I don't fuck with LW, but SCC definitely has that culty vibe. Overall I think Scott has some interesting articles and the general idea of rationalism is .. fin

I don't fuck with LW, but SCC definitely has that culty vibe. Overall I think Scott has some interesting articles and the general idea of rationalism is .. fine. But that's not at all what the communities around it are like. You just get tons of 'rational racism' with HBD (human biodiversity for those not in the know, which is basically just race realism with a nerdy veneer), IQ worship, and a group that collectively abandons anything like the rationalist ideal and becomes a post-hoc clusterfuck. The community can almost be thought of like these racist AIs: garbage in, garbage out. They cling to any bit of rational-sounding data that supports their preconceptions, and have to adopt severe anti-academic stances to reject the mountains of data that contradict their views. I suppose the deeper rot is that these rationalists fancy themselves like scientists, able to interact with primary data and draw conclusions, but any actual expert (i.e. someone that has performed research and published it in a community of peers, not whacko journals) is just confused how anyone could be so wrong. You regularly see posts where someone comes in who actually knows what they're talking about, authoritatively shows that all the nonsense they've been talking about makes no sense, and at best they get a 'huh, interesting' before the nonsense picks back up. The idea of a rationalist community is to organize around questioning your own assumptions, confronting diverse views, and engaging in good-faith debate. But the reality is that basically none of that happens for anything controversial to the community, so it's just a veneer of legitimacy for in-group circle-jerking. And it just so happens that the in-group tends to be pretty damn racist.