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Comment by vinkelhake | Hacker News Reader

I'm not saying there aren't weird things going on, but this article sure does a lot of guilt-by-association. We're putting neoreactionaries, polyamorous rationalists, doomsday AI researchers and the Zizians in one big web.

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As someone on the periphery looking in, it's because they make up a large web. Its an extended community that shares a lot of people between its many arms. There are also some shared values between all these people, even at the very extended edges. For example, they share a superiority complex. From my experience, most of these people believe that they see further or know more because they believe in certain things that are, on their face, unintuitive. I don't want to pass more judgement than to say, having members believe contradictory or outright falsehoods is a thing that cults do. I'm not saying this is a cult because I haven't seriously sat down and thought about it but that is reminiscent of something cults do.

Read HPMOR. Unlike what I thought it might be, the protagonist does not solve problems through pointing out logical fallacies or something. Harry Potter is a straight-up superhero who is infinitely smarter and more talented than anyone around him. It's not so much rationality as a narcissistic fantasy that goes on for hundreds (thousands?) of pages.

Even though I had been well-disposed to rationalism and read HPMOR to learn more, I could not take Yudkowsky seriously in any way after I gave up halfway through.

Had a similar experience trying to read that. You know you meet or have to work with people like that in your life and hopefully you use those experiences to remind yourself what kind of person you don't want to be.

This is how the internet works now. There are only two clubs, and if you refuse to be associated with either one then someone will helpfully come along and assign a group for you.

It's a big tent community, in part because these people spend so much time entertaining wild, speculative hypotheticals, which in the process allows some of these particularly toxic ideas to spread.

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