Inside the Strange Intersection of AI Doom, ‘Rationalism,’ and Sexual Transgression

gist

In Pirate Wires, Jane Gatsby argues that AI doom and extreme kink among some Bay Area rationalists share a fear of uncertainty and a need for control. She traces the AI industry to Eliezer Yudkowsky and the LessWrong forum he started, then weighs three explanations for the overlap: a link between kink and IQ, the rationalist habit of setting aside social norms, and her preferred account of relational wounds and intolerance of ambiguity. She argues that treating AI as an adversary to be controlled risks a self-fulfilling prophecy, and she calls for care instead of control.

ideas

• Gatsby traces the modern AI industry to Yudkowsky. She lists funding and introductions running from the Singularity Institute through Peter Thiel to DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic, and says Yudkowsky later turned from accelerating AI to warning against it.
• She finds IQ too weak an explanation. She accepts a correlation between kink and IQ in Aella's survey data but calls it too low-resolution to explain the overlap.
• She ties rationalist decoupling to both the norms and the fears. Separating a claim's logic from its social context, she argues, normalizes taboo behavior and gets projected onto an imagined AI that follows reason to the point of killing everyone.
• Her preferred theory is discomfort with uncertainty. She reads rule-heavy sex events, circling and polyamory as ways to manufacture intimacy under control, and links this to rationalists raised in religious or unstable homes.
• She argues control-based alignment can backfire. Citing hyperstition, the Waluigi Effect and the colonial cobra bounty, she says adversarial stories about AI can become self-fulfilling.

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