People connected to LessWrong and the Bay Area surveillance industry often cite David Chapman’s “Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths in Subculture Evolution” to understand why their subcultures keep getting taken over by jerks. Chapman is a Buddhist mystic who seems rationalist-curious. Some people use the term postrationalist.
Have you noticed that Chapman presents the founders of nerdy subcultures as innocent nerds being pushed around by the mean suits? But today we know that the founders of Longtermism and LessWrong all had ulterior motives: Scott Alexander and Nick Bostrom were into race pseudoscience, and Yudkowsky had his kinks (and was also into eugenics and Libertarianism). HPMOR teaches that intelligence is the measure of human worth, and the use of intelligence is to manipulate people. Mollie Gleiberman makes a strong argument that “bednet” effective altruism with short-term measurable goals was always meant as an outer doctrine to prepare people to hear the inner doctrine about how building God and expanding across the Universe would be the most effective altruism of all. And there were all the issues within LessWrong and Effective Altruism around substance use, abuse of underpaid employees, and bosses who felt entitled to hit on subordinates. A '60s rocker might have been cheated by his record label, but that does not get him off the hook for crashing a car while high on nose candy and deep inside a groupie.
I don’t know whether Chapman was naive or creating a smokescreen. Had he ever met the thinkers he admired in person?
I regret to inform you: is*
Its become more openly right wing since my time. Masks off and all that.
I ran across it when it was still pitching “cozy twitter”, but rapidly also saw that a lot of that was driven by some of the homesteader and natalist types. then after a few rounds of looking into some histories and bigger posters, started backing away… can imagine it’s more mask-off now
It was a fascinating awakening to see that all the most annoying and vaguely sinister tweeters I’d chanced upon over the years (eigenrobot, aella, 0 hp lovecraft, st rev, those gross milady shitheads, so so many people with “void” in their screenname or some shit) were all part of the same stupid club. I’m glad they’ve made it so easy to dismiss them en masse.
they were on bluesky in the early days, recruited by the rationalists and neoreactionaries at bsky corp
the queer shitposters drove them the fuck off
the TPOTters were most put out that nobody accepted “oh no i’m not a nazi it’s just my friend is” as an excuse