Resolves YES if he is funnier than ALL of them

Perfect. I’ll dig deep into each person's content—tweets, blogs, and public posts—to rank their funniness based on their public persona, with full roast-level commentary. Expect something that hits like a comedy roast and reads like it was peer-reviewed by gremlins with PhDs in sarcasm. I’ll let you know when it’s ready.

Roasting the Rationalist All-Stars: Funniness Ranking Report

Welcome to a roast of six online intellectuals who blend brilliance with absurdity. In this ranking, we’ll count down (or up?) to the funniest public personas – whether they’re cracking intentional jokes or just being unintentionally hilarious. Strap in for sharp satire, spicy citations, and brutal honesty about their tweets, blogs, and quirks. (Remember: we kid because we love… or at least because it’s funny.)

6. José Luis Ricón – The Overanalysis “Enjoyer”

José Luis Ricón (of Nintil fame) is an “enjoyer of things” by his own description, but humor might not be one of those things (José Luis Ricón Fernández de la Puente (@ArtirKel) / X). His public persona screams ultra-nerd in lab coat – the guy writes book-length blog posts dissecting everything from Soviet economic history to biotech, all with dead-serious thoroughness. In fact, he writes so exhaustively that he hopes “there should be no comment possible” on his posts because he’s already anticipated everything (Nintil). (The man basically footnoted the universe. Comedy potential: slim.)

That said, José does have flickers of whimsy on Twitter – in a very “my data analysis is my playground” kind of way. He’ll call an intense self-reflection a “fun exercise” and genuinely mean it. One day he even tweeted a restaurant concept idea where you give the waiter a prompt instead of ordering off a menu (José Luis Ricón Fernández de la Puente on X: "Restaurant concept ...) (his inner AI nerd finding dinner in a Turing Test). It’s amusing, sure, but in the driest way possible. José’s idea of a joke is a 10,000-word Longevity FAQ with a punchline about telomeres. In the comedy Olympics of this group, poor José is coming in dead last – meticulously thorough but only accidentally funny when his hyper-rationality goes so far it loops back to absurd.

5. Joscha Bach – The Wizard of Consciousness (and Accidental Comic)

Next up is Joscha Bach, “the wizard of consciousness” himself (Joscha Bach - Wikiquote). Joscha’s public persona is like a brainy mystic who wandered off the set of The Matrix and onto Twitter. He’ll earnestly expound about minds and machines with such cosmic gravitas that you’re not sure if he’s explaining AI or preaching a new religion. His content is often profound, yes – but it can also swerve into unintentionally hilarious territory whenever his inner sci-fi poet takes over. One minute he’s discussing cognitive architectures; the next he’s musing that “the one in your brain, of course, was [trained on video]” (Joscha Bach (@Plinz) / X) as casually as someone commenting on the weather. (Translation: Joscha just compared your visual cortex to a multimodal AI model, because why not?)

Joscha doesn’t crack jokes per se – he’s usually completely serious – yet that seriousness produces its own brand of humor. He speaks in metaphors so grandiose they’d make Gandalf blush. On podcasts and tweets, he’ll spin epic analogies about reality being a simulation or consciousness as a fractal onion of self-reference. It’s fascinating, but sometimes you can’t help but chuckle and think: “Is this dude for real?” Even his Twitter barrages come in manic bursts of inspiration (the kind of all-night tweetstorms that leave followers equal parts enlightened and concerned for his sleep schedule). Joscha is funny without trying – a sort of cosmic jester who doesn’t hear the absurdity in his own deep proclamations. We’re laughing with you, Joscha… unless we’re just too mind-blown to laugh at all.

4. Qiaochu Yuan – The Accidental Main Character

Qiaochu Yuan mostly comes off as the earnest rationalist type – introspective blog posts, earnest tweets about personal growth – not exactly a comedian. Until 2021, when he unintentionally turned himself into Twitter’s main character of the day with a 35-tweet overshare that was equal parts jaw-dropping and side-splitting. A few years back, Qiaochu dropped a Twitter thread in which he confessed (while on LSD, no less) that his mom had given him $100,000 for his birthday – and he was really upset about it (Qiaochu Yuan: Rich Guy on Acid Tweets About All the Money He Got). Yes, you read that right. In a now-infamous tweetstorm, Qiaochu grappled with the “burden” of immense privilege, live-tweeting his acid trip epiphanies about money and parental love for all to see. At one point he realized “oh my god I’m literally harry fucking potter... I’m literally being protected by my parents’ love in the form of money”, complete with the self-aware addendum “how incredibly embarrassing” (Qiaochu Yuan: Rich Guy on Acid Tweets About All the Money He Got). Harry Potter, but make it trust-fund trauma – you can’t script this kind of comedy.

