Post-Rationalism & RivalVoices— The Continued Failures of LessWrong
A technological death cult with a religious devotion to Bayesian epistemology, A utilitarian action group seeking to most effectively help others, a racist revanchist movement and STEM university students all talking in one space together — Welcome to LessWrong
LessWrong was a website launched on the 1st of February 2009. It was created from interconnecting blogs around the concept of ‘Rationality’. It’s quite likely you’ve heard of it, or you know someone who was influenced by it. By 2020, it had bore fruit. All those groups that were contained within it branched out into their own movements. The racist revanchist movement became the basis for the alt-right, the utilitarians became the Effective Altruists, the STEM students and technological doomsayers now work in Silicon Valley. There’s been much written on each of these groups, but one has escaped the radar. There’s a growing cultural sphere to be found around the writings of David Chapman, Venkatesh Rao and the inevitable huckstering of twitter personalities that revolve around such movements. One of the most notable of the grifters is NotRivalVoices.
The RivalVoices’ grift, along with so many others in this sphere, is fairly simple once its laid out. It is to use the language of philosophy and social science to obfuscate a cheap version of self-help. The important thing here isn’t actually to help your life in any material way, but to simply feel like it has been bettered. One gains a sense of some undiscovered truth, but without it actually achieving anything for you. Instead, this only serves for you to delve yet deeper into their sphere. Common names are replaced with convoluted ones. The feeling of being bettered is replaced with imagined problems. A common trope of RivalVoices is reconceptualise all negative experiences into a trauma. Ironically, this can transform what were only negative events into a trauma into the mind of the individual who has now bought into this space. Each negative experience is reified and examined, closed off and turned into an object for examination. This is even worse when it comes to RivalVoices, who claims to work on the basis of gaining objective knowledge into these experiences. The grifter’s figure then becomes one of authority. Of course, this has been done many times before in many different cultural spaces. Normally, these grifts are done through the language of mysticism, a rediscovered tradition or some other esoteric thing. What’s unique about those that surround LessWrong is merely an aesthetic sensibility. This aesthetic is one of intellectualism.
Intellectualism as a mode of control is even more dangerous than spiritual aesthetic. It is much easier to resist mystics as controllers because one’s reason is always there to be called against it. The intellectual spheres around LessWrong propose that they are based in reason, a reason that supersedes your own. The moments where one feels some improvement work as a way of undermining one’s own sense of rationality. It allows it to be dominated by someone else. The new authority figure. These authority figures can use their positions to do some damaging things.
You may say this is largely harmless. But, it’s had some horrible consequences in the Rationalist communities. There have been stories of abuse, sexual assault and suicide from these communities. To resist against highly personal criticism framed in the logic of rationality is described as being irrational. Only by following the unofficial leaders of these communities can one be deemed to be ‘rational’. This is doubled by the fact that through the internet, these communities prey on a very specific kind of figure: alienated bright young people. In a world without social connection, these rationalist communities offer it to them. They can, of course, take it away.
Invariably, each of the rationalist warlords that rise up create a constituency around themselves are ‘auto-didacts’. This is precisely what gives them a unique power, especially as it relates to the LessWrong crowd. LessWrong, in being a community of STEM fanatics, all have little formal knowledge of philosophy outside of what these auto-didacts dictate to them. So, these ‘auto-didacts’ turned self-help philosophers. There is a distinction between lying and bullshitting. The liar is concerned with the truth. The liar tries to hide the truth and replace with something else. The bullshitter isn’t concerned with the truth at all. The bullshitter is just trying to make the right impression, imply the right things, give the right mood. Being ‘self-taught’ gives them stronger intuitions towards bullshitting as they don’t have the knowledge around the subjects they talk about to even meaningfully lie about them. The power of the bullshitter is not just to give an impression to others, but to themselves. Or to put it another way, it makes it easier for them to buy their own bullshit.
This is the continued failure of LessWrong manifest: warring cults headed by undereducated bright men, and its always men, with chips on the shoulders. Each of these warring cults, breakoffs from the original LessWrong cult.
