> Do you have a sense of what shapes this? There are so many people in that orbit whose writing I find both exhausting and suspect.

I'm not remotely from that scene, and I only really discovered it was a "scene" a few years ago, having managed to live out quite a nice life, even in tech circles here in London, without knowing this type of thing existed.

So, my take might be extremely wrong, but also, extremely simple:

They are just humans being human. Human's love an in-group. It starts at the play ground in school. Making in-group talk, making fun of out-group people. In that scene, in-group and out-group swap daily. Anyway, this just continues on throughout life, no-one is really immune. People see the LessWrong crowd ("scene") and are seduced by it, and signal that they are in that group by adopting the same language. This just perpetuates.