leviathan-supersystem:

it’s the blog joined at the hip with MIRI, the machine intelligence research research institute, which is a weird-ass AI doomsday cult which is seems grimes has gotten mixed up with. you know roko’s basilisk? that’s them. 

anyways to save time i’m going to copy-paste an earlier response to this kind of question from this post:

so have you ever seen someone saying in their blog description that they’re a “rationalist”? well that’s the self-descriptor used by people who come from a site called “lesswrong.com,” which is run by a guy named Eliezer Yudkowsky, and which purports to teach people the methods of “bayesian rationalism,” which is basically just a method to pretend you’re using math to help make your decisions, but since it involves guesstimating the probabilities you’re calculating, it’s not noticeably any better than just guessing without math. the whole thing traces it’s roots back to the site Overcoming Bias, which was wirtten by Eliezer and a man named Robin Hanson, who was involved in several Bush-era scandals [link]. going back further, the community can be traced to the Extropians, a techno-libertarian group from the 90′s.

oh, also Eliezer wrote a terrible Harry Potter fanfiction to promote bayesian “rationality” as well, called “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.”

anyways, aside from teaching people bayesian “rationality,” lesswrong is also an extension of MIRI, or the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which is based around the idea that we are inevitably headed toward the creation of an all-powerful computer dictator, and that the only course of action is to make sure that we create a good computer dictator, and not a bad one. the whole thing has a decidedly quasi-religious undercurrent, and at one point that undercurrent burst through to the surface in the creation of Roko’s Basilisk, which was when someone on the site posited that when the all-powerful computer dictator comes into being, it will eternally punish anyone who didn’t do enough to help it come into being by donating to MIRI, so to avoid being punished forever people should donate as much as possible to MIRI, like some kind of modern incarnation of Pascals wager. while most of them don’t still subscribe to this belief, a small percentage of them do.

at any rate, besides the bad logic and AI worship, they also have really shitty politics- Eliezer Yudkowsky is a right-wing libertarian, as is Scott Alexander, who runs the closely related site SlateStarCodex. among the other nonsense, they both constantly try to use their sites to try to sell right-wing libertarianism to moderate progressives, perhaps most explictly in the slatestarcodex post “Right is the New Left”[link] which is basically dedicated to trying to convince progressive liberals that they should shift politically rightward and become libertarians. there are a whole bunch of really shitty conceptual frameworks they’ve come up with as part of this, including the “blue tribe/red tribe/grey tribe” framework, which is this really weak shoddy framework based around broad stereotypes about left-leaning people being snooty wealthy cosmopolitan democrats, right-wing people being simple working class rural people, and techno-libertarians being smart free-thinking genuises, and trying to use this framework as a sales pitch for libertarianism. probably the best illustration of how the concept is used by people in that community as a sales pitch for libertarianism is this post by pax-dickinson [link]. the fact that lower-income people actually lean leftward, thus contradicting their whole framework, doesn’t seem to phase them. you can straight up show them the statistics and they’ll still insist that it’s the gospel truth that left-wingers are all snooty rich whole-foods shoppers.

at any rate, besides being partially an effort by libertarians to recruit progressives and shift them rightward, the whole thing is funded personally by wealthy right-wing CEO Peter Thiel, who is known for his various statements about how democracy should be abolished and women should have never been given the vote, as well as his association with the neofascist alt-right sub-movement “NeoReaction,” specifically Mencius Moldbug, who Peter Thiel is also funding.

the sad thing is that Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn’t even seem to realize the extent of what Peter Thiel is using him to achieve by shifting people’s politics further rightward. Eliezer was shocked, for instance, when Peter Thiel endorsed Trump, instead of Gary Johnson.

so basically the lesswronger community is liberals being played like suckers by right-wing libertarians who are being played like suckers by neofascists. chain of fools.

as a result of this, the lesswronger community exemplify everything rancid about liberalism. very “the free market is sacred!” type politics. very “but fascists have feelings too!” type politics. people who think of themselves as progressive, but actually act in every capacity toward supporting right-wing causes.

which brings us to how I first encountered them

so i was just minding my own business, being a communist, saying unkind things about fascists on the world wide web, when these dipshits started dogpiling me and my friends for being communists, and saying unkind things about fascists, and screaming at us that we’re evil and stupid, etc.

but of course, then when we responded to these critiques, and offered our own critiques of the politics of lesswrong, they absolutely lost their shit, and acted like the victims.

also when i pointed out that one of their dear friends was in fact Wesley Eugene Rian, better known by his nom-de-blog Nydwracu, a well-known neoreactionary and utter piece of shit, and that this was perhaps relevant information to the debate, they similarly lost their shit, accusing me of victimizing him, since apparently being a prominent neofascist theorist is just “words on the internet” but me pointing out that someone is a neofascist theorist is terrible and dangerous. Nydwracu, incidentally, still engages in all the kind of douchebaggery you would expect, including recently trying to create a media hoax framing someone for murder [link]. the lesswrongers will constantly make excuses for this, and say the real bad guys are the leftists, and if they were just nicer to Nydwracu, he wouldn’t even be “fascist-ing on the internet” [link]. this of course is bullshit.

EDIT: oh, also, i almost forgot- around this time the lesswrongers began shipping me with nydwracu. like in the fandom sense. they came up with a name for the ship and everything. it was really really really really really creepy.

anyways, in spite of their constant whining about how left-wingers need to be more “charitable” toward right-wingers in debates, the lesswrongers themselves have absolutely atrocious conduct in debates, are extremely prone to flying off the handle and acting like assholes. anyways here’s some posts where i got trapped in debates with these assholes which pretty much sum up what they’re all about:

(links for desktop): [link] [link] [link] [link] [link]

(links for mobile): [link] [link] [link] [link] [link]

Addendum: you can also get a feel for the overall vibe of the community by checking out the reddit board r/slatestarcodex, which is a board for fans of the blog slate star codex, which spun off from lesswrong. you can also check out it’s rival community r/sneerclub, (name’s a joking reference to a post Yudkowsky made whining about people who didn’t like his harry potter fanfic) which is for critics and ex-members of the community, and has case after case documented of former members burning out under the weight of the overwhelming right-wing bias of the community beneath their thin pretense of “neutrality”.