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?
A subculture many of his readers are familiar with is pick-up artistry. It was founded by a few charismatic obsessed dudes, who teach how to make outsiders give you want you want, and who often have ways of making money from their disciples which are not open and straightforward (whether advertising expensive seminars with dubious benefits, or funneling them into get-rich-quick schemes and get-hot-quickly schemes). PUA did not have a founding generation of unworldly geeks followed by superficial sociopaths, and the big egos don’t just fleece the casual fans but people outside the subculture.
People tell me that the California counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s had a strong entrepreneurial side.
entire rationalist project is arguably get-smart-quick scheme
A get-smart-quick scheme, with an absurd amount of occult cargo-culting of scientific discourse.
Pua is a good example, as their ur text, the game already shows how predatory towards men it got, but they seem to have been annoyed tha the ‘sociopath’ dared to use their methods and fellow men and not just women. And that is if we see Strauss as a geek, and not a ‘sociopath’ (a thing he feared iirc when he revealed he was a journalist).