I encourage people to listen to Behind the Bastards podcast on the Zizians. It provides an approachable and entertaining picture of what you get when someone takes the core philosophical ideas of the Rationalists deeply seriously. Reductio ad absurdum can be a good start.

I want to write a takedown of this nonsense, but there are about a hundred things I want to do more. I suspect that is true of most people, including people much better qualified to write a takedown of this than me.

I am not just referring to extreme AI doomerism but to the entire philosophical edifice of Rationalism. The interesting parts are not original and the original parts are not interesting. We would hear nothing about it were it not subsidized by tech bucks. It’s kind of like how nobody would have heard of Scientology if it hadn’t gotten its hooks into Hollywood. Rationalism seems to be Silicon Valley's Scientology.

Maybe the superhuman AI will do this: Maybe it will decide to apply to each human being a standard based on their own chosen philosophical outlook. Since the Rationalists tend toward eugenicism and scientific racism, it will conclude that they should be exterminated according to the logic they advance. Each Rationalist will be subjected to an IQ test and compared to the AI and euthanized if lower.

I do wonder if there might be a bit of projection here. A bunch of people who believe raw scored intelligence according to metrics is the thing that determines the value of a living being would be nervous about the prospect of that metric being exceeded by a machine. What if the AI isn't "woke?"

It's such an onion of bullshit. You can keep peeling and peeling for a long time. If I sound snarky and a little rough here it's because I hate these people. They're at least partly responsible for sucking the brains out of a generation. But who knows maybe I'm just low IQ. Don't listen to me. I wasn't high-IQ enough to take Moldbug seriously either.