EFFORTPOST Impassionata Returns: A Not Very Thorough Continuation of the SFBA Rationalist Cult Coverage

@GatanKot's coverage of the SFBA Rationalist Cult pulled me back in, I've had this draft sitting around for a while. The truth is it's not very good, but neither is this place.

Far from being a place where rightoids are subjected to the ridicule they deserve, this continues to be full of increasingly weak denialism about the fascism of Trump. You all really are this stupid, aren't you? The dude spent the entire debate in scare tactics about immigrants. The xenophobia is so apparent.

Y'all seem to think that Democrats don't have policies on immigration but there are ways to debate immigration without centering fear and alarm. It's a panicked approach for Trump because Trump knows he's a weak candidate.

Hence his desperation around Project 2025. What, you think that because Project 2025 doesn't contain passages from Mein Kampf that the concern over it isn't sane? It's the Christian theocracy in agenda form.

So you're all pointing at the leftists freaking out about the theocracy that Republicans definitely want to instate. That Trump is definitely tied to, in fact when he's tried to distance himself from it that's caused problems for him! Hilarious.

Point is that the intelligent people have moved on. I don't like to write here. I'm not up to the task of abusing the rightoids anymore.

It's just that @TracingWoodgrains wrote an article that was _really bad_. I'm not saying it couldn't have been a good article, but it definitely was evidence of a person broken by being online.

Trace is in denial that he's still an SFBA Rationalist Cultist even as he performs a propagandistic action protecting the SFBA Rationalist Cult from one of its more successful detractors. The only audience for Trace's article is Rationalists. That's it. That's how insular Trace is, and how far he has fallen into mediocrity.

Woke Derangement Syndrome

Scott Alexander got really broken, mentally, by the woke moral panic of the mid 2010s. In combination with his face blindness which seems to have rendered him unable to smell the fascism, he managed to drag the SFBA Rationalist greater cult complex to this political zone where it became obligatory and necessary to platform white supremacists and fascists.

So you have this xenophobic impulse and this violent rhetoric and this authoritarian strongman. And Scott Alexander's take was: this isn't fascism because Trump took a photo op with a taco.

That's how easily duped these people are.

But I think it's worse than that. It's well known that Scott Alexander deliberately sought a neoreactionary audience. As a consequence /r/slatestarcodex's culture war threads were full of white supremacists and fascists.

You can draw a straight line from this decision to TracingWoodgrains absurd belief that the amount of white supremacists and fascists he experiences is 'about normal.' These people don't have a good barometer for how many racists is normal. They're not intelligent, they just LARP intelligence.

I mean you have Scott Alexander literally moaning about how Scientific Journals are bad and dumb and stupid even as his blog is the form and function of a journal: he accepts papers in his book review feature. LessWrong is deliberately a scientific journal.

But they think they're better than humans. They have ingrained the belief in their superiority so thoroughly that they believe they are humble because they claim to value criticism.

And they recreate the same normal people social forms but worse. Scott's substack is worse as a scientific journal because it's filled with smug superior dipshit cult thinking.

This is just a draft, and not a good one. It's too sprawling. I'm annoyed by the wasted potential TracingWoodgrains represents.

In a time where the man who lied his way to sending a mob at the capital on January 6th in an obvious coup attempt is running for president again, TracingWoodgrains is: attacking a defunct former wikipedia editor? Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

I'm not saying the piece on Girard couldn't be a good one, but it definitely isn't.

So Scott Alexander has recently been falling apart.

There was an article, I'm too darn annoyed to track it down, where Scott Alexander writes about 'part therapy' and his conclusion is roughly: isn't it good that we banished the demons?

But the whole point of parts therapy is that in this crucial way the demons remain.

Scott Alexander's reaction to fascism is pretty precisely this denial.

So Scott's right that like, we shouldn't teach kids that demons are responsible for their emotional problems. But the limitations of 'objective' rationality are numerous. (How does a cult function if it necessarily believes that it and it alone is capable of objective thought? It doesn't.)

This is the SFBA Rationalist Cult's tic: if it can't understand something, it decides it's stupid and doesn't exist.

The stupidity of people still occurs.

