The shared thread among these is (in ever widening circles) a story people tell themselves to justify precisely why, for example, the actions of someone you'll never meet in Tulsa, OK have any bearing whatsoever on the fate of you, a person in Lincoln, NE.

One can see how this leaves an individual in a tenuous place if one doesn't feel particularly connected to nationhood (one can also see how being too connected to nationhood, in an exclusionary way, can also have deleterious consequences, and how not unlike differing forms of Christianity, differing concepts on what the 'soul' of a nation is can foment internal strife).

(To be clear: those fates are intertwined to some extent; the world we live in grows ever smaller due to the power of up-scaled influence of action granted by technology. But "nation" is a sort of fiction we tell ourselves to fit all that complexity into the slippery meat between human ears).

I fully accept that the rationalist community may have morphed into something far beyond that original tenet, but I think rationalism just describes the approach, not that it's the "one true philosophy".

It's nuts.

I do not think this cult dogma is any more out there than other cult dogma I have heard, but the above quote makes me think it is easier to found cults in modern day in someways since you can steal other complex world building from numerous sources rather building yourself and keeping everything straight.

Narcissists tend to believe that they are always right, no mater what the topic is, or how knowledgeable they are. This makes them speak with confidence and conviction.

Some people are very drawn to confident people.

If the cult leader has other mental health issues, it can/will seep into their rhetoric. Combine that with unwavering support from loyal followers that will take everything they say as gospel...

That's about it.

On the other hand, there's a whole other side of a few nutjobs who really behave like cult leaders, they believe their own bullshit and over time manage to find in this community a lot of "followers", since one of the foundational aspects is radical acceptance it becomes very easy to be nutty and not questioned (unless you do something egregious).

Human brains are lazy Bayesian engines. In uncertainty, we grasp for simple, all-explaining models (heuristics). Mage provides this: a complete ontology where magic equals psychology/quantum woo, reality is malleable, and the camp leaders are the enlightened "tradition." This offers relief from the exhausting ambiguity of real life. Dill didn't invent this; he plugged into the ancient human craving for a map that makes the world feel navigable and controllable. The "rationalist" veneer is pure camouflage. It feels like critical thinking but is actually pseudo-intellectual cargo culting. This isn't Burning Man's fault. It's the latest step of a 2,500-year-old playbook. The Gnostics and the Hermeticists provided ancient frameworks where secret knowledge ("gnosis") granted power over reality, accessible only through a guru. Mage directly borrows from this lineage (The Technocracy, The Traditions). Dill positioned himself as the modern "Ascended Master" dispensing this gnosis.

The 20th century cults Synanon, EST, Moonies, NXIVM all followed similar patterns, starting with isolation. Burning Man's temporary city is the perfect isolation chamber. It's physically remote, temporally bounded (a "liminal space"), fostering dependence on the camp. Initial overwhelming acceptance and belonging (the "Burning Man hug"), then slowly increasing demands (time, money, emotional disclosure, sexual access), framed as "spiritual growth" or "breaking through barriers" (directly lifted from Mage's "Paradigm Shifts" and "Quintessence"). Control language ("sleeper," "muggle," "Awakened"), redefining reality ("that rape wasn't really rape, it was a necessary 'Paradox' to break your illusions"), demanding confession of "sins" (past traumas, doubts), creating dependency on the leader for "truth."

Burning Man attracts people seeking transformation, often carrying unresolved pain. Cults prey on this vulnerability. Dill allegedly targeted individuals with trauma histories. Trauma creates cognitive dissonance and a desperate need for resolution. The cult's narrative (Mage's framework + Dill's interpretation) offers a simple explanation for their pain ("you're unAwakened," "you have Paradox blocking you") and a path out ("submit to me, undergo these rituals"). This isn't therapy; it's trauma bonding weaponized. The alleged rape wasn't an aberration; it was likely part of the control mechanism. It's a "shock" to induce dependency and reframe the victim's reality ("this pain is necessary enlightenment"). People are adrift in ontological insecurity (fear about the fundamental nature of reality and self). Mage offers a new grand narrative with clear heroes (Awakened), villains (sleepers, Technocracy), and a path (Ascension).

