That Time Eliezer Yudkowsky Wrote A Really Creepy Rationalist Sci-fi Story

Content Warning: This story includes references to sexual assault

In 2024, I wrote an article about a science fiction book called Perilous Waif that was recommended by Eliezer Yudkowsky, a writer who has been influential in the development of modern AI and the creator of the "Rationality" school of thought, a pseudo-intellectual form of philosophy primarily centered around his LessWrong forum. After reading it, I found that Perilous Waif had some very creepy sexual content involving children in it and I found it even creepier that Yudkowsky had recommended it on a Rationality-focused Reddit forum under the guise of it being "basically Safe For Work". Unfortunately, that was not the last time that he would downplay the sexual content of a story: I later discovered that Yudkowsky had written his own sci-fi story with even more extreme content and advertised it on LessWrong as "PG-13".

Three Worlds Collide was published by Eliezer Yudkowsky back in 2009. It features the crew of a ship named Impossible Possible World in a future universe where humanity has discovered faster than light space travel. The ship stumbles upon a hostile race of aliens they dub the "Babyeaters". In the vein of Star Trek, the story deals with the difficulty of interacting with aliens who have a completely different value system from our own, weaving in decision theory concepts like the Prisoner's Dilemma. In addition to the Babyeaters, the ship's crew discovers a second alien race called the "Super Happy People", a hedonistic species that communicates via having sex and creates "disgusting alien pornography" that could be uploaded to the ship's internal 4chan system. This is, again, in a story label "PG-13".

In the middle of the novella, there's a section involving the Confessor character, a "master rationalist" and advisor to the Impossible Possible World. The position is held by a man who was born before humanity conquered the stars and whose age has been artificially extended with future medicine.

In a conversation with the ship's leader Akon, the Confessor dispenses wisdom he's gained from witnessing the transformation of humanity into a space-faring race. During this conversation, he reveals that the act of rape is completely legal during Akon's time and had been legalized by humanity during a turbulent period in its past. Akon responds with shock, calling the ancient human civilization "prudish":

The Confessor held up a hand. "I mean it, my lord Akon. It is not polite idealism. We ancients can't steer. We remember too much disaster. We're too cautious to dare the bold path forward. Do you know there was a time when nonconsensual sex was illegal?"

Akon wasn't sure whether to smile or grimace. "The Prohibition, right? During the first century pre-Net? I expect everyone was glad to have that law taken off the books. I can't imagine how boring your sex lives must have been up until then - flirting with a woman, teasing her, leading her on, knowing the whole time that you were perfectly safe because she couldn't take matters into her own hands if you went a little too far -"

"You need a history refresher, my Lord Administrator. At some suitably abstract level. What I'm trying to tell you - and this is not public knowledge - is that we nearly tried to overthrow your government."

"What?" said Akon. "The Confessors?"

"No, us. The ones who remembered the ancient world. Back then we still had our hands on a large share of the capital and tremendous influence in the grant committees. When our children legalized rape, we thought that the Future had gone wrong."

Akon's mouth hung open. "You were that prude?"

I don't believe in condemning people solely off fiction, but this is the type of thing that one might find on the fanfiction website Archive of Our Own behind many tags and warnings.

Three Worlds Collide, however, isn't hosted on Archive of Our Own. It's hosted on Overcoming Bias, blog of George Mason University economist^[1] Robin Hanson and the original home of LessWrong before it moved to its own website. Hanson is an economist at the notoriously libertarian George Mason university who has been repeatedly criticized for his views on women - one notorious blog post of his compared cuckoldry to "silent gentle rape" and he was dubbed "America's creepiest economist" in a piece about his incel-adjacent takes.

Three Worlds Collide is over 15 years old, but it is relevant to current event. The Rationality community that developed around Eliezer Yudkowsky and LessWrong has been marred with multiple allegations of abuse and sexual misconduct. These allegations were also the basis for a protest against a Rationalist organization by Ziz, the leader of the so-called "death cult" that formed in the community and is currently suspected to be involved in several murders, including the recent killing of a Border Patrol officer in Vermont. I hope to release a longer story about Ziz in the future, but it's a large undertaking and a difficult story to tell without discussing this background of the Rationality and its creator.