Harada aka. Harada Roshi is Japanese and very old (b. 1940). Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was Indian. Chan Buddhism is Chinese. The Abenaki, Lakota, and Diné live in North America. Greedy teachers often claim a long list of titles to impress young students who have no way to discover that their knowledge is skin-deep or to deflect when students ask questions they can’t answer. Reporters often focus on his time in Japan so may be unsure about his other travels. This academic page on American Buddhists is a bit confused about where he fits too. The Japanese take teachers declaring students authentic heirs to the lineage seriously, and it looks like Forall never received that endorsement. Someone called Gordon Worley explains:

Traditionally, it’s pretty common that anyone leading anything in Zen has dharma transmission. In Japan, even the lowliest temple priest has received transmission, though not permission to teach. Soryu, to the best of my knowledge, is in the opposite situation: he received some limited permission to teach (though the bounds of that permission are unclear to me), but did not receive transmission, so he cannot be said to be fully initiated into the lineage in which he trained and thus can’t pass it on.

What this effectively means is that he teaches based on charismatic authority. This is not unheard of in religions, though it is unusual within Zen. A great many religions rely on charismatic authority in some form, though the strongest version of it I’m familiar with is in Evangelical Christianity.

Charismatic authority is classic rationalism. These people do not like to find a place in existing institutions where people with more skill and experience judge newcomers. They want to impress people who have no technical knowledge or training with their language and physical presence. I don’t think any students can tell if Soryu’s Pali hymns and commentary on ancient texts are correct.

They are connected to a movement called Second Renaissance which uses the same cartographer as Scott Alexander used for his map of the LessWrong blogosphere.

Allegations and Responses (cw: sexual and emotional abuse)

Around 2021 a student said that she was raped by a teacher at OAK then expelled when she reported this and Forall shut down any official response. She said that after she left Soryu Forall started to openly date his current and former students. It appears likely that at least one of the Zizians was in touch with MAPLE because on the same day the first newspaper reported that two of them had got into a gunfight with federal agents in Vermont, the Academy fired up a dormant Twitter account to say that lying about murder was wrong. In 2025 and 2026, more people posted about bad experiences at MAPLE, and British journalist Sam Kriss came by with questions:

The stories have the same themes as stories from CFAR, Leverage Research, Brent Dill, and Ziz Lasota:

  • deception of potential students
  • bait-and-switch once they signed up
  • esoteric doctrines and mysticism (“Soryu has claimed to have entered such a deep samadhi he was able to use the kinds of spiritual powers that masters usually use to read people’s minds, but this time instead used it to read the mind of the global AI egregore—or ‘cyborgregore,’ the collective mind of all AI systems”)
  • reprogramming with sleep deprivation, constant busywork, separations from family and advisors, and endless reminders of the impending end of the world (apocalypse)
  • male leaders who abused their power
  • a leader whose vision of “protecting life” includes the possibility of human extinction as a means to a higher goal (“He has repeatedly shared that killing every human on Earth to protect the rest of life on earth was his explicit life purpose from ages nine to nineteen—with CRISPR (a gene modifying technique that could be used to create a novel bio-weapon) as his best available means—until his vision shifted to ‘killing them spiritually’ (a way he frames awakening) as a superior alternative.”)
  • leaders who burst out in anger when people do not give them exactly what they want
  • a quiet hostility towards women and femininity except as ways of keeping men in line
  • rejection of any responsibility to the mundanes next door (“Asked how many townspeople it (MAPLE) would take in (if the United States collapsed), Soryu closed the question off, aghast—‘take people in?! Oh god…’—setting the number at zero”)
  • pressure on underlings to provide free or poorly-paid labour and domestic service so the leaders do not need day jobs
  • paranoia about outsiders
  • mental breakdowns, panic attacks, Complex PTSD, and hospital visits for mental disturbance

Students say they were recruited for a casual meditation retreat, reprogrammed, and pushed to commit their lives or money to the organization, and that criticism is deflected back on them rather than being used to reform the organization. It also mentions that when COVID reached the academy in 2022 Soryu pushed them to ignore it (“Interviews resumed in a 9x9 room with little ventilation while Soryu himself had COVID.”) Rationalists are proud that they took quick action on COVID in 2020, but silent on what to do about it since vaccines arrived. Soryu’s hostility to outside experts and authorities included telling students that “if we study anything from teachers other than Soryu, they must be both Asian and ordained (thus excluding the entire Western world).” One of the reporters noticed that the disciples were overwhelmingly white and mostly male, but Forall does not seem to be keen on race talk. The same report mentions a 2023 exodus by seven people which sent a report which Soryu tossed down the memory hole.