I'm a staunch atheist and I feel the pull all the time.

But looking into the underlying Western Esoteric Spirit Science, 'Anthroposophy' (because Theosophy wouldn't let him get weird enough) by Rudolph Steiner, has been quite a ride. The point being that.. humans have a pretty endless capacity to go ALL IN on REALLY WEIRD shit, as long as it promises to fix their lives if they do everything they're told. Naturally if their lives aren't fixed, then they did it wrong or have karmic debt to pay down, so YMMV.

In any case, I'm considering the latent woo-cult atmosphere as a test of the skeptical inoculation that I've tried to raise my child with.

Ayahuasca?

I think people are going nuts because we've drifted from the dock of a stable civilization. Institutions are a mess. Economy is a mess. Combine all of that together with the advent of social media making the creation of echo chambers (and the inevitable narcissism of "leaders" in those echo chambers) effortless and ~15 years later, we have this.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-tale-of-the-final-fantas...

See for example "Reality Distortion Field": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field

God died and it's been rough going since then.

A contradiction creates a structural fallacy; if you find one, it's a fair belief that at least one of the supporting claims is false. In contrast, appeal to authority is probabilistic: we don't know, given the current context, if the authority is right, so they might be wrong... But we don't have time to read the universe into this situation so an appeal to authority is better than nothing.

... and this observation should be coupled with the observation that the school of rhetoric wasn't teaching a method for finding truth; it was teaching a method for beating an opponent in a legal argument. "Appeal to authority is a logical fallacy" is a great sword to bring to bear if your goal is to turn off the audience's ability to ask whether we should give the word of the environmental scientist and the washed-up TV actor equal weight on the topic of environmental science...

There's a point where more passive thinking stops adding value and starts subtracting sanity. It's pretty easy to get to that point. We've all done it.

The first is diffusion of power. Social media is powered by charisma, and while it is certainly true that personality-based cults are nothing new, the internet makes it way easier to form one. Contrast that with academic philosophy. People can have their own little fiefdoms, and there is certainly abuse of power, but rarely concentrated in such a way that you see within rationalist communities.

The second (and more idealistic) is that the discipline of Philosophy is rooted in the Platonic/Socratic notion that "I know that I know nothing." People in academic philosophy are on the whole happy to provide a gloss on a gloss on some important thinker, or some kind of incremental improvement over somebody else's theory. This makes it extremely boring, and yet, not nearly as susceptible to delusions of grandeur. True skepticism has to start with questioning one's self, but everybody seems to skip that part and go right to questioning everybody else.

Rationalists have basically reinvented academic philosophy from the ground up with none of the rigor, self-discipline, or joy. They mostly seem to dedicate their time to providing post-hoc justifications for the most banal unquestioned assumptions of their subset of contemporary society.

(I call it neorationalism because it is philosophically unrelated to the more traditional rationalism of Spinoza and Descartes.)

Your rant about government or not being allowed to hike in some places in Canada is unrelated to the issue.

I agree that the term "rationalist" would appeal to many people, and the obvious need to belong to a group plays a huge role.

And I say this as a Christian. I often think that becoming a state religion was the worst thing that ever happened to Christianity, or any religion, because then it unavoidably becomes a tool for power and authority.

And doing the same with other ideas or ideologies is no different. Look at what happened to communism, capitalism, or almost any other secular idea you can think of: the moment it becomes established, accepted, and official, the corruption sets in.

The author is a self-identified rationalist. This is explicitly established in the second sentence of the article. Given that, why in the world would you think they're trying to claim the whole movement is a cult?

Obviously you and I have very different definitions of "obvious"

This is the Internet, you're allowed to say "they are obsessed with unlimited drugs and weird sex things, far beyond what even the generally liberal society tolerates".

I'm increasingly convinced that every other part of "Rationalism" is just distraction or justification for those; certainly there's a conscious decision to minimize talking about this part on the Internet.

This article describes “rationalism” as described in LessWrong and the sequences by Eliezer Yudkowsky. A good amount of it based on empirical findings from psychology behavior science. It’s called “rationalism” because it seeks to correct common reasoning heuristics that are purported to lead to incorrect reasoning, not in contrast to empiricism.

