The modern Effective Altruism movement is a quasi cult loosely connected to another quasi cult called the “rationalist movement,” and all of this is loosely organized around the Bay Area.
Don’t get me wrong. Rationalism has a long intellectual and scholarly history. Effective Altruism is based on the philosophy of utilitarianism, with its own long scholarly history. Subscribing to these ideas alone doesn’t put you into a cult.
But there definitely is a loose, quasi cult system, originating out of the Bay Area, using these names and ostensibly claiming to promote the ideas.
These people also go pretty hard on AI doomerism, and AI singularity as a coming end times sort of event. They’ve been taking this position since long before LLMs ascended to where they are now.
Lesswrong is the pen name and Internet handle of one Eliezer Yudkowsky. It is also the name of an Internet “community blog” where I think a lot of the rationality side of the group got organised, and maybe where they still organise. I don’t really keep up with the goings on.
!sneerclub@awful.systems is/was a Lemmy community dedicated to critiques and criticism of the rationality / EA system or nexus or whatever. (I have a hard time coming up with names for this. It’s definitely not organised like the Mormons or Scientologists or so on.)
The modern Effective Altruism movement is a quasi cult loosely connected to another quasi cult called the “rationalist movement,” and all of this is loosely organized around the Bay Area.
Don’t get me wrong. Rationalism has a long intellectual and scholarly history. Effective Altruism is based on the philosophy of utilitarianism, with its own long scholarly history. Subscribing to these ideas alone doesn’t put you into a cult.
But there definitely is a loose, quasi cult system, originating out of the Bay Area, using these names and ostensibly claiming to promote the ideas.
These people also go pretty hard on AI doomerism, and AI singularity as a coming end times sort of event. They’ve been taking this position since long before LLMs ascended to where they are now.
Lesswrong is the pen name and Internet handle of one Eliezer Yudkowsky. It is also the name of an Internet “community blog” where I think a lot of the rationality side of the group got organised, and maybe where they still organise. I don’t really keep up with the goings on.
!sneerclub@awful.systems is/was a Lemmy community dedicated to critiques and criticism of the rationality / EA system or nexus or whatever. (I have a hard time coming up with names for this. It’s definitely not organised like the Mormons or Scientologists or so on.)