Insiders responded to the allegations by means such as:

Is it true that Soryu is not authorized to teach or run a residential Buddhist training center?

This is false. Before starting MAPLE he was authorized to do so by well-known teachers of the Vipassana and Zen traditions.

Is MAPLE a primarily hierarchical organization?

No. The org chart is quite flat. We regularly have whole-organization meetings in which everybody’s views are taken into account.

…

At another time, while Soryu was away traveling, the leadership team tried to convert the entire organization away from Buddhism. When Soryu returned, he saw this and told the leaders that if they wanted to go in this direction, they could, and that he would go do something else. They were unwilling to take on the financial responsibility of the organization and refused the offer.

In the late spring of the 15th year of training at Monastic Academy (MAPLE), a writer named Sam Kriss came to MAPLE. In the last hours of his visit, Soryu Forall guided the community in a workshop on mindful decision making.

Mid-way through the workshop, Sam Kriss shifted the topic of focus from decision making to structures of domination, e.g. hierarchies, with a particular emphasis given to the lens of Marxism. He asked: “What creates mechanisms of domination?” and “In environments [e.g. MAPLE] where people are trying to clear out the attachment to thinking, are there fewer structures of domination?”

To the first question, the community answered: “Attachment to thinking.” Vimoksha engaged with Sam in detail on this to open a way for him to see how structures of domination are caused by mind.

To the second question, the community answered: “There are fewer structures of domination here than in the mainstream.”

As these points were made and as Sam Kriss was beginning to engage with the points more directly, the community sat in agreement and clarity, happy with these teachings.

As these points were made, I felt a sense of appreciation and celebration for this community of leader-sages-in-training.

Aella pronounced that this sounds bad and abusive and totally unlike Tuesday at Lighthaven. https://x.com/Aella_Girl/status/2091015022042595743#m https://archive.ph/fZ0Lc

Conclusion

Ask (Anthropic’s president) Daniela (Amodei) about it and she says, “I’m not the expert on effective altruism. I don’t identify with that terminology. My impression is that it’s a bit of an outdated term”. Yet her husband, Holden Karnofsky, cofounded one of EA’s most conspicuous philanthropy wings, is outspoken about AI safety, and, in January 2025, joined Anthropic. - Wired, March 2025 (more here)

Forall said he was unfamiliar with the Zizians and the January incident (shootout) — as a Buddhist he has taken vows against killing for any reason. … “I’ve heard of The Rationalists, but I’m no expert in that way of looking at things,” Forall said. - Vermont News & Citizen, May 2025

I believe people’s reports that they were abused by OAK and MAPLE staff. People told similar stories about CFAR and Leverage Research and VibeCamp (not to mention Maoism and Scientology). It looks like Forall controls the revenue and the daily lives of people at the academy. I am more interested in MAPLE’s connections to other TESCREAL groups. Some of the Zizians were arrested in Vermont, and the local news story noticed that MAPLE tweeted that killing was wrong on the day the first reporter linked a shooting in Vermont to the Zizians. Bay Area rationalism and postrationalism have Buddhist connections but the leaders of Bay Area Rationalism tend to have Jewish or Christian backgrounds. Did he really fall into the same vices as the rats on his own? It would be typical if the same guru who tells students not to use screens has intense online connections. I would also like to know more about where he fits into Buddhist traditions and practices, because founding your own monastery with eclectic practices is a great way to delete the ‘preventing abuse’ parts of existing Buddhist traditions.

Some EAs share the Buddhist concern about the suffering of wild animals and insects.

