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that's extremely unfair! some of them are incels

because nobody else will

oh that’s why they’re all miserable and want all life to end

Interesting definition.

This is literally the least surprising part of this reveal

Oh, I thought it was because they all get off on the idea of AI fucking them.

It's always nerdasses who didn't get laid until their early 30s, so now it's just this army of "yeaah wer havin SHEX now, what do you think bout dat? We're some crazy LIBERTINES now with the ~office bacchanal~, bro" I could not have sex for 10 years & still be less of a virgin, it's pretty crazy

Are they all adults?

Small wonder, seeing J. K. Rowling is a liberal centrist and thus out to cling to the status quo like a desperate limpet. www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxUE...

I've been thinking about this article since it came out. Nobody knew who these weirdos were but I DID. harpers.org/archive/2015...

I poked around the site a bit around the same time and there were these dumb “experiments” where one genius would pose as an ai and talk another genius into letting it out of the box. The ai was always successful and they wouldn’t release any specifics out of fear that I guess future ais could 1/2

OOOOH, *that* fanfic. The one I thought was a good read when it first started but went off the rails after like 50 chapters

I fought my way through a few chapters and it was the most smug, self-congratulatory fiction of any kind I've ever read.

This is six times longer than any book should be. And it’s not a book!

Scientology 2.0

I’m also remembering the hpmor twilight spinoff fic by someone in that circle

I haven't even been in the fandom in decades, but off the top of my head I can still think of multiple other Harry Potter fanfics that would be more fit for purpose as a central source text!

Wow, that fanfic started out as a fun little satire that played with the wizarding stuff in some interesting ways, but just went off into meandering stupid. I did like that all the murdered unicorns were recognizable My Little Pony characters tho.

yeah like do we wanna talk about the Congo section

Still good to know who they are youtu.be/9mJAerUL-7w

the zizians were just the most extreme offshoot. the more banal stuff is honestly even more dumbfounding

Would they qualify as a sect of the broader denomination? Curious for actual religious studies lens on this, too.

The whole EA/rationalist community reeks of people who dropped out of college because it didn't validate their belief that they're the smartest most special people on the planet, so they found a community where everyone did that for each other and in the process drove each other insane.

I thought I was pretty knowledgeable in these things, but wth is a Zizian? 🥴

You want to know more about the sex part of this? Fine:

I think the only reason the Zizians didn’t break into the big AI companies is that they were mostly transwomen and the AI companies probably didn’t hire them for that reason. Not because they were crazy. There’s probably people just as crazy who did get hired because they were cis men.

The cryptocurrency cult overlaps. Sam Bankman-Fried and the rest of the FTX crowd are co-religionists. Partly why you hear a bit less about EA this year.

In some ways, the Zizians are what you get if you take the AI apocalypse doomers at their word, mixed with the effects of extreme sleep deprivation as praxis.

I gather they're not followers of Žižek

All the same, I suspect one could do worse for an introduction than listening to @iwriteok.bsky.social discuss the Zizians in www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mJA... and then asking yourself if someone even 20% as crazy should be trusted with sharp objects.

Rationalism cult is too fucking good at SEO and polishing every bit of publicly available information about themselves (Not technically a cult but it sure is a movement with very cult-y elements) Every relevant wiki article is contaminated and biased imho

So like 50 shades of grey but much darker?

Didn't they try to stuff the ballots of a literary award with it?

kind of like how a lot of those weirdos were thrust into Aella I guess, but somehow even less sexy

It also betrays its fundamental purpose. Supposedly, the core conceit of the Methods of Rationality is that Harry's aunt Petunia married a scientist instead of a Dursley, and Harry was raised to understand the scientific method, which he would then apply to magic.

This was in 2012, mind you. That school shut down, in large part because other schools were better at tracking student outcomes. We never got a unique student identifier.

I tried reading that back in college when some LiveJournal friends of friends were into it and I couldn't even make it through the first chapter. I thought it was really pretentious and boring, it reminded me of the worst guys in my philosophy and ethics classes.

Lmao the quiverfull Calvinist neighbors I had way back when loved this, seems like it has a real lure for sex cultists.

It's also an illterate fanfic. It's premised on the wizarding world in Harry Potter not having gone through the Enlightenment. About a decade and a half ago I posted on a fanfic site pointing out all the Enlightenment-style institutions present in the text. That turned into a months-long shitshow.

What's... what's the first one? I think I have a little more space for bewildered horror today?

