Nick Land’s drugs got him there well before everyone else, but I’m talking about the right wing cranks such as Big Yud that have kept up a mask of “grey tribe” pretenses, said stupid stale memes like “politics is the mind killer,” and worshipped billionaires as the more radiant energy beings they are, being of the sky while we are of the dirt.
Sure, it seemed inevitable all along, especially when billionaires started outright buying ownership stakes in “futurology” conventions. It got especially creepy when the United States Department of Defense openly peddled contractor wares in such places.
It isn’t fun being the Cassandra, seeing it happening in real time, warning people, then getting laughed off about it. I’ve lost real life friends to this stuff, people that were superficially just open minded and quirky in college but now wear the metaphorical armband and goosestep to wherever Sam Harris or other crypto-bigoted cranks tell them to go.
I ended up following a splinter group of the rationalist community that was fairly left-leaning and generally pretty decent overall, so most of this transformation was invisible to me.
But something snapped within the last year, and not only are a bunch of them more right-wing than they ever were before, but suddenly half of them are okay with vaccine denialism. And just… how can you possibly take part in a “rationalist” community that accepts that level of crank shit.
Also Yudkowsky is going to turn into a communist. It’s going to take him way too long (guessing between 10 and 20 years from now), it’s going to be hilarious watching him try to rationalize why it took so long, and even better when he starts blogging again to mythologize how great and smart he is for finally changing his mind.
This is a far advance prediction of a detailed hypothesis with seemingly low probability, so, when it turns out I’m right, all the rationalist crowd has to bow to my wisdom, because those are the established rules.
I’m going to take an even edgier position.
He’s already a Marxist, but doesn’t realise he’s accidentally reinventing Dialectical analysis in the slowest way possible while holding his fingers in his ears yelling “lalalalala I’m developing positivism actually!”
I reckon he’s going to basically write State and Revolution in 15 years but it’ll be called something absurd like “The rational sword cuts only the rotten beams of the cathedral”
:stalin-heart:
You should write that! I know you’ve got the theory background, and you clearly know how to write in the rationalist lingo. You could write a rational!StateAndRev under a Definitely Not A Yudkowsky Alt pseudonym, post it on /r/rational, and convert a bunch of tech weirdoes to the cause.