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    SneerClub@awful.systemsbyCinnasVerses@awful.systems
    23 days

    LessWrong's Psychedelic Phase: Perigee

    English

    Previously on SneerClub, we saw that several Less-Wrongers were open about experimenting with LSD to help reinvent themselves (Shannon F., gwern, Aella, Jessica Taylor). Aella and Taylor thought they permanently damaged themselves, but Aella continued to explore a wide variety of substances. Many rationalists told a Nootropic Survey on SlateStarCodex that they had tried LSD. Scott Alexander was very curious about these experiments, but in June 2018 he suddenly mentioned someone he knew who has permanent symptoms after using LSD once. Later that year Jax Romana and a pseudonymous medium account accused prominent male rationalists of pressuring their female partners to use LSD and MDMA to make them more pliable. Beginning in 2019, prominent rationalists point out that substance use can have negative effects, and that letting leaders pressure followers to use substances can have bad consequences. AFAIK, Bay Area Rationalism has not yet introduced practices like free drug tests or formal rules around substance use which are common in other communities, and Bay Area rationalists do not acknowledge that there are many best practices and educational resources around substance use one phone-call away (VibeCamp now has some harm reduction practices). If the period to 2018 was a rise to apogee, the period since 2019 is a fall towards perigee.

    Withdrawal 2019-2026

    I know plenty of people who use heroic amounts of LSD all the time, and are still nervous wrecks. … I hope I am wrong about this, I really do. And I think there’s a good chance that I might be. I really want psychedelic research to succeed and I support it wholeheartedly. But there’s been so much hype around so many things before that I want to avoid getting burned again, so I ‘ll stay skeptical for now.

    Note that he does not say the LSD caused the anxiety (“still”). Compare his 2014 post professing not to know that most people use pot because it makes them feel good to all these posts where his friends enthusiastically disclose what substances they use. He was posting about psychedelics by 2013, and going to parties with Aella by winter 2019/2020, and he went to college in the USA and med school one Ryanair flight from Amsterdam and Copenhagen, so he sure seems like someone familiar with drug cultures!

    • 23 July 2019: Scott Alexander posts Book Review: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (comments by gwern, Steve Sailer). This covers author Ken Kesey’s transformation from a struggling writer into a guru and critical success after the CIA provided him with LSD, and his eventual retreat to rural Oregon. You can read it in two ways: one way if you know Scott Alexander as a blogger, and another if you know that Bay Area EA and LW are an apocalyptic movement with gurus and communes which experiments with drugs and kink. This was posted a few months before Ziz and some of her friends were arrested while protesting a CFAR reunion in November 2019.

    The best I can do in making sense of this story is to think of Kesey as having unique innate talents that made him a potential cult leader, combined with the sudden rise in status from being a famous author and the first person in his social scene with access to LSD. Despite the connotations of “cult leader”, Kesey was overall a good person, genuinely wanted to help people’s spiritual development, and genuinely thought LSD could do this. LSD formed the content of his cult, the same way Messianic Judaism formed the content of Jesus’ cult. It also made his life easier because of the drug’s natural tendency to make people think they are having important insights. When he, attempting to genuinely discover a spiritual path, decided to change the content and go beyond LSD, he lost that crutch, his people betrayed him, he became less confident in himself, and eventually he gave up.

    But it’s interesting how often malevolent cult leaders have turned to drugs since then – so often that I see it listed in some lists of cult warning flags. It’s especially surprising since we usually think of LSD as helping people break out of systems of mental control – why would you give it to somebody you’re trying to brainwash?

    This seems to be the first time that an influential rationalist talks about how substances fit into communities. Rationalist discourse about Leverage Research, CFAR, etc. often focuses on “are they good people?” (metaphysical) not “were wrongs done and how can we prevent future harm?” (actionable)

    • 10 September 2019: Scott Alexander posts SSC Journal Club: Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics And The Anarchic Brain about Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics And The Anarchic Brain: Toward A Unified Model Of The Brain Action Of Psychedelics by Karl Friston and Robin Carhart-Harris. “Thanks to Sarah H. and the people at her house for help understanding this paper.” He frames this paper around Bayesian priors as rationalists understand them. There is the mandatory citation of speculative fiction they liked when they were 12:

    When I was young, I liked a fantasy book called The Sword of Shannara. The titular sword had an unusual magic power: it made the wielder realize anything he already knew. Neither a truly good person nor a truly bad person would benefit from the sword, but someone who was hypocritical, or deluding themselves, or complicit in their own brainwashing, would find all the parts of their mind flung together so hard that they couldn’t help but realize all the inconvenient facts they were trying to repress, or connect all the puzzle pieces previously scattered in separate mental compartments. Sometimes this resulted in a blinding revelation that you were on the wrong side, or had wasted your life; other times in nothing at all. F&CH argue that psychedelics are the real-life version of this, a way to make all of your beliefs connect with each other and see what results from the reaction.

