Move over TESCREAL, R9PRESENTATIONALism is here. (archive.is)

submitted 20 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) by Soyweiser@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems

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As found by @gerikson here, more from the anti anti TESCREAL crowd. How the antis are actually R9PRESENTATIONALism. Ottokar expanded on their idea in a blog post.

Original link.

I have not read the bigger blog post yet btw, just assumed it would be sneerable and posted it here for everyone's amusement. Learn about your own true motives today. (This could be a troll of course, boy does he drop a lot of names and thinks that is enough to link things).

E: alternative title: Ideological Turing Test, a critical failure

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[-] scruiser@awful.systems 4 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

“Yall are in a cult, and it is TESCREAL.”

So I know you were going for a snappy summary, but I think one of the important things to note is that the TESCREAL essay doesn't call them a singular cult, it draws connections between the letters of the acronym including inspirations, people in multiple letters of the acronym, common terminology, common ideological assumptions, and such.

I think a hypothetical more mature rationalist movement would acknowledge their historical and current influences and think critically about how they relate to them instead of just going nuh-uh. Like the relatively more reasonable EAs occasionally point out problematic trends in their movement and at least try to address them (not particularly effectually, but at least they aren't all in total denial).

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 5 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

Yeah i was just doing the meme from king of the hill. If I go indepth, I would sneer at stuff like: "Because if TESCREALism really is a secularized religion, then… so what?"

For being a misrepresentation, it is secularized eschatological Christianity (perhaps even Catholicism, but not Protestant enough to say that, counting the rich feels very knife in church door ish), not just a religion. Doesn't even represent the argument correctly. It is the rapture of the nerds, not the breaking of the Saṃsāra for nerds.

E: bonus points for after first generalizing religion then picking islam as some weird anti apostate example. Must have been an accident. E2: the apostate (yes, my word, he said 'shirkers', which is not a term I have ever seen used re religion) stuff is even funnier considering that Émile P. Torres (who for some reason is not mentioned in the opening, just later), is somebody who has written about “existential threats” for ages (more on his ideas on this here which also has the bonus that it is way more readable than the main post), DavidG was a lesswronger, a lot of science fiction writers who are not positive about TESCREAL are people who wrote transhumanist sf, and see also the large group of sneerclubbers who used to read LW/SSC etc. (E3: forgot to mention, Gebru is a computer scientist).