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Comment by phillipcarter | Hacker News Reader

I've come to learn that a lot of the rationalist crowd are really just fanfiction authors. That's fine - people should be able to do that - but I don't like how they're given the limelight on things that they generally have little expertise and hands-on knowledge with. I want to like them and want to have them engaged in discourse, but I find them so insufferable.

Not to mention the sub-crowd of rationalists that is weirdly into eugenics. I wish the rest of the rationalist community would disown them loudly.

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The "rationalists" are more like a strange AI cult than a scientific or philosophical program. (I always put "rationalist" in quotes when referring to this group of people, because based on the things these people believe, it's a total misnomer.) At this point they're not even really trying to hide it anymore, with their prophet, Eliezer Yudkowsky, wailing in the wilderness about the imminent end of humanity. We've seen similar eschatological belief systems in recent history and they don't usually end well.

> I always put "rationalist" in quotes when referring to this group of people, because based on the things these people believe

I always found it amusing that Roko's Basilisk[1], which was incepted in the LessWrong forum, was just a roundabout way of adding eternal damnation of your "soul" (or rather, the recreation of your consciousness) to the already hilariously pseudo-religious way of treating a potential AGI.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk

(I know that Roko's Balisisk was not widely accepted and I don't want to paint all LessWrong users with the same brush here, but I still think it's a quaint example of where supposed "rationality" can take you.)

Reminds me of the reasonabilists from Parks and Rec

> The Reasonabilists named themselves because they believe if people criticize them, it'll seem like they are attacking something reasonable.

I'm not sure if it's coincidental and ironic or entirely intended by you, but I found it funny that my introduction to this crowd was a literal fanfiction written by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

I don't want to speak for GP, but I doubt it's coincidental. Many if not most people's first exposure to "rationalism" was via Yudkowsky's Harry Potter fanfic. There's a pretty decent rundown of rationalism's history in Extropia's Children [1].

[1] https://aiascendant.substack.com/p/extropias-children-chapte...

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