    Our friends are fascinated by the idea of removing all the contractions and ambiguities in human life, and living in accordance with their intellectual beliefs.

    • 26 November 2019: Scott Alexander posts Mental Mountains about traditional talk-based therapy and psychedelic therapy and the problem of moving from intellectual knowledge to acting upon it

    I can’t count how many stories I’ve heard along the lines of “I was in a bad relationship, I kept telling myself that it was okay and making excuses, and then I took LSD and realized that it obviously wasn’t, and got out.” Certainly many people change religions and politics after a psychedelic experience, though it’s hard to tell exactly what part of the psychedelic experience does this, and enough people end up believing various forms of woo that I hesitate to say it’s all about getting more rational beliefs. But just going off anecdote, this sometimes works.

    Jessica was (I don’t know if she still is) part of a group centered around a person named Vassar, informally dubbed “the Vassarites”. Their philosophy is complicated, but they basically have a kind of gnostic stance where regular society is infinitely corrupt and conformist and traumatizing and you need to “jailbreak” yourself from it (I’m using a term I found on Ziz’s discussion of her conversations with Vassar; I don’t know if Vassar uses it himself). Jailbreaking involves a lot of tough conversations, breaking down of self, and (at least sometimes) lots of psychedelic drugs.

    Yudkowsky chips in:

    I could be very wrong, but the story I currently have about this myself is that Vassar himself was a different and saner person before he used too much psychedelics. :( :( :(

    I’m about ready to propose a group norm against having any subgroups or leaders who tell other people they should take psychedelics. Maybe they have individually motivated uses - though I get the impression that this is, at best, a high-variance bet with significantly negative expectation. But the track record of “rationalist-adjacent” subgroups that push the practice internally and would-be leaders who suggest to other people that they do them seems just way too bad. … I’m also about ready to propose a similar no-such-group policy on ‘woo’, tarot-reading, supernaturalism only oh no it’s not really supernaturalism I’m just doing tarot readings as a way to help myself think, etc. … I should be explicit that concern about outcomes of psychedelic advocacy includes Michael Vassar, and concern on woo includes the alleged/reported events at Leverage.

    This seems to be the first time that a Rationalist leader suggests that the community needs norms around substance use (compare Alexander’s post about Ken Kesey, or Aella’s posts on how she thinks acid damaged her). One thread to pull is postrationalism (people who acknowledge that Yud is a doofus and rationalism is a magical working not a scientific project, but want to carry on the Great Work rather than sneer).

    There are many other comments arguing about who encouraged who to use drugs, and who was helpful or harmful. Jessica Taylor published a second post titled “Occupational Infohazards” objecting to Scott Alexander’s attempts to blame everything bad that happened on Vassar and summarizing the beliefs of Ziz Lasota and her circle. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pQGFeKvjydztpgnsY/occupational-infohazards I previously discussed this in A Bad Trip in Berkeley.

    • 11 July 2022: Holly Elmore releases a blog post which begins:

    I am part of an online community centered on practicing rationality to better know the truth and achieve one’s goals. Psychedelics are increasingly a social activity in the rationalist community and a prescription for what ails ye, so I wrote this post on facebook earlier this year expressing my reservations about using psychedelics with the intent or pretense of learning truth. I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about what I think about mindfulness and insight, so I’m sprucing it up a bit and sharing it here.

    Most people who have spent time with substance users offer similar advice, as do many people who have used substances, written down their insights, and read what they wrote after the effects wear off. Drugs transform your feelings, but are less reliable at improving your abilities. Elmore thinks LSD is growing more popular not less popular in the community, and that it is a social activity. gwern, Aella, and others presented their use as individual or between romantic partners, whereas Elmore presents it as “a social activity.” Its often a bad idea to use substances alone, but its also dangerous when the boss invites you to an all-you-can-drink whisky bar.