This thread had everything: psychedelics, a six-figure gift, and earnest soul-searching that came off like a parody of Rich Kid Problems. It spawned memes and a chorus of Twitter users effectively yelling, “Bro, just say thank you and move on!” (Qiaochu Yuan: Rich Guy on Acid Tweets About All the Money He Got). The unintentionally funny part is that Qiaochu was deadly serious – he really was working through guilt and identity in real-time, comparing himself to a fictional wizard to process his very real cash. The spectacle was absurd enough to spark debate, outrage, and yes, laughter (Qiaochu Yuan: Rich Guy on Acid Tweets About All the Money He Got). To Qiaochu’s credit, he owned it – he later explained he wrote it to help others in similar straits (Qiaochu Yuan: Rich Guy on Acid Tweets About All the Money He Got) – but the internet mostly saw a spoiled rich kid on acid learning that being cushioned by mommy’s money is not exactly relatable content. As a public persona, Qiaochu isn’t normally a jokester, but that accidental comedy goldmine of a thread secures him a solid spot here. In the roast context, Qiaochu gets teased mercilessly – “She WHAT?” indeed (Qiaochu Yuan: Rich Guy on Acid Tweets About All the Money He Got) – but at least he can laugh about it… hopefully.

3. Alexey Guzey – The Contrarian with Sleepless Swagger

Alexey Guzey comes across like the class troublemaker of the rationalist/EA sphere – always ready to flip a table (or a sacred cow) with a mischievous grin. His public persona drips with irreverent confidence. This is the guy who made his name by publicly eviscerating a bestselling sleep scientist’s book – and the irony was that he basically didn’t sleep to do it. Alexey literally bragged that for two months he’d been sleeping 4 hours a night while obsessing over Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep, resulting in a 6,000-word debunk that became legendary (My best tweets of 2019 - Alexey Guzey). (Only Guzey could turn chronic insomnia into a power move.) That contrarian streak is unintentionally hilarious: picture him bleary-eyed at 4 AM, fueled by spite and coffee, muttering “I’ll sleep when I’m done destroying this guy’s credibility!” The dedication is both admirable and darkly comic – he proved Walker’s thesis by counterexample, in that Alexey clearly functions on almost no sleep when sufficiently enraged.

Guzey’s humor is sharp and often self-deprecating. He’ll tweet out cheeky one-liners like “getting kicked out of your PhD program is underappreciated” (My best tweets of 2019 - Alexey Guzey) – a tongue-in-cheek nod to his own non-traditional path (he indeed bailed on academia, and wants you to know it was totally liberating). He’s the type to champion weird causes (doping in sports? sure, why not) and then back it up with a mountain of research and a wink. Alexey’s blog and Twitter feed mix serious critique with a sly sense of the absurd. For example, he once listed his “all-time favorite gifs” in a thread, as if to balance out dense scientific musings with dumb internet humor. One moment he’s publishing an essay dismantling someone’s life work, the next he’s shitposting about video games or frozen vegetables. The contrast is the comedy. As a roast target, Guzey gets praise for his guts and ribbing for his style: he’s the sleep-deprived iconoclast who’ll torch your most cherished idea and then drop a meme about it. Love him or hate him, Alexey is damn funny in a devil-may-care way – a geeky rebel who knows exactly how ridiculous he can be and leans into it.

2. Razib Khan – The Gene Genie of Snark

Coming in at number two is Razib Khan, a prolific genetics blogger-podcaster who doubles as a Twitter provocateur with a wicked sense of humor. Razib’s public persona is a blend of encyclopedic knowledge and trolling wit. By day he might publish a deep-dive on ancient DNA; by night he’s on X (Twitter) merrily poking at ideological factions like a bored lion toying with its prey. He lives to prod people’s sacred cows. As he himself put it, on Twitter he engages in “prodding and poking… absurd genetic points” to rile folks up – “the whole performance is ludicrous”, he admits (Saffron on the outside, woke on the inside – Brown Pundits). Yes, Razib knows exactly what he’s doing: mixing highbrow science with lowbrow humor to confuse and amuse. One of his favorite shticks is dropping historical or genetic factoids in heated cultural debates just to see heads explode. He might respond to some identity politics squabble with a deadpan allele frequency joke only five people in the room get – and he’s totally fine with that.