Trumpism is Fascism.

Witness:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/nobody-can-make-you-feel-genetically

I think the best conclusion from this result is just to stop caring about these kinds of polls. Any poll whose outcome can change by more than an order of magnitude based on the respondents' politics or statistical knowledge isn't a valid guide to the frequency of real-world events.

Scott Alexander's encounter with irrational people believing irrational things is: just ignore the irrational people believing irrational things.  This is how Scott Alexander ended up in a cult of irrational people believing irrational things while also believing in the superiority of their cult.

THE REEEEEAAL MEAT.

Following the continued bickering over the cultish nature of EA, Scott wrote this sad, sad piece. If you have a sensitive stomach or are allergic to people embarrassing themselves, please avert your eyes for the rest of the essay.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-stone-on-ea

EA hasn't always been the best at avoiding this failure mode, but at least we manage to outdo our critics.

I don't believe that this has been demonstrated.

One of the first things intelligent people should learn is that they don't get to decide they weren't caught in a superiority complex.

That the SFBA Rationalist Cult is in denial of the superiority complex it has is really, really funny.  They have an entire course of apologetics about how no, they're not superior to anyone, they just are better than everyone at charitable giving.

Stone is repeating one of the most common critiques of EA as if it's his own invention, without checking the long literature of people discussing it and coming up with responses to it.

Hear the stuck pig squeal.

1: It's actually very easy to define effective altruism in a way that separates it from universally-held beliefs.

For example (warning: I'm just mouthing off here, not citing some universally-recognized Constitution EA Of Principles):

This is all any SFBA Rationalist Cultist does (Trace just mouthed off about a defunct wikipedia editor).

1. Aim to donate some fixed and considered amount of your income (traditionally 10%) to charity, or get a job in a charitable field.

This is just normal altruism.

2. Think really hard about what charities are most important, using something like consequentialist reasoning (where eg donating to a fancy college endowment seems less good than saving the lives of starving children). Treat this problem with the level of seriousness that people use when they really care about something, like a hedge fundie deciding what stocks to buy, or a basketball coach making a draft pick. Preferably do some napkin math, just like the hedge fundie and basketball coach would. Check with other people to see if your assessments agree.

This is just normal altruism.  It's only superior to normal altruism if you believe that your cult is in some way superior in reasoning power to normal people, and your cult isn't, specifically because your cult believes it is superior in reasoning power to normal people.

3. ACTUALLY DO THESE THINGS! DON'T JUST WRITE ESSAYS SAYING THEY'RE "OBVIOUS" BUT THEN NOT DO THEM!

I think less than a tenth of people do (1), less than a tenth of those people do (2), and less than a tenth of people who would hypothetically endorse both of those get to (3). I think most of the people who do all three of these would self-identify as effective altruists (maybe adjusted for EA being too small to fully capture any demographic?) and most of the people who don't, wouldn't.

This is absurd stupid elitism and Scott Alexander should feel deeply embarrassed for having written it.  This is the worst paragraph where the elitism of the altruism branch of the SFBA Rationalist Cult is most evident.  They really believe this.  They really believe that they're more giving than other religions with tithing, more thoughtful about how they give than 'normal' people (and here's the contradiction that will break their robot brains: do they believe they're superior to normal people?  If so, that's the cult dynamic.  If not, then how did Scott Alexander come to write this absurd paragraph?), and better at following through with giving than a religion which gathers in person attendance.

The midwits caught preening, called out on their preening, double down that it's not preening because it's just being "rational."  It's just "correct" (and they have the math to prove it) to believe that the SFBA Rationalist Cult is superior at giving.

Step 2 is the interesting one. It might not fully capture what I mean: if someone tries to do the math, but values all foreigners' lives at zero, maybe that's so wide a gulf that they don't belong in the same group. But otherwise I'm pretty ecumenical about "as long as you're trying" […]

This is where the SFBA Rationalist Cult is actually worse than normal altruism because they believe in magical ritual math which makes them superior but actually just gives them braindead bizarre beliefs.

2: Part of the role of EA is as a social technology for getting you to do the thing that everyone says they want to do in principle.