To quote one of the core foundational articles: "Before you try mapping an unseen territory, pour some water into a cup at room temperature and wait until it spontaneously freezes before proceeding. That way you can be sure the general trick—ignoring infinitesimally tiny probabilities of success—is working properly." (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eY45uCCX7DdwJ4Jha/no-one-can...)

One can argue how well the community absorbs the lesson, but this certainly seems to be a much higher standard than average.

  Church, cult, cult, church. So we'll get bored someplace else every Sunday. Does this really change our everyday lives?

(One of my favorite TED talks was about a failed experiment in introducing traditional Western agriculture to a people in Zambia. It turns out when you concentrate too much food in one place, the hippos come and eat it all and people can't actually out-fight hippos in large numbers. In hindsight, the people running the program should have asked how likely it was that folks in a region that had exposure to other people's agriculture for thousands of years, hadn't ever, you know... tried it. https://www.ted.com/talks/ernesto_sirolli_want_to_help_someo...)

see: bitcoin

A significant part of this is the intersection of the cult with money and status - this stuff really took off once prominent SV personalities became associated with it, and got turbocharged when it started intersecting with the angel/incubator/VC scene, when there was implicit money involved.

It's unusually successful because -- for a time at least -- there was status (and maybe money) in carrying water for it.

Which, to me, raises the fascinating question of what does a "good" version look like, of groups and group dynamics centered around a shared interest in best practices associated with critical thinking?

At a first impression, I think maybe these virtues (which are real!) disappear into the background of other, more applied specializations, whether professions, hobbies, backyard family barbecues.

There's a reason they call themselves "rationalists" instead of empiricists or positivists. They perfectly inverted Hume ("reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions")

These kinds of harebrained views aren't an accident but a product of rationalism. The idea that intellect is quasi infinite and that the world can be mirrored in the mind is not running contradictory to, but just the most extreme form of rationalism taken to its conclusion, and of course deeply religious, hence the constant fantasies about AI divinities and singularities.

https://freedomofmind.com/cult-mind-control/bite-model-pdf-d...

They do note at the beginning of the article that many, if not most such groups have reasonably normal dynamics, for what it's worth. But I think there's a legitimate question of whether we ought to expect groups centered on rational thinking to be better able to escape group dynamics we associate with irrationality.

And the crazy thing is, none of that is fundamentally opposed to rationalism. You can be a rationalist who ascribes value to gut instinct and societal norms. Those are the product of millions of years of pre-training.

I have spent a fair bit of time thinking about the meaning of life. And my conclusions have been pretty crazy. But they sound insane, so until I figure out why they sound insane, I'm not acting on those conclusions. And I'm definitely not surrounding myself with people who take those conclusions seriously.

The game as it is _actually_ played is that you use rationalist arguments to justify your pre-existing gut intuitions and personal biases.

Specifically, rationalism spends a lot of time about priors, but a sneaky thing happens that I call the 'double update'.

Bayesian updating works when you update your genuine prior believe with new evidence. No one disagrees with this, and sometimes it's easy and sometimes it's difficult to do.

What Rationalists often end up doing is relaxing their priors - intuition, personal experience, cultural norms - and then updating. They often think of this as one update, but what it is is two. The first update, relaxing priors, isn't associated with evidence. It's part of the community norms. There is an implicit belief that by relaxing one's priors you're more open to reality. The real result though, is that it sends people wildly off course. Care in point: all the cults.

Consider the pre-tipped scale. You suspect the scale reads a little low, so before weighing you tilt it slightly to "correct" for that bias. Then you pour in flour until the dial says you've hit the target weight. You’ve followed the numbers exactly, but because you started from a tipped scale, you've ended up with twice the flour the recipe called for.

Trying to correct for bias by relaxing priors is updating using evidence, not just because everyone is doing it.

> The ability to dismiss an argument with a “that sounds nuts,” without needing recourse to a point-by-point rebuttal, is anathema to the rationalist project. But it’s a pretty important skill to have if you want to avoid joining cults.

