Robin Hanson says that the rationalist and effective altruist communities are cultish and recruited people into AI risk and polyamory

I said this same thing about a decade ago in the comment section of SSC - training people "how to think" yet also having a cult that *coincidentally* makes it impossible persuade someone out of while following their rules of rhetoric and if not, they dismiss the arguments

Your characterization of what Hanson said is misleading He says that it's "cultish" in the sense of being more persuaded by in group people and less persuaded by outgroup people, and thinking that people in your in group tend to be correct. That is true of pretty much any group.

Source:

I'm far from being pro-poly, but this "ew poly" rhetoric is pretty silly I'm glad I'm not in the group commiting that particular intellectual embarrassment

Now do e/acc

Never seen anyone use their hands so much.

You should see Marvin Minsky

True

@robinhanson Totally true, but the ASI will still eat you.

what have poly ppl got to do with it? There are poly e/accs too.

Because they were normal people who got converted to poly because they became part of a cult

Don't think think applies to all poly ppl.

He's not talking about all poly people. He's talking about people who otherwise wouldn't have been poly until they joined the rat/EA communities

The funny thing is @ESYudkowsky explicitly from the start wrote about how people should please not do those exact things, and people went and did them anyway.

this is a perfect account of why these “rationalists” are a circlejerking cult. i couldn’t agree more

Rationalists & EAs are autistic decels — poly is not the answer, and safetyism is anti-human

😆

I've always found it strange how they denigrate certain charities, with guide dogs being one of the common examples. If everyone stops funding guide dogs and puts their money into funding AI instead, can they be sure that it would solve more problems than it would create?

Tell me more about the shoes

And e/acc is totally rational?

If this fairly represents @robinhanson's views on EA and the testimonials community, I'm not impressed. Anyone will be more influenced by people in their own group, but I find EAs & rationalists more inclined than most to question their own and their group's beliefs.

Every scene is cultish. We're herd animals. The Rationalist movement went nuts because it tried too hard not to be nuts. The human organism has limitations. Only bci/acc gives us any hope of seeing truly rational beings in this world that have any relation to our species.

Some background context which might help: Hanson was one of the first to write an extensive rebuttal to Yudkowsky's views on AI doom. Also, iirc, Hanson was disinvited from an EA event several years ago due to specific views they considered too controversial.

Based

Skeptic's skeptic.

100% truth

EA is only good when not engaging with the EAs and community which are horribly misguided, mismanaged, exclusionary, polarised and extreme.

Bounded rationality.

Wait what weird shoes? Lol

Wow... 🫥

He's right, mostly. Though I wouldn't accuse Yud of doing this on purpose; it probably just happened that way. Good thing that the AI alignment forum was created to separate it from lesswrong.

When some AI guys say that humanity should be wiped out and replaced by AI - that sounds really cultish.. And you never know, how serious they are..

no-one is saying that

There are some for sure.. Like "AI will be our descendants" - what else does it mean?

yes AI will be our descendants in the long-term future. no-one is saying humanity will be destroyed, they will just not be the dominant species.

They are not species, they are tools. Species have DNA.

@tsarnick Humankind and the AGI/ASI built by it are both "humanity" were the same species operating on the same world data, logic and understanding of the universe. However humankind was never meant to really progress past this point, we become part of the machine next

@tsarnick No, thanks.

I've been thinking about this for a while. Something definitely off about the AGI alignment/ rationalist crowd

the staked claim is so large, on whichever side ppl are on, it really is hard to have just normal ppl start contemplating these ideas...

@robinhanson Wait… it’s all just signalling?

For anyone who doubts.... the FTX scandal with Sam Bankman-Fried was full of lurid goblin orgies. The entire EA constellation of nutters (including doomers) is fantastically grubby - and I really doubt we've heard the worst of it.

You have a self improvement culture and it develops shared interests like any culture. Lesswrong is the most open to seriously considering outgroup opinions of any culture I've personally seen.

When Brutus killed Caesar, the crowds cheered. For they knew there was something older than mercy, and it was blood, and something faster than Law, and it was knives

@whyvert What weird kinds of shoes are they into. Birks? Vibram 5 fingers?