Thinking about how the arsing fuck to explain the rationalists to normal people - especially as they are now a loud public problem along multiple dimensions.
The problem is that it’s all deep in the weeds. Every part of it is “it can’t be that stupid, you must be explaining it wrong.”
With bitcoin, I have, over the years, simplified it to being a story of crooks and con men. The correct answer to “what is a blockchain and how does it work” is “it’s a way to move money around out of the sight of regulators” and maybe “so it’s for crooks and con men, and a small number of sincere libertarians” and don’t even talk about cryptography or technology.
I dunno what the one sentence explanation is of this shit.
“The purpose of LessWrong rationality is for Yudkowsky to live forever as an emulation running on the mind of the AI God” is completely true, is the purpose of the whole thing, and is also WTF.
Maybe that and “so he started what turned into a cult and a series of cults”? At this point I’m piling up the absurdities again.
The Behind The Bastards approach to all these guys has been “wow these guys are all so wacky haha and also they’re evil.”
How would you first approach explaining this shit past “it can’t be that stupid, you must be explaining it wrong”?
[also posted in sneer classic]
I usually say the following. I’m paraphrasing a spiel I have delivered in person several times and which seems to get things across.
'there’s a kind of decentralized cult called rationalism. they worship rational thinking, have lots of little rituals that are supposed to invoke more rational thinking, and spend a lot of time discussing their versions of angels and demons, which they conceive of as all powerful ai beings.
rationalists aren’t really interested in experiments or evidence, because they want to figure everything out with pure reasoning. they consider themselves experts on anything they’ve thought really hard about. they come up with a lot of apocalypse predictions and theories about race mingling.
silicon valley is saturated with rationalists. most of the people with a lot of money are not rationalists. but VCs and such find rationalists very useful, because they’re malleable and will claim with sincerity to be experts on any topic. for example, when AI companies claim to be inventing really intelligent beings, the people they put forward as supporting these claims are rationalists.’
It’s eugenics but as a religious cult for reactionaries
Yud is that creepy nerd from your middle school who wrote disturbing fan fiction, but it wasn’t just a phase and now he has the aforementioned cult
I’m trying to imagine how a John Oliver sketch would introduce them. “The kind of nerds who make you think the jocks in '80s movies had a reasonable point got together and sold ‘science’ and ‘rational thinking’ as self-help, without truly understanding either, and it got very culty.”
I usually go with “Scientology for the 21st century”. That for most gives just “weird cult”, which is close enough for most people.
For those that are into weird cults you get questions about Xenu and such, and can answer “No they are not into Xenu, instead they want to build their god. Out of chatbots”. And so on. If they are interested in weird cult shit, and have already accepted that we are talking about weird cults the weirdness isn’t a problem. If not, it stops at “Scientology for the 21st century”.
A few years ago an article by gwern hit the first page of hackernews and idlewords comments do a good job of explaining everything wrong with the rationalist mindset.
Those comments are tight, but really the problem with trying to explain any of this to laypeople isn’t exposing how wrong it is. The hard part is making any sense of it.
Like if I told you Donald Trump has connections with a cult that believes grandmothers are a species of raspberry, whose goal is turning Denmark into cheese and oh, a splinter group of theirs just murdered a police officer. That will just raise more questions than it answers. How the hell did they come to believe that? Why would anyone want that? And then I have to choose between looking like a loony conspiracy theorist, doing an impromptu lecture or just having to decide you actually probably don’t want to know.
