#sorry if this is a lil disorganized. i'm out of practice writing and i've got a very strong kentucky mule partway through my system

[beansprouts]

an anecdote, probably irrelevant if you know little about tech esp in silicon valley

Anyone who knows me irl knows that I went to a very elite private college full of rich people highly motivated by STEM. While there I narrowly avoided being inducted into rationality/longtermism, which I consider a doomsday cult. I have a former friend who is as big in this cult as they come (when I knew him in college he had not one, but two T-shirts about Bayes theorem) who went to work for MIRI after he graduated.

This guy was my former good friend; visited me in the mental hospital. Now he's been putting out papers of this pseudoscientific drivel, the kind of statistics-on-steroids that's costing thousands of jobs. Basically the shit I've been deeply opposed to (due to my own education in computer science and linguistics, also just being a marginalized person) since someone posted a link about OpenAI's new product in a work slack a few years ago and I quickly rebutted their unscientific methodology and naively thought the tech world would just dismiss their "work."

Someone on bluesky posted a very good thread, with sources, connecting a lot of these threads and deconstructing the cult's ideology and why it's dangerous. That thread is here. My first instinct was to respond with my own personal relevant experience from college of realizing this ideology was truly on a religious level and not just an encouraging of scientific open-minded thinking like they claim. And then I realized that I can't do that, because I am genuinely terrified of these people, and my bluesky profile is an image of me, which is enough information for the people involved to track me down. And despite this guy having been my friend once, I know what their evangelical devotion to the technocult looks like, and I am far more frightened of that than I am trusting of him.

So I'm posting my silly little story here instead, even though my tumblr is mostly fandom reblogs and definitely not a suitable home for it, because I know the rats aren't very active on here.

It's not much of a story. My former friend, a "rationalist," has always championed ideological debate and open-mindedness. I had found an excellent op-ed by Ted Chiang that seemed to rebutt some of the AGI fears (which as a rationalist he took very seriously) by analyzing them as more of a hallmark of a capitalistic mindset and society than any sort of genuine technological inevitability, let alone one breathing down our keyboards with impending doom. It's fantastic and you should read it, even though it's on Buzzfeed.

I sent that article to my friend, because I knew he loves to defend his ideas. He was a libertarian and would defend this ideology for fun. So, as an extension of this, I assumed he would enjoy either some new angles of analysis he hadn't considered on this viewpoint, or alternatively deconstructing this argument (since of course he was also a former policy debater).

Instead, he was.. offended. Hurt. Acted like me sending him that article was a transgression. Vaguely attempted to argue with it, but not in any way that made sense. This was inconsistent with all of his behaviour previously. Like, you have to understand, this guy would debate economics in the lunch line for fun. I had every reason to believe he would rise to the challenge and argue back against this op-ed. Hell, much of our friendship had taken the form of such discussions until that point!

But he didn't react the way he had with all his other logically held beliefs, because rationality is not one of those. Rationalists don't believe in AGI coming to kill us all, well, rationally. They believe in that with an emotional zeal and fervor. Roko's Basilisk, or whatever new form it will take next time someone has a thought experiment, is the end-of-days scenario that they feel so strong of a need to fight that it has become religious to them.

Doomsday cult.

Now that guy is director-level at a tech startup .. and I'm unemployed and mostly arrange choral music lol.

Also, since I know I have followers on here whom I know in real life and who may know whom I'm vagueblogging here: please don't send this to him. I haven't talked to him since like 2018? and I do not want him to know I consider him an ideological enemy.