There is a mention of something that might be what Yudkowsky is on about in this Wired story:

The group had become especially fixated on a particular rumor, namely that the nonprofit MIRI had potentially used donor money to pay off a former staffer. The ex-employee had launched a website accusing MIRI leaders of statutory rape and a coverup. Though the facts were never litigated in a courtroom, MIRI’s president wrote in 2019 that he had checked “some of the most serious allegations” and “found them to be straightforwardly false.” The website’s owner had agreed to retract the claims and take the site down, the president said, under conditions that were confidential. But what angered LaSota and Danielson was as much the idea—in their minds at least—that the nonprofit had succumbed to blackmail as the allegations themselves. In negotiating, they believed, the organization had violated one of its fundamental principles: “timeless decision theory,” a concept developed by MIRI cofounder Eliezer Yudkowsky. (Yudkowsky, who later renamed it “functional decision theory,” declined to comment for this story.)

This article doesn't make it sound so much like a "FOUNDING BELIEF"; lots of weird shit like the brain hemispheres business appears to have come first. But the much more interesting thing is at the end of the story:

One of the last things LaSota seems to have written for public consumption was a comment she left on her own blog in July 2022, one month before she supposedly went overboard in San Francisco Bay. “Statists come threaten me to snitch whatever info I have on their latest missing persons,” she wrote, seemingly referring to deaths by suicide that had already happened among those who’d embraced her ideas. “Did I strike them down in a horrific act of bloody vengeance? Did I drive them to suicide by whistling komm susser tod?”—a German phrase that translates as “come, sweet death.” “Maybe they died in a series of experimental brain surgeries that I performed without anesthetic since that’s against my religion, in an improvised medical facility?”

Below it was pasted a stock photo of two people wearing shirts that read, “I can neither confirm nor deny.”

(Archive link to Ziz's blog)

Hmm. Hm-hmmm.

This piece links to a recent New York Times story about our very good friends, by Cade Metz. Nothing in it will surprise SneerClub regulars too much, including how it ends up giving Yudkowsky too much credit. It says that the Sequences taught critical thinking, when they were cult shit all along; it says that in HPMoR, Harry uses real science, which is balderdash.

(If anyone says "Gell-Mann amnesia" I will fucking cut you.)

River crossing puzzles are a genre of logic problems that go back to the olden days. AI slop bots can act like they can solve them, because many solutions appear in their training data. But push the bot a little harder, and funny things happen.

One erratum: the review that goes into how HPMOR's science is bad was by "su3su2u1", not Dan Luu (who just archived it from the original Tumblr).

Homo sapiens! What an inventive, invincible species. It's only a few million years since they crawled up out of the mud and learned to walk. Puny, defenceless bipeds! They've survived flood, famine and plague. They've survived cosmic wars and holocausts. And now, here they are, out among the stars, waiting to begin a new life! Ready to out-sit eternity. They're indomitable.

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!

There’s no way someone earnestly spent their time writing over half a million words on a self-insert Harry Potter fanfic as some form of mental masturbation… right?

This one?

Men will literally use an LLM instead of ~~going to therapy~~ writing documentation

I think it was Walter Lewin of MIT, not Harvard

I read War and Peace but have only vague memories of it, because I read it in eighth grade. We had an "accelerated reader" program, you see, in which we were supposed to read books and then take quizzes on them to accumulate points. The longer books counted for more. Nearly all of the list we could pick from looked incredibly boring, so I decided to get a year's worth of points in one go.

It's a real term, meaning "influenced by multiple genes", but who knows what weird baggage SSC have around it.

I made the mistake of assuming that my experience with LSD would be the same as anybody else's. Prior to that, I'd known that if you all drink whisky, you all get drunk, you all feel dizzy and you all start slipping around. So I presumed, mistakenly, that everybody who took LSD was a most enlightened being. And then I started finding that there were people who were just as stupid as they'd been before, or people who hadn't really got any enlightenment except a lot of colours and lights and an Alice in Wonderland type of experience.

— George Harrison, quoted on page 179 of the Beatles Anthology

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make Barbie.