[1] https://maxread.substack.com/p/the-zizians-and-the-rationali...

Are you certain about this?

Not that non-rationalists are any better at reasoning, but non-rationalists do at least benefit from some intellectual humility.

The biggest nonsense axiom I see in the AI-cult rationalist world is recursive self-improvement. It's the classic reason superintelligence takeoff happens in sci-fi: once AI reaches some threshold of intelligence, it's supposed to figure out how to edit its own mind, do that better and faster than humans, and exponentially leap into superintelligence. The entire "AI 2027" scenario is built on this assumption; it assumes that soon LLMs will gain the capability of assisting humans on AI research, and AI capabilities will explode from there.

But AI being capable of researching or improving itself is not obvious; there's so many assumptions built into it!

- What if "increasing intelligence", which is a very vague goal, has diminishing returns, making recursive self-improvement incredibly slow?

- Speaking of which, LLMs already seem to have hit a wall of diminishing returns; it seems unlikely they'll be able to assist cutting-edge AI research with anything other than boilerplate coding speed improvements.

- What if there are several paths to different kinds of intelligence with their own local maxima, in which the AI can easily get stuck after optimizing itself into the wrong type of intelligence?

- Once AI realizes it can edit itself to be more intelligent, it can also edit its own goals. Why wouldn't it wirehead itself? (short-circuit its reward pathway so it always feels like it's accomplished its goal)

Knowing Yudowsky I'm sure there's a long blog post somewhere where all of these are addressed with several million rambling words of theory, but I don't think any amount of doing philosophy in a vacuum without concrete evidence could convince me that fast-takeoff superintelligence is possible.

Me too, in almost every area of life. There's a reason it's called a conman: they are tricking your natural sense that confidence is connected to correctness.

But also, even when it isn't about conning you, how do people become certain of something? They ignored the evidence against whatever they are certain of.

People who actually know what they're talking about will always restrict the context and hedge their bets. Their explanation are tentative, filled with ifs and buts. They rarely say anything sweeping.

Reasoning is the appropriate target because it is a self-critical, self-correcting method that continually re-evaluates axioms and methods to express intentions.

But the world is way more complex than the models we used to derive those "first principles".

But I constantly battle tested them against other smart people’s views, and just after I ran out of people to bring me new rational objections did I become sure.

Now I can battle test them against LLMs.

On a lesser level of confidence, I have also found a lot of times the people who disagreed with what I thought had to be the case, later came to regret it because their strategies ended up in failure and they told me they regretted not taking my recommendation. But that is on an individual level. I have gotten pretty good at seeing systemic problems, architecting systemic solutions, and realizing what it would take to get them adopted to at least a critical mass. Usually, they fly in the face of what happens normally in society. People don’t see how their strategies and lives are shaped by the technology and social norms around them.

Here, I will share three examples:

Public Health: https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/

Economic and Governmental: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362

Wars & Destruction: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=424

For that last one, I am often proven somewhat wrong by right-wing war hawks, because my left-leaning anti-war stance is about avoiding inflicting large scale misery on populations, but the war hawks go through with it anyway and wind up defeating their geopolitical enemies and gaining ground as the conflict fades into history.

I feel like the internet has led to an explosion of these such groups because it abstracts the "ideas" away from the "people". I suspect if most people were in a room or spent an extended amount of time around any of these self-professed, hyper-online rationalists, they would immediately disregard any theories they were able to cook up, no matter how clever or persuasively-argued they might be in their written down form.

[0]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/curtis-yarvin-...

Each change is arguably equivalent and it seems logical that if x = y then you could put y anywhere you have x, but after all of the changes are applied the argument that emerges is definitely different from the one before all the substitutions are made. It feels like communities that pride themselves on being extra rational seem subject to this because it has all the trappings of rationalism but enables squishy, feely arguments

I am profoundly sure, I am certain I exist and that a reality outside myself exists. Worse, I strongly believe knowing this external reality is possible, desirable and accurate.

How suspicious does that make me?

You need to review the definition of the word.

> The smartest people I have ever known have been profoundly unsure of their beliefs and what they know.