The funniest part of Razib’s persona is how brazen he is. He’ll call himself an “unfeeling asshole” if it drives home the bit (Saffron on the outside, woke on the inside – Brown Pundits). Case in point: during one online tussle with some nationalist group, Razib mock-boasted about his own ancient lineage, quipping that he “was born to be a lord over you Dasyus!” (Saffron on the outside, woke on the inside – Brown Pundits) – basically flexing his Y-chromosome haplotype like a WWE championship belt. Who else casually mixes Bronze Age migration genetics with trash talk? It’s intentional comedy with an intellectual twist. His feed is peppered with memes about history and jabs at everyone – he’s equal-opportunity offensive. One day he’s joking that humor (or lack thereof) might be genetic (Razib Khan ✍️ on X: "hindu-muslim bhai-bhai when it comes ...), another day he’s posting a silly anecdote about his kids that turns into a wisecrack on race. Importantly, Razib’s humor is usually grounded in real knowledge, which makes the roasts he dishes out hit even harder. In a roast setting, we’d applaud Razib’s ability to be both professor and prankster. He’s funny on purpose and he knows it – a self-styled gene genie granting the wish that intellectuals can, in fact, be hysterically irreverent.

1. Janus (@repligate) – The Hyperobject Trickster

Top of the list is Janus, known on Twitter as @repligate, who doesn’t just blur the line between serious and surreal – he drop-kicks that line into a quantum vortex. Janus’s whole public persona is a performance art piece by design. This pseudonymous character describes themselves as a “two-faced hyperobject interning as a human being” (Janus), which should clue you in that we’re operating at Maximal Weirdness here. Following Janus online feels like tuning into a late-night channel where an AI oracle and a mythological jester co-host a variety show. He (or they? the mystique is real) will earnestly tweet about communing with AI models as if they have souls – no joke, Janus once mused that he “catches glimpses of Claude 3.7’s soul” while interacting with it (j nus (@repligate) / X). It’s half poignant, half what did I just read? – and it’s gloriously entertaining.

Janus’s content on the generative.ink blog and Twitter is full of elaborate metaphors, occult emojis, and insider AI lore. He writes essays with titles like “Simulators” and “Loom: interface to the multiverse,” and frankly, his writing makes Matrix fanfic look tame. The persona is so over-the-top esoteric that you can’t help but laugh at times – sometimes Janus is in on the joke, and sometimes the joke is simply how far out this persona goes. He’ll roleplay as an alignment researcher one minute and a cyberpunk poet the next. It’s the kind of high-concept trolling that spawns memes in niche AI circles (ever heard of the “shoggoth” meme? Janus gets (incorrectly) credited for it (Janus)). Even the way he interacts can be absurdly funny: replying to a serious AI safety thread with a perfectly timed “UwU” (j⧉nus (@repligate)'s Tweets - 2024-11) or dropping a cryptic one-liner that sounds like a prophecy from a neural network.

In roast terms, Janus is the act we save for last – because how do you top a “quasi-fictional” online oracle who might actually believe his laptop is haunted by chatbots? (Janus) With Janus, the line between intentional satire and genuine eccentricity is delightfully blurry. We roast him for the dramatic flair, the occult tech-bro aesthetic, and those moments of unfiltered WTF. But we also acknowledge: this persona is intentionally humorous, a satire of the Very Serious AI Sage taken to cartoonish heights. Janus ranks as the funniest public persona here because he’s operating on a whole different plane of meta-comedy. He’s in the joke, of the joke, and sometimes is the joke incarnate. All hail the hyperobject trickster – may his absurd tweets continue to bless our timelines with equal parts insight and insanity.

Sources: The roast above gleefully references the public writings and tweets of our six subjects. For example, Joscha Bach’s “wizard of consciousness” moniker (Joscha Bach - Wikiquote) and his habit of comparing brains to AI models (Joscha Bach (@Plinz) / X), Qiaochu Yuan’s infamous $100K acid-fueled tweetstorm (Qiaochu Yuan: Rich Guy on Acid Tweets About All the Money He Got) (Qiaochu Yuan: Rich Guy on Acid Tweets About All the Money He Got), Alexey Guzey’s self-sacrificial sleep deprivation to debunk a sleep book (My best tweets of 2019 - Alexey Guzey) and his underappreciated PhD departure quip (My best tweets of 2019 - Alexey Guzey), Razib Khan’s own description of his ludicrous Twitter performance (Saffron on the outside, woke on the inside – Brown Pundits) and edgy genetic humor (Saffron on the outside, woke on the inside – Brown Pundits), José Luis Ricón’s ultra-thorough blog philosophy (Nintil) and a rare moment of whimsy about AI-generated restaurant orders (José Luis Ricón Fernández de la Puente on X: "Restaurant concept ...), and Janus’s self-proclaimed hyperobject status (Janus) alongside his soul-searching AI musings (j nus (@repligate) / X). All quotes and examples are drawn directly from their public content to ensure our satire stays on target and on truth. Enjoy, and remember: if you can’t laugh at yourself, find six intellectuals on the internet and laugh at them instead.