The LW/CFAR/MIRI crowd has gone full r-slur. Novels are typed, but nothing is said.

holy shit you're right this is part of why I came here, to dish on the SFBA Rationalists.

This is what happens when sorcerers get out of control. I'm not even sure how much I'm joking with that. The power to ensorcel is baked into our genome. You believe whatever the authority believes. People moved their authorities online into mad individuals writing on message boards. This is Good Actually because it frees us of the usual authorities of the State, but Bad when it leads to total kooks becoming mainstream. The lolz, they are being had, and they will continue until morale improves.

Point is that these people formed a cult. One of the first truly distributed cults, by my measure.

A guy writes out his sketches of reality, an amateur philosophy. Others who didn't have access to books where these ideas had already been written down did have access to the Internet. So this guy gets a following of people for whom he has defined their relationship to reality.

Now I tell you this is the key part: the founder did not go to college and his feelings of inadequacy around this have everything to do with how he has perceived as well as every mistake he has made. The Internet's First Real Cult Leader isn't enough for this guy, he has to prove those fools at the Academy wrong, he's that kinda dingbat kook. This is a pseudo-intellectual, who founded a cult mostly joined by pseudo-intellectuals. Mensa without the entrance exam. See if you can guess what happens next.

I bet your guess wasn't: this guy gets bit by one of the bad spirits, the AI-is-coming-to-kill-us spirit. (Summoning this spirit is not for the faint of heart and leads to the Negative Plane Initiation, if you're lucky. The worst cases live in psych textbooks as people who just stopped moving, which is why I think jaded nihilist-posting, posing around pretending you think nothing matters, is so wimpy.)

So he turns his entire cult on this premise that he is going to stop evil AI from being developed, and in this he entered into the messianic phase of the human spirit. People here were admiring a Christ Aspirant the other day; the general idea is the same, but the Christ myth leads to a different branch of the spiritual relationships with the Dasein. Christ Aspirants are malfunctioning. Christ Consciousness is, at best, a spiritual calling and at worst a pile of narcissistic grandiose delusions. (There exist stable individuals who possess Christ Consciousness, but not many.)

I call them the SFBA Rationalists because they were based in the San Francisco Bay Area, because history is cyclical, because in the 60s there were a round of cults headed by charismatic men who took on multiple lovers. Just shit-tons of minor cults, scattered out there.

What did they do? They looked at the world of man in horror, decided to break free, formed cults, fricked their brains out and lived in vans, and then more or less got jobs and took the contract the machine offers: do work and live comfortably. (This was easier to do in the 60s-80s.)

MIRI sounds on the level. But they are the corporate-corporeal form of the cult founded by this would-be messiah. This is the third post about this cult.

This cult had the quality that many of its members entered with full-throated endorsement into the polyamorous lifestyle. Scott Alexander (if you don't know Scott Alexander, you must think of him as a prominent lieutenant to the founder, and I heard of those who unironically believed Scott Alexander to function as a Caliph) even bragged about how polyamory would be how things just would be in the future, and it was hard to imagine it any other way.

There are rumors about SFBA Rationalist parties. I believe them to be true, even though they are not from a very credible witness. You want to see the shattered remains of minds trying to make sense of what they saw... well, I examined their minds myself, and all I really know is: bad juju got out. It's easy to get people in a circle, have them share their assessment of their faults, shower them with acceptance and promises to make them better people, and get them to do anything you want them to do.

Again the key bit about how these people don't read books: these were people who experimented with their social structure without reading a book about it.

This is the third article coming out that alleges cult-like experimentation. The first was evidence of schizophrenia in the writer, talking about split minds and a 'duel of hemispheres.' The second dropped a few days ago and is referenced in this third one.

So to reiterate: this cult reached widespread acclaim, formed a brief community which mostly dispersed (former cult members call this the 'diaspora' and many of them lingered in Scott Alexander's enclaves until the racists Scott Alexander deliberately invited in because he was building an audience and numbers are good, right? Have I mentioned these people disdain the Academy?)

And this community formed a political forum., and in 2016 I entered that forum. I had seen the cult develop, but only poked at the sequences enough to get the general idea.

It's at this point that I enter the picture. Impassionata's fame, such as it is, is largely from, as far as I'm concerned, presenting a moderate liberal perspective, just disgustingly moderate. I didn't express my radical leftist opinions (such as they are, since nonviolence is pretty much baked into the equation, nothing turns people away more than violence--mostly my anti-capitalistic anti-authoritarian mindset), just the ones that I felt represented a reasonable middle.

Because having been read of history I knew that fascism was a dangerous sort of creeping threat. That it would appear benign at first, and the first people who cried in recognition would be derided as fools and wildmen, 'deranged.' So I pointed out all of the creeping tendrils of fascism.

Nothing convinced me that nerds need to get bullied more as much as posting in the Culture War threads.

My words fell on deaf ears. These were people who had a phobia of social justice, perhaps because they'd seen a psychopath up close and confused the predatory nature of such people as inherent to an ideology. (These people did not get liberal arts degrees, and it shows. Constantly. Liberal Arts degree is a path to the Standard Cowtools which are better than the homegrown shit spread by the SFBA Rationalists.)

See the theory people tend to be operating by is that there's two sides to politics, both of which are fake standins for corporate interests. In the 90s this was true, but our political situation has gotten more bitter and more bitter (Randall Munroe needs to update his timeline of Congress votes), and stuff actually happens. When the balance falls apart one side charges the capital and if you think that was a LARP then you have lost touch with reality and are LARPing at understanding politics. (At r/TheMotte, when the insurrection attempt took place, there were people genuinely asking what made this different from BLM burning down a police station. I'm sorry: if you have trouble understanding the difference, you may be neurodivergent. Symbolic violence, man.)

Because that's what the political forum bought: a LARP. If you participated there you were in a cool subset of the Internet where dodgy opinions weren't banned.

You know what was banned?

Calling out racism.

Or saying "Hey that adulation of Duterte seems fascistic."

Thus I ran into the mods.

After a while I started getting bullied, and I laughed, and said: let it be so.

And I wrote that banger of an essay about how white people can't dance.

The place, r/slatestarcodex's Culture Wars which evolved into r/TheMotte which is still linked to by Scott Alexander's old blog, is a pseudo-intellectual heck-hole and always was. Idiots affirming their own opinions and bullying anyone off who didn't agree with them.

There's an essay about the Cathedral by Marvin Goldfug or whatever, that's ripping off fricking Rush Limbaugh. Seriously. It's just a copy-paste of the arguments Rush Limbaugh used to make: the liberals have taken over our school and media. He just rebranded it and the frickers whose cult founder disdained post-high-school education were easy pickings for the nerdy white men who were scared of feminism and looking for answers.

These people are allergic to the Academy. Offered a choice between learning about leftist things and picking a reason the left is a horrible monstrosity out to get them personally, they pick wrong, and their ship of fools sailed away as TheMotte. Scott Alexander writes a substack now.

He wrote a satire about how--and I'm not sure if this is going to translate, but it's a joke, it's just deadpan--he wrote a '"""""satire"""""" about how Republicans should infuse their rhetoric with more understanding of class.

So that's where we're at. SFBA Rationalists become a cult whose political opinions were so bad they became a MENSA knockoff.

Now I go and read the article.