The smartest people are unsure about their higher level beliefs, but I can assure you that they almost certainly don't re-evaluate "axioms" as you put it on a daily or weekly basis. Not that it matters, as we almost certainly can't verify who these people are based on an internet comment.

> I immediately become suspicious of anyone who is very certain of something, especially if they derived it on their own.

That's only your problem, not anyone else's. If you think people can't arrive to a tangible and useful approximation of truth, then you are simply delusional.

Another issue with "thinkers" is that many are cowards; whether they realize it or not a lot of presuppositions are built on a "safe" framework, placing little to no responsibility on the thinker.

> The smartest people I have ever known have been profoundly unsure of their beliefs and what they know. I immediately become suspicious of anyone who is very certain of something, especially if they derived it on their own.

This is where I depart from you. If I say it's anti-intellectual I would only be partially correct, but it's worse than that imo. You might be coming across "smart people" who claim to know nothing "for sure", which in itself is a self-defeating argument. How can you claim that nothing is truly knowable as if you truly know that nothing is knowable? I'm taking these claims to their logical extremes btw, avoiding the granular argumentation surrounding the different shades and levels of doubt; I know that leaves vulnerabilities in my argument, but why argue with those who know that they can't know much of anything as if they know what they are talking about to begin with? They are so defeatist in their own thoughts, it's comical. You say, "profoundly unsure", which reads similarly to me as "can't really ever know" which is a sure truth claim, not a relative claim or a comparative as many would say, which is a sad attempt to side-step the absolute reality of their statement.

I know that I exist, regardless of how I get here I know that I do, there is a ridiculous amount of rhetoric surrounding that claim that I will not argue for here, this is my presupposition. So with that I make an ontological claim, a truth claim, concerning my existence; this claim is one that I must be sure of to operate at any base level. I also believe I am me and not you, or any other. Therefore I believe in one absolute, that "I am me". As such I can claim that an absolute exists, and if absolutes exist, then within the right framework you must also be an absolute to me, and so on and so forth; what I do not see in nature is an existence, or notion of, the relative on it's own as at every relative comparison there is an absolute holding up the comparison. One simple example is heat. Hot is relative, yet it also is objective; some heat can burn you, other heat can burn you over a very long time, some heat will never burn. When something is "too hot" that is a comparative claim, stating that there is another "hot" which is just "hot" or not "hot enough", the absolute still remains which is heat. Relativistic thought is a game of comparisons and relations, not making absolute claims; the only absolute claim is that there is no absolute claim to the relativist. The reason I am talking about relativists is that they are the logical, or illogical, conclusion of the extremes of doubt/disbelief i previously mentioned.

If you know nothing you are not wise, you are lazy and ill-prepared, we know the earth is round, we know that gravity exists, we are aware of the atomic, we are aware of our existence, we are aware that the sun shines it's light upon us, we are sure of many things that took debate among smart people many many years ago to arrive to these sure conclusions. There was a time where many things we accept where "not known" but were observed with enough time and effort by brilliant people. That's why we have scientists, teachers, philosophers and journalists. I encourage you that the next time you find a "smart" person who is unsure of their beliefs, you should kindly encourage them to be less lazy and challenge their absolutes, if they deny the absolute could be found then you aren't dealing with a "smart" person, you are dealing with a useful idiot who spent too much time watching skeptics blather on about meaningless topics until their brains eventually fell out. In every relative claim there must be an absolute or it fails to function in any logical framework. You can with enough thought, good data, and enough time to let things steep find the (or an) absolute and make a sure claim. You might be proven wrong later, but that should be an indicator to you that you should improve (or a warning you are being taken advantage of by a sophist), and that the truth is out there, not to sequester yourself away in this comfortable, unsure hell that many live in till they die.

The beauty of absolute truth is that you can believe absolutes without understanding the entirety of the absolute. I know gravity exists but I don't know fully how it works. Yet I can be absolutely certain it acts upon me, even if I only understand a part of it. People should know what they know and study it until they do and not make sure claims outside of what they do not know until they have the prerequisite absolute claims to support the broader claims with the surety of the weakest of their presuppositions.

