Orange Site notices the SFBA Rationalist Cult

ahahahahahahahahaha

oguz-ismail 3 hours ago | prev | next [–]

How does a 27-year-old fail to kill an 80-year-old with a samurai sword?

tibbetts 3 hours ago | parent | next [–]

Probably by trying to do it from first principles.

It might be time for me to take my assorted SFBA Rationalist Cult writing and put them on a blog. I'd have done it already but the goddarn fascism just keeps on marching onwards.

Aurornis 3 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [–]

Weird to see a community I followed show up so close to home and negatively like this.

I had some coworkers who were really into LessWrong and rationality. I thought it was fun to read some of the selected writings they would share, but I always felt that online rationalist communities collected a lot of people with reactionary, fascist, misogynistic, and far-right tendencies. There's a heavily sanitized version of rationality and EA that gets presented online with only the highlights, but there's a lot more out there in the fringes that is really weird.

For example, many know about Roko's Basilisk as a thought exercise and much has been written about it, but fewer know that Roko has been writing misogynistic rants on Twitter and claiming things like having women in the workforce is "very negative" for GDP.

The Slate Star Codex subreddit was a home for rationalists on Reddit, but they had so many problems with culture war topics that they banned discussion of them. The users forked off and created "The Motte" which is a bit of a cesspool dressed up with rationalist prose. Even the SlateStarCodex subreddit has become so toxic that I had to unsubscribe. Many of the posts and comments on women or dating were becoming indistinguishable from incel communities other than the rationalist prose style.

Even the real-world rationalist and EA communities aren't immune, with several high profile sexual misconduct scandals making the news in recent years.

It's a weird space. It felt like a fun internet philosophy community when my coworkers introduced it years ago, but the longer I've observed it the more I've realized it attracts and accepts a lot of people whose goals aren't aligned with objectively "make the world better" as long as they can write their prose in the rationalist style. It's been strange to observe.

Of course, at every turn people will argue that the bad actors are not true rationalists, but I've seen enough from these communities to know that they don't really discriminate much until issues boil over into the news.