"We know we're a cult but we call it a social technology to obscure it."

I talk a big talk about donating to charity. But I probably wouldn't do it much if I hadn't taken the Giving What We Can pledge (a vow to give 10% of your income per year) all those years ago. It never feels like the right time. There's always something else I need the money for. Sometimes I get unexpected windfalls, donate them to charity while expecting to also make my usual end of year donation, and then - having fulfilled the letter of my pledge - come up with an excuse not to make my usual end-of-year donation too.

They think they're atheists, but this is what they need to mimic a fraction of religion's power.

Cause evaluation works the same way. Every year, I feel bad free-riding off GiveWell. I tell myself I'm going to really look into charities, find the niche underexplored ones that are neglected even by other EAs. Every year (except when I announce ACX Grants and can't get out of it), I remember on December 27th that I haven't done any of that yet, grumble, and give to whoever GiveWell puts first (or sometimes EA Funds).

And I'm a terrible vegetarian. If there's meat in front of me, I'll eat it. Luckily I've cultivated an EA friend group full of vegetarians and pescetarians, and they usually don't place meat in front of me. My friends will cook me delicious Swedish meatballs made with Impossible Burger, or tell me where to find the best fake turkey for Thanksgiving (it's Quorn Meatless Roast). And the Good Food Institute (an EA-supported charity) helps ensure I get ever tastier fake meat every year.

"I benefit from my religious cult, but it's not a cult, nor a religion, but it is better than religion."

Everyone says they want to be a good person and donate to charity and do the right thing. EAs say this too. But nobody stumbles into it by accident. You have to seek out the social technology, then use it.

"If I use the term 'social technology' to disguise the fact that the SFBA Rationalist Cult is a cult, I can still believe that I'm superior to normal people and not in a cult."

I think this is the role of the wider community - as a sort of Alcoholics Anonymous, giving people a structure that makes doing the right thing easier than not doing it. Lots of alcoholics want to quit in principle, but only some join AA. I think there's a similar level of difference between someone who vaguely endorses the idea of giving to charity, and someone who commits to a particular toolbox of social technology to make it happen.

One of the common criticisms of AA is that it is cultlike??

(I admit other groups have their own toolboxes of social technology to encourage doing good, including religions and political groups. Any group with any toolbox has earned the right to call themselves meaningfully distinct from the masses of vague-endorsers).

But no group can claim a monopoly on being effective altruists unless they're arrogant smug dipshit frauds.

Shut the frick up Scott.  The difference between a cult and a religion is roughly that a religion is formalized as a religion (its dogma, doctrine, and/or culture are cognizant of the nature of the "soCiAl tEcHnOLogY" as a religion) and a cult has pathological behavior, patterns within it which are harmful to the cult members and others.

Factors like

• A persistent arrogance

• An entire literature of denialism about that arrogance

• Failure to believe in obviously true things about the world (Trumpism is Fascism and Scott, you're the reason your cult is out of sync with educated people about this!)

If you missed the fascism, it's not too late to be the people to notice the fascism.

If Trump is such a fascist, surely the system will handle him, they said smugly.

You are the system. You are the system of nihilism and playing pretend.

I'm tired of pretending the boomers aren't running this country into the ground. Biden shouldn't run. Biden should execute Trump and withdraw from the race. Yes, execute him: the Supreme Court ruled that Biden has immunity and Trump is an existential threat to our government.

You frickers

The people who piss me off here are those who want to pretend that politics doesn't matter, that nothing matters. Your nihilism is weak. Man up frickers. You've helped create this situation by carrying water for Trump. You laugh at him because he reifies your belief that politics is a joke. You are the ones who make your politics a joke. Stop forcing us to live in your clown world.

Man the frick up.

And ditch Trump.

Call it fascism. Because that is what it is. It's fascism. It's a xenophobic movement glorifying violence, attacking journ*lism, promoting an authoritarian strongman, creating the narrative that it is just and necessary to seize power by any means necessary.

Trump declared war on the constitution on January 6th. He's a treasonous traitor and deserves death. It's not more complicated than that, and it will never be more complicated than that.

Trump is an Enemy of the United States of America.