experience report from the last two years of #Leverage-Research, one of the #cults that grew out of the #Rationalists #toread
on 02026-01-06#qchu in June 02022 describing how he joined (in mid-02012), then drifted away from, Bay Area #Rationalists and #Effective-Altruists: “i had no defenses against something like this. i’d never encountered such a coherent memeplex laid out in so much excruciating detail, and - in retrospect - tailored so perfectly to invade my soul in particular. (he knew math! he explained quantum mechanics in the Sequences!) an egg was laid inside of me and when it hatched the first song from its lips was a song of utter destruction, of the entire universe consumed in flames, because some careless humans hadn’t thought hard enough before they summoned gods from the platonic deeps to do their bidding. (...) traditionally a cult tries to isolate you on purpose from everyone you ever knew before them but when it came to the rationalists i simply no longer found that i had anything to say to people from my old life. none of them had the context about what mattered to me anymore. i didn’t even move to the bay on purpose to hang out with the rationalists; i went to UC berkeley for math grad school because i was excited about their research. the fact that eliezer yudkowsky would be living in the same city as me was just an absurd coincidence. the rationalists put on a meet-and-greet event at UC berkeley. i met anna salamon, then the director (iirc) of the Center for Applied Rationality, and talked to her. she invited me to their rationality workshop in january 2013. and from that point i was hooked. (...) (this is deeply embarrassing to admit but one reason i always found the simulation hypothesis strikingly plausible is that it would explain how i just happened to find myself hanging around who i considered to be plausibly the most important people in human history). (...) god i feel like writing this all out is explaining something that’s always felt weird to me about the whole concept of stories and science fiction stories in particular. i have been living inside a science fiction story written by eliezer yudkowsky. (...) it would take me years to learn how to articulate what was in the water. i would feel like i was going insane trying to explain how somehow hanging out with these dorks in the bay area made some part of me want to extinguish my entire soul in service of the greater good. i have been accused of focusing too much on feelings in general and my feelings in particular, or something like that. and what i want to convey here is that my feelings are the only thing that got me out of this extremely specific trap i had found myself in.” #cults
on 02026-01-06On #polyamory among the “#rationalists”.
on 02025-09-16