Fortunately the EA side is a little more on the nose sometimes.

One of my first wakeup calls was they offered to mail me a book for free🚩🚩🚩 (it was from 80,000 hours)

I've seen the same thing and it's reassuring lol.

I lurk on subreddit drama and curated tumblr, and I feel like the common reaction to LW has gone from a few negative comments and "really? that's crazy"'s five years ago to being much more aware. Years ago you'd see maybe one person familiar with them and then a couple people respond who are totally out of the loop and maybe you'd see one crazy rationalist chime in to nuh-uh them. Now, anything rationalist-related usually has a bunch of people bringing up the harry potter or acausal robot god stuff right away.

I use the tag feature a lot in RES to keep track of people who I like hearing what they have to say. Years ago I mostly saw the same names when LW stuff came up, but now there's always a ton of people I've never seen before who are familiar with it.

It's also reassuring because I really don't want to be the person to say anything first and it's easier to chime in on a discussion someone else has already started.

Why not make an evil time travelling robot controlled by the illuminati? ~~bro it's even called Alexander~~

Maybe they simply yearn to write Final Fantasy villains

Getting flashbacks to the people who thought the GameStop guy was a leftist

https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1go1ndu/rsuperstonk_in_the_midst_of_a_political_civil_war/

RationalWiki really hits that sweetspot where everybody hates it and you know that means it's doing something right:

From Prolewiki:

RationalWiki is an online encyclopedia created in 2007. Although it was created to debunk Conservapedia and Christian fundamentalism,[1] it is also very liberal and promotes anti-communist propaganda. It spreads imperialist lies and about socialist states including the USSR[2] and Korea[3] while uncritically promoting narratives from the CIA and U.S. State Department.

From Conservapedia:

RationalWiki.org is largely a pro-SJW atheists website.

[ . . . ]

RationalWikians have become very angry and have displayed such behavior as using profanity and angrily typing in all cap letters when their ideas are questioned by others and/or concern trolls (see: Atheism and intolerance and Atheism and anger and Atheism and dogmatism and Atheism and profanity).[33]

From WikiSpooks (with RationalWiki's invitation for anyone to collaborate highlighted with an emotionally vulnerable red box for emphasis):

Although inviting readers to "register and engage in constructive dialogue", RationalWiki appears not to welcome essays critical of RationalWiki[3] or of certain official narratives. For example, it is dismissive of the Journal of 9/11 Studies, terming it, as of 2017, it a "peer- crank-reviewed, online, open source pseudojournal".[4]

And a little bonus:

"Can I have Google discount my rationalwiki entry, has errors posted out of spite 10 years ago"

https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/106033064/can-i-have-google-discount-my-rationalwiki-entry-has-errors-posted-out-of-spite-10-years-ago?hl=en

My site questions Darwinism but that's become quite mainstream. But my rationalwiki page has over 20 references to me being a creationist, and is tagged "pseudoscience." Untrue

Chiming in with my own find!

https://archiveofourown.org/works/38590803/chapters/96467457

I've seen this person around a lot with crazy takes on AI. They have a couple quotes that might inflict psychic damage:

If I had the skill to pull it off, a Buddhist cultivation book would've thus been the single most rationalist xianxia in existence.

My acquaintance asks for rational-adjacent books suitable for 8-11 years old children that heavily feature training, self-improvement, etc. The acquaintance specifically asks that said hard work is not merely mentioned, but rather is actively shown in the story. The kid herself mostly wants stories "about magic" and with protagonists of about her age.

They had a long diatribe I don't have a copy of, but they were gloating about having masterful writing despite not reading any books besides non-fiction and HPMoR, their favorite book of all time.

There's also a whole subreddit from hell about this subgenre of fiction: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/

I've seen people say that /uj is essential to keeping communities healthy. If you only allow 'reasonable discussion', you allow all kinds of awful people in as long as they're not too obvious, while regular people get reprimanded for responding to it. But if you only allow shitposting and no genuine discussion, it's going to become genuine whether you want it to or not (see: Gamers Rise Up or similar)

On here, you can see people write earnestly on a bunch of different topics, but you can also see them just tell a promptfan "you can't get it up unless the fingers are wrong, can you" and ban them. It's great

A Minecraft server, a Discord channel, and maybe a Matrix server all bridged together would be really goofy and I'm all for it

God I cannot believe that Harry Potter fanfiction is such a big part of Rationalism.

I made the mistake of reading too many comments down in a Reddit thread and a ~~ephebophile~~pedophile showed up. I looked at their profile and was just totally blindsided by Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality fanfiction and it apparently being their second favorite book ever. I think their first was Lolita but I don't remember.

I've heard that (maybe?) SBF had Harry Potter orgies, detailed on his girlfriend's cryptofascist tradwife Tumblr blog. I know I shouldn't but I kind of want to see if I can dig around the Internet Archive and find out how much of that really happened. Just making myself suffer for fun

The descriptions are already perfect

I feel like the article ends pretty suddenly, but maybe that's just because I can already imagine the next 30 pages of explaining TESCREAL bullshittery in my head

Not going to namedrop as I have no idea how involved and connected he is to all this

I totally will 😎

Robert Miles was my first heartbreaker. He seems like a great educator; I just like listening to him explaining things and talking about computer science. But damn it came as a shock to see he's the narrator of a Rationalism for Kids cartoon series and is neck-deep in EA.