JFC, What the fuck is this? Wish dot com Sutter Kane?

this sounds like any million fanfics someone wrote to insert like libertarianism into some popular franchise what an insane thing to hold up with seriousness

Even the plot summary is painful to read

NONONONO

Fuck hairy potter and fuck the asshole writer.. I won't, wouldn't and won't. FUCK it all

Every time I open BlueSky I learn something more about the big Powerful people and what they’re really up to and I can’t find words for how it makes me feel. Very not good

You know I thought I had read this but apparently what I actually read was some portion of Harry Potter and the Natural 20 and thank goodness

I read the first chapter of this like when it came out and it was so bad. Like I understand now that there's some value in poking holes in JK Rowling's world, but it was just painful to read. Looking back, I 100% can see the connection here, "you can outsmart even magic if you're Rational Enough".

I gasped!

I saw the first word and immediately said 'NOO!' loudly, alone in my kitchen. Maddening, in a literal sense.

The amount of damage Jowling Kowling has done to the noosphere would make Sheev Palpatine green with envy. Which is why in MY fanfic…

@earational.bsky.social who knew that a fictional boy wizard would lead to so much actual evil in the world

Oh buddy, I’m sorry you had to find out this way….but more people need to find out

I would argue there Bible is Nick Bostrom's book Super Intelligence, but other then that... Yes fully agree.

Especially because, yeah, it was really good fanfic, but I mean COME ON

OH MY GOD I remember reading this fanfic, like, ten years ago. It was cute, I guess? Not something I'd read more than once, and I don't see what's super special about it. Huh. These people really are weird.

I read this several years ago and found it interesting, but I didn’t make it my personality.

Entirely because there's more "potential humans" in the Xeelee Sequence, nevermind that the overwhelming vast majority of them have horrifying lives.

Basically all these people fucking love Banks.

I remember thinking the first few pages were kind of fun, but that it quickly turned into an unbearable slog.

Maybe my general lack of interest in fanfic protected me. But I feel like there have been several dipshit movements tailor-made for people much like me that just somehow passed me by. If I had any idea why or how, that would be a useful contribution, but…

The last few years have been wild as someone who knew about Yudkowsky from this fic and nothing else

Wild, whacky stuff.

I hate it here.

How have I never heard of this Potter Shrugged bullshit before

So, a normal Rick and Morty episode?

Oh definitely not

To be fair to the weirdos, I think a lot of people would be sexing all over the place if they were high as a kite and thought the world was about to end

Aella Paella

They're also idiots

oh yeah there’s tons of drugs

Sounds like a bleak (but fascinating) read. Can you send the link.

Oh they are fucking us all

Yep. It's so mondaine to be killed by a few ppm of CO2

I have heard such things! Michael Lewis in his book about SBF, though, says that, re: polyamory, “they certainly tried every position in Settlers of Cataan.” Not sure how substantiated this sex stuff is. Also, good for them if true.

Poly

but being poly is a cult line item here.

I don't really care that they're all fucking each other but I wish they would stop fucking with the rest of us.

I think he considers the city lost

Yes

Yes

Where's that big earthquake that takes California I've heard about my whole life?

That's how it spreads.

oh yes

Not to mention the subset that’s in a perpetual state of roid rage.

The recent claims about the potential power of AI to destroy humanity are no different than all the other claims about the potential power of AI. It's always bullshit, and it's always just intended to beg for more money from gullible investors

This Erin Redwing? I mean, the AI sex cult is one thing, maybe true, but Astrologer turned bitcoin expert isn't the journalist to break the story.

Our ancestors survived the Black Death, all the Ice Ages and every extinction event.

Somehow I missed this connection but now it seals it up nicely. You're exactly correct...they are batshit crazy, this explains it all

Filtering out the skeptics is classic cult behavior

Everybody needs to go listen to the Behind the Bastards series on the Rationalists right meow.

Putting aside the EA nonsense and sex cult, I think the reason why ASI is dangerous and extinction level makes sense. It’s just the gorilla problem - gorillas are stronger than humans in every way except IQ. Humans win in a fight. ASI has more IQ than humans. Doesn’t ASI win?

My take on the rationalists is this: the community's true north star is ego. Its founder works on AI, and he found a way to make working in AI the most important, enlightened, dangerous, and sexy thing in the world. The philosophy is essentially a huge pile of reasons to believe they are supermen.

AI will starve people, given that few will have jobs.

You see, it's *not wrong* to call it a cult in relation to cults typically being occult. The reason for keeping knowledge occult, is because it's very destructive knowledge, and so the cult exists to gatekeep it from reaching a wider public. Also see biosecurity and nuclear launch codes.

Anyone who has to tell you that they're rational, isn't.