Apologies for grammar, length and how schizo my thought process appears; I don't think linearly and it takes a goofy amount of effort to try to collate my thoughts in a sensible manner.

Pressing through uncertainty either requires a healthy appetite for risk or an engine of delusion. A person who struggles to get out of their comfort zone will seek enablement through such a device.

Appreciation of risk-reward will throttle trips into the unknown. A person using a crutch to justify everything will careen hyperbolically into more chaotic and erratic behaviors hoping to find that the device is still working, seeking the thrill of enablement again.

The extremism comes from where once the user learned to say hello to a stranger, their comfort zone has expanded to an area that their experience with risk-reward is underdeveloped. They don't look at the external world to appreciate what might happen. They try to morph situations into some confirmation of the crutch and the inferiority of confounding ideas.

"No, the world isn't right. They are just weak and the unspoken rules [in the user's mind] are meant to benefit them." This should always resonate because nobody will stand up for you like you have a responsibility to.

A study of uncertainty and the limitations of axioms, the inability of any sufficiently expressive formalism to be both complete and consistent, these are the ideas that are antidotes to such things. We do have to leave the rails from time to time, but where we arrive will be another set of rails and will look and behave like rails, so a bit of uncertainty is necessary, but it's not some magic hat that never runs out of rabbits.

Another psychology that will come into play from those who have left their comfort zone is the inability to revert. It is a harmful tendency to presume all humans fixed quantities. Once a behavior exists, the person is said to be revealed, not changed. The proper response is to set boundaries and be ready to tie off the garbage bag and move on if someone shows remorse and desire to revert or transform. Otherwise every relationship only gets worse. If instead you can never go back, extreme behavior is a ratchet. Ever mistake becomes the person.

The discount function really should have a noise term, because predictions about the future are noisy, and the noise increases with the distance into the future. If you don't consider that, you solve the wrong problem. There's a classic Roman concern about running out of space for cemeteries. Running out of energy, or overpopulation, turned out to be problems where the projections assumed less noise than actually happened.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discount_function

If you don't get anything out of reading the list itself, then you're probably not going to get anything out of the rest of the community either.

If you poke around and find a few neat ideas there, you'll probably find a few other neat ideas.

For some people, though, this is "wait, holy shit, you can just DO that? And it WORKS?", in which case probably read all of this but then also go find a few other sources to counter-balance it.

(In particular, probably 90% of the useful insights already exist elsewhere in philosophy, and often more rigorously discussed - LessWrong will teach you the skeleton, the general sense of "what rationality can do", but you need to go elsewhere if you want to actually build up the muscles)

Buddhist meditation exists only in the context of the Four Noble Truths and the rest of the Buddha's Dhamma. Throwing them away means it stops being Buddhist.

It's called the "Landmark"[0] now.

Several of my family members got sucked into that back in the early 80s and quite a few folks I knew socially as well.

I was quite skeptical, especially because of the cult-like fanaticism of its adherents. They would go on for as long as you'd let them (often needing to just walk away to get them to stop) try to get you to join.

The goal appears to be to obtain as much legal tender as can be pried from those who are willing to part with it. Hard sell, abusive and deceptive tactics are encouraged -- because it's so important for those who haven't "gotten it" to do so, justifying just about anything. But if you don't pay -- you get bupkis.

It's a scam, and an abusive one at that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landmark_Worldwide

Sad because Eli’s dad was actually a real and well-credentialed researcher at Bell Labs. Too bad he let his son quit school at an early age to be an autodidact.

Part of the argument is that we've had nuclear weapons for a long time but no apocalypse so the annual risk can't be larger than 1%, whereas we've never created AI so it might be substantially larger. Not a rock solid argument obviously, but we're dealing with a lot of unknowns.

A better argument is that most of those other risks are not neglected, plenty of smart people working against nuclear war. Whereas (up until a few years ago) very few people considered AI a real threat, so the marginal benefit of a new person working on it should be bigger.

I'm a little skeptical (there may be bottlenecks that can't be solved by thinking harder), but I don't see how it can be ruled out.