    • 26 September 2022: Alfred MacDonald posts Vibecamp And Its Consequences on his Substack. He talks about substance use and members of the subcultures trying to set boundaries on which substances are safe to experiment with. He gives the impression that substance use was common and openly discussed in his part of the Less Wrong/Effective Altruist/Postrationalist subculture.

    you might draw the line of “not good drugs” at psychedelics and think other class-equals are wrong. If so, fair. But where this becomes obviously organized by class is in the regard of MDMA. Note that prior to Scott Alexander’s articles on Desoxyn, virtually no one talked about microdosing methamphetamine as a substitute for Adderall, which is more accurately phrased “therapeutically dosing” as the aim was to imitate a Desoxyn prescription. I know this because I was one of the few to do it, and you were absolutely thought of as a scary person doing the Wrong Kind Of Drug. MDMA, however, is meth; it’s literally its name: three-four-methylene-deoxy-methamphetamine. Not only is it more cardiotoxic than vanilla meth, it’s significantly more metabolically demanding.

    I do not think this is good pharmacology or a good way of thinking about substances. The article on Desoxyn was published in 2021. This community uses many substances other than psychedelics but I am just one Shakespeare joke not a whole research team.

    During my twenties in Silicon Valley, I ran among elite tech/AI circles through the community house scene. I have seen some troubling things around social circles of early OpenAI employees, their friends, and adjacent entrepreneurs, which I have not previously spoken about publicly. … I don’t think events like the consensual non-consensual (cnc) sex parties and heavy LSD use of some elite AI researchers have been good for women. They create a climate that can be very bad for female AI researchers, with broader implications relevant to X-risk and AGI safety. … The climate was like a fratty LSD version of 2008 Wall Street bankers, which bodes ill for AI safety.

    In December 2025 Joseph announced that “I now run Meta’s interpretability community-- 150+ researchers across FAIR, GEnAI, & Reality Labs.” OpenAI has a core staff of Rationalist doom cultists mixed in with tech bros who just want money and their name in the news. Her online presence has been stripped of things which would let you guess which years she meant by “my twenties in Silicon Valley”, but her LinkedIn has her SAT score from 2013. SAT is commonly used for university admissions, so she probably turned 20 around the year 2015, and might have lived in the Bay Area between undergrad at Princeton and grad school at McGill.

    Aella seems to have introduced consensual nonconsent parties into Bay Area rationalism since that is her favourite kind of play. Before she arrived the biggest kink events in the community I heard of were cuddle parties. It is critics like Joseph who link the drugs with the sex parties, Aella presents those two interests as distinct. Substance use is a common way to cope when you are told to do something you do not feel comfortable with but don’t feel safe refusing, like your supervisor asking you to ravage/be ravaged in a chaotic group setting.

    • 14 November 2024: Yud tweets “Among my friends who came to my attention for psychelics (sic) having had any significant impact on them, positive or negative, I would say the mean result has been overwhelmingly, heartbreakingly negative. Please seriously consider not doing drugs.” https://archive.ph/MqeGZ Yud does not seem to have a broad social circle, so his friends who tried LSD would almost certainly be rationalists, Effective Altruists, or friendly tech workers and investors. This tweet sounds a lot like Scott Aleaxnder’s note in May 2019 about knowing “a lot” of people who use LSD and were “nervous wrecks.”
    • 16 February 2025: three of the Zizian movement, a splinter of Bay Area rationalism, are arrested in Maryland while living in trucks along a dirt road. A 2026 article describes the charges:

    LaSota, Zajko and Blank are charged with possession of LSD and possession with intent to deliver LSD, multiple gun violations, trespassing and hindering a police officer.

    Article uses Ziz’s legal name as well as her preferred name if that is a concern for you. While police in the United States often plant drugs on people, on a prominent case like this I tentatively believe that they really found LSD. In most stories, Ziz’s method of reprogramming focused on sleep deprivation not drugs.

    A woman named Teresa Youngblut was arrested in early 2025 after a shooting between Zizians and police in Vermont. “Court records note that Youngblut’s diary contains several references to taking LSD.”

