The combination of insularity and shared purpose that makes it so attractive also makes it a hunting ground for con artists, sexual predators and megalomaniacs.
that “the EA ideology causes adherents to treat themselves as little machines whose purpose is to act according to the EA ideology” which leads to “suppressing important parts of your humanity”. Put less catastrophically: EAs often struggle to walk and chew gum because the chewing renders the walking suboptimal.
In 2017, she was hospitalised for three weeks with delusions that she was “intrinsically evil” and “had destroyed significant parts of the world with my demonic powers,” she wrote in her post. Although she acknowledged taking psychedelics for therapeutic reasons, she also attributed the delusions to her job’s blurring of nightmare scenarios and real life. “In an ordinary patient, having fantasies about being the devil is considered megalomania,” she wrote.
The eight women say casual misogyny threaded through the scene. On the low end, Bryk, the rationalist-adjacent writer, says a prominent rationalist once told her condescendingly that she was a “five-year-old in a hot 20-year-old’s body”. Relationships with much older men were common, as was polyamory. Neither is inherently harmful, but several women say those norms became tools to help influential older men get more partners.
In 2018, two people accused Brent Dill, a rationalist who volunteered and worked for CFAR, of abusing them while they were in relationships with him. They were both aged 19, and he was about twice their age. Both partners said he used drugs and emotional manipulation to pressure them into extreme BDSM scenarios that went far beyond their comfort level.
For some of the women who allege abuse within the community, the most devastating part is the disillusionment. Angela Pang, a 28-year-old who got to know rationalists through posts on Quora, remembers the joy she felt when she discovered a community that thought about the world the same way she did. She’d been experimenting with a vegan diet to reduce animal suffering, and she quickly connected with effective altruism’s ideas about optimisation.
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