Why go to all the trouble of branding yourself as "rational" if you're just going to reinvent religion?

Nice job summarizing the lore in only 19 minutes (I assume this post was aimed at providing full context to people just joining or at least relatively new to tracking all this... stuff).

Some snarky comments, not because it wasn't a good summary that should have included them (all the asides you could add could easily double the length and leave a casual listener/reader more confused), but because I think they are funny ~~and I need to vent~~

You’ll see him quoted in the press as an “AI researcher” or similar.

Or decision theorist! With an entire one decision theory paper that he didn't bother getting through peer review because the reviewers wanted, like actual context, and an actual decision theory and not just hand waves at paradoxes on the fringes of decision theory.

What Yudkowsky actually does is write blog posts.

He also writes fanfiction!

I’m not even getting to the Harry Potter fanfic, the cult of Ziz, or Roko’s basilisk today!

Yeah this rabbit hole is deep.

The goal of LessWrong rationality is so Eliezer Yudkowsky can live forever as an emulated human mind running on the future superintelligent AI god computer, to end death itself.

Yeah in hindsight the large number of ex-Christians it attracts makes sense.

And a lot of Yudkowsky’s despair is that his most devoted acolytes heard his warnings “don’t build the AI Torment Nexus, you idiots” and they all went off to start companies building the AI Torment Nexus.

He wrote a lot of blog posts about how smart and powerful the Torment Nexus would be, and how we really need to build the Anti-Torment Nexus, so if he had proper skepticism of Silicon Valley and Startup/VC Culture, he really should have seen this coming

There was also a huge controversy in Effective Altruism last year when half the Effective Altruists were shocked to discover the other half were turbo-racists who’d invited literal neo-Nazis to Effective Altruism conferences. The pro-racism faction won.

I was mildly pleasantly surprised to see there was a solid half pushing back in the comments in the response to the first manifest, but it looks like the anti-racism faction didn't get any traction to change anything and the second manifest conference was just as bad or worse.

Text version just came up - excellent read as usual.

A lot of Yudkowsky’s despair is that his most devoted acolytes heard his warnings “don’t build the AI Torment Nexus, you idiots” and they all went off to start companies building the AI Torment Nexus.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

While we’re talking about what rationalists actually believe, I’d be remiss not to mention one deeply unpleasant thing about the rationalist subculture: they are really, really into race and IQ theories and scientific racism. Overwhelmingly.

Considering the whole thing's deeply fucking steeped in fascism, I'm not shocked.