    • 15 November 2025: as he builds up steam to respond to a former staffer’s accusations that he had sex with a minor, Yud goes on a long digression on medical and recreational LSD use by minors and adults. This post takes for granted that LSD microdoses are the best treatment for some kind of headaches. Rather than a world where MDs can proscribe LSD like they can proscribe heroin, Yud seems to imagine a world where any adult can chose to use any substance they can afford. This suggests that LSD is a frequent topic of conversation in his community, even though its not as popular as marijuana, alcohol, and caffeine among the wider US population. https://archive.is/kI1Yc

    • 21 September 2026: NYT reports on the hacker house / group home scene in the San Francisco ‘AI’ industry:

    Parties featuring psychedelic drugs and sharing of sexual partners are common, the people said. One house threw lavish events for the A.I. community so often that its owner claimed more than $200,000 of damage, including for a rodent infestation.

    At the mansion in Hillsborough known as AGI House — named for “artificial general intelligence,” a technology that can match the powers of the human mind — the local police have logged 37 incidents since 2022. At least 17 were related to complaints about large parties and events, according to the reports. (“The A.I. Party House Where Networking Has a Dark Side”)

    They quote someone who alleges that he attended wild parties at one of these houses aged 13 because nobody was checking ID. These sound a lot like the plzdontkillus creator house.

    Conclusion

    Based on public Internet posts, I see three broad phases. It appears that gwern and Aella self-experimented with LSD circa 2012-2014, Scott Alexander was intrigued and provided what sounds a lot like medical advice to his readers, and the community is fascinated with the idea of self-medicating to be smarter. Around 2016-2018, people in Michael Vassar’s circle and at CFAR dropped a lot of acid and changed as a result. Jax Romana accused Yudkowsky of dosing his playmates with LSD to control them in this period, and an anonymous Medium post accused Brent Dill of using MDMA the same way. Sonia Joseph links the drugs and the sex parties to a general laddish climate where women can get assaulted if they play along and shunned if they refuse to participate or tell a powerful man that his behaviour is not acceptable. From 2018 Scott Alexander started to post more about the risks of psychedelics and the way leaders can use them. By 2021, Eliezer Yudkowsky was convinced that Michael Vassar and some others had been damaged by LSD use. (Yud dropped out of school after 8th grade, street drugs are not always what the dealer says they are, and people can use multiple substances, so his diagnosis should be taken cum grano salis). However, substance use still seems common and unregulated at rationalist events. I do not see any acknowledgement that there are other communities in SoCal with a lot of experience of psychedelics and harm reduction. Sott Alexander cites a few academic papers, biographies of Ken Kesey and the Shulgins, and his clinical experience as a psychiatrist. IvyAstrix says she tried to introduce harm reduction practices to events like VibeCamp based on her experience in marijuana advocacy and the rave scene in Canada.

    The mother of Curtis Yarvin’s child thinks that her psychedelic phase was just part of her spiritual exploration and “most colleges these days have psychedelic communities”. Elon’s brother Kimbal Musk, who used Jeffrey Epstein as a matchmaker, is also into psychedelic therapy. He is was formerly on the board of Burning Man; the Brent Dill affair involved a LW-adjacent Burning Man camp.

    Edit / corrected some firsts (I discovered new posts as I was writing this and did not catch everything in the edits)

    Edit / Kimbal Musk was chased off the board after the Epstein Docs came out

    Edit / Add the 2026 NYT article on the hacker house scene

    0
      SneerClub@awful.systemsbyCinnasVerses@awful.systems
      8 months

      A Bad Trip in Berkeley

      English NSFW

      LSD and other psychedelics are popular in LessWrong and there are hints that many of them have had bad experiences or have been abused while they were under the influence. While I am still working on a longer post, it looks like the critical period was 2016-2018.

      Some of this post may appear in that future longer post with fuller links.

      Early Days

      Before that, Shannon F. (who dated Yudkowsky and lived with the founder of the New York City chapter of LessWrong), gwern, Scott Alexander, and Aella posted positive to cautious views of psychedelics. Scott Alexander was interested in their medical uses, gwern self-medicated, Aella and Shannon F. had a less clinical approach. SlateStarCodex helpfully polled readers about their substance use, and 17% of respondents said they had used LSD in 2020. About 12% of Americans said they have tried psychedelics in 2023 so the response at SlateStar is quite high.