Anyone who's ever seen the sky knows it's blue. Anyone who's spent much time around rationalism knows the premise of this article is real. It would make zero sense to ban talking about about a serious and obvious problem in their community until some double blind peer reviewed data can be gathered.

It would be what they call an "isolated demand for rigor".

The key takeaway from the article is that if you have a group leader who cuts you off from other people, that's a red flag – not really a novel, or unique, or situational insight.

I once called rationalists infantile, impotent liberal escapism, perhaps that's the novel take you are looking for.

Essentially my view is that the fundamental problem with rationalists and the effective altruist movement is that they are talking about profound social and political issues, with any and all politics completely and totally removed from it. It is liberal depoliticisation[1] driven to its ultimate conclusion. That's just why they are ineffective and wrong about everything, but that's also why they are popular among the tech elites that are giving millions to associated groups like MIRI[2]. They aren't going away, they are politically useful and convenient to very powerful people.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-politics

[2] https://intelligence.org/transparency/

Ummm, EY literally has a semi-permanent office in Lighthouse (at least until recently) and routinely blocks people on Twitter as a matter of course.

This is an interesting idea (phenomenon?):

> A purity spiral is a theory which argues for the existence of a form of groupthink in which it becomes more beneficial to hold certain views than to not hold them, and more extreme views are rewarded while expressing doubt, nuance, or moderation is punished (a process sometimes called "moral outbidding").[1] It is argued that this feedback loop leads to members competing to demonstrate the zealotry or purity of their views.[2][3]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purity_spiral

Is he known publicly for some other reason?

So to the point of the article, rationalist cults are common because Rationalists are irrational people (like all people) who (unlike most people) are blinded to their own irrationality by their overinflated egos. They can "reason" themselves into all manner of convoluted pretzels and lack the humility to admit they went off the deep end.

It was a while ago, but take the infamous story of the 2006 rape case in Duke University. If you check out coverage of that case, you get the impression every member of faculty that joined in the hysteria was from some humanities department, including philosophy. And quite a few of them refused to change their mind even as the prosecuting attorney was being charged with misconduct. Compare that to Socrates' behavior during the trial of the admirals in 406 BC.

Meanwhile, whatever meager resistence was faced by that group seems to have come from economists, natural scientist or legal scholars.

I wouldn't blame people for refusing to study in a humanities department where they can't tell right from wrong.

It’s not from a rational basis, but from being bombarded with fear from every rectangle in my house, and the houses of my entire community

Which is to say that I don't think just dooming is going on. Especially, the belief in AGI doom has a lot of plausible arguments in its favor. I happen not to believe in it but as a belief system it is more similar to a belief in global warming than to a belief in the raptures.

The "threat of AI" they're claiming validates rationalism doesn't exist. These loons were the reason Google sat on their LLMs and made their image models only draw pictures of robots, because of the supposed "threat" of AI. Now everyone can run models way better on their own laptops and the sky hasn't fallen, there hasn't even been mass unemployment or anything. Not even the weakest version of this belief has proven true. AI is very friendly, even.

And masks? How many graphs of cases/day with mask mandate transitions overlayed are required before people realize masks did nothing? Whole countries went from nearly nobody wearing them, to everyone wearing them, overnight, and COVID cases/day didn't even notice. You can't look at a case graph and see where the rules changed. Which makes sense because SARS-CoV-2 is aerosolized and can enter through the masks, around the masks, when masks are removed and even through the eyeballs.

Seems like rationalists in the end have managed to be correct about nothing. What a disappointment.

After reading a warning from a rationalist blog, I posted a lot about COVID news to another forum and others there gave me credit for giving the heads-up that it was a Big Deal and not just another thing in the news. (Not sure it made all that much difference, though?)

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7569573/

https://aiascendant.substack.com/p/extropias-children-chapte...

Here's a counter-piece on David Gerard and his portrayal of LessWrong and Effective Altruism: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...

The main point is that it isn't so much the cult (leader) so much as the victims being in a vulnerable mental state getting exploited.

Who would ever maintain power when removed from their community? You mean to say they base their identity on the awareness of the power they possess within a certain group?