      Looking Back in 2021

      Jessica Taylor says that she both got a job with MIRI/CFAR and self-medicated with psychedelics in 2017. She told the story in 2021 as follows:

      the psychotic break was in October 2017, and involved psychedelic use (as part of trying to “fix” multiple deep mental problems at once, which was, empirically, overly ambitious); although people around me to some degree tried to help me, this “treatment” mostly made the problem worse, so I was placed in 1-2 weeks of intensive psychiatric hospitalization, followed by 2 weeks in a halfway house. This was followed by severe depression lasting months, and less severe depression from then on, which I still haven’t fully recovered from. I had PTSD symptoms after the event and am still recovering. (“My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage)”)

      Taylor does not say where she got the idea to self-medicate with these substances, or that anyone encouraged her to do so, but the idea of self-medicating with psychedelics was certainly part of LessWrong online culture by 2018 and people tend to be more willing to talk about illegal activities than post about them. 2016-2018 was the period when CFAR switched to focus on AI risk and was run by people close to Brent Dill. Many other people in the community chip in about their own experiences:

      humantoo: During my psychotic break, I believed that someone associated with Vassar had administered LSD to me. Although I no longer hold this belief, I cannot entirely dismiss it.

      jessicata: I remember someone who lived in Berkeley in 2016-2017, who wasn’t a CFAR employee but was definitely talking extensively with CFAR people (collaborating on rationality techniques/instruction?) and had gone to a CFAR workshop, telling me something along the lines of “CFAR can’t legally recommend that people try LSD, but…”; I don’t remember what followed the “but”, I don’t think the specific wording was even intended to be remembered (to preserve plausible deniability?), but it gave me the impression that CFAR people may have recommended it if it were legal to do so, as implied by the “but”. This was before I was talking with Michael Vassar extensively. This is some amount of Bayesian evidence for the above.

      Eliezer Yudkowsky: @Marie La I disagree and think the woo has proven in empirical practice to be sufficiently destructive to people who can’t see the destruction, to reach a level where it should not be tolerated by this group as a future subgroup norm, same as LSD use shouldn’t be tolerated by us as a subgroup norm.

      Aella: @Eliezer Yudkowsky On phone so thumb words but I notice I have a belief that this is predictable, and thus not dangerous? or rather, it’s something like if you’re religious and noticed some ppl have been drinking alcohol and then eventually losing their faith, you might be right to be wary of alcohol, but if you know that it’s actually the doubt of their faith that causes the alcohol drinking, then you wouldn’t be concerned if someone drinks alcohol but also isn’t doubting their faith.

      Eliezer Yudkowsky: My sense of “this seems to be ending very poorly on average” is much stronger for situations in which there’s a Leader or a Discernible Subgroup has formed, that are going up to others and saying “why, you really should try some psychedelics / woo”. Or where they wander up to individuals trying that, and put their arm around their shoulders all friendly-like.

      It goes on, if you are interested in psychedelics please ask harm-reduction experts where you live not our friends!

      A deleted comment by PhoenixFriend contained the following:

      I’m a present or past CFAR employee commenting anonymously to avoid retribution. I believe that the dynamics of the organization grew to be significantly more cult-like than the OP and readers realize. I say all this with the hope that future-CFAR will emerge like a phoenix, leaving these issues in the ashes. … Psychedelic use was common among the leadership of CFAR and spread through imitation, if not actual institutional encouragement, to the rank-and-file. This makes it highly distressing that Michael (probably Michael Vassar) is being singled out for his drug advocacy by people defending CFAR.

      The description of Scientology auditing and Maoist self-criticism at CFAR continues, reader beware. Duncan Sabien objects to PhoenixFriend’s characterization of what happened at CFAR.

      Jax Romana accused Yudkowsky of dosing two women with psychedelics to control them in 2018. To the best of my knowledge these allegations have not been made by anyone else and have not been independently confirmed.

      A Hypothesis

      Could a period of heavy experimentation at CFAR and in MIchael Vassar’s circle in 2016-2018 have given other rationalists cold feet? The comments on the thread by Jessica Taylor are the oldest post I can find where a prominent rationalist suggests creating community norms to limit psychedelic use. Something must have really scared Yudkowsky if he is willing to tell his followers “Please seriously consider not doing drugs.” He is very reluctant to tell people what to do except give his organizations money.

      There are many people in SoCal who could have told them that the ways they wanted to use drugs, kink, and reprogramming techniques were very dangerous. I picked up the gist just from reading fannish publications.

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