Yes, Kurzweil desperately trying to create some kind of a scientific argument, as well as people with university affiliations like Singer and MacAskill pushing EA, are what give this stuff institutional strength. Yudkowsky and LW are by no means less influential, but they're at best a student club that only aspires to be a proper curriculum. It's surely no coincidence that they're anchored in Berkeley, adjacent to the university's famous student-led DeCal program.

FWIW, my capsule summary of TPOT/"post-rationalists" is that they're people who thought that advanced degrees and/or adjacency to VC money would yield more remuneration and influence than they actually did. Equally burned out, just further along the same path.

I've been contemplating this, and I agree with most everyone else about leaning heavily into the cult angle and explaining it as a mutant hybrid between Scientology-style UFO religions and Christian dispensationalist Book of Revelation eschatology. The latter may be especially useful in explaining it to USians. My mom (who works in an SV-adjacent job) sent me this Vanity Fair article the other day about Garry Tan grifting his way into non-denominational prosperity gospel Christianity: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/christianity-was-borderline-illegal-in-silicon-valley-now-its-the-new-religion She was wondering if it was "just another fad for these people," and I had to explain no, not really, it is because their AI bullshit is so outlandish that some of them feel the need to pivot back towards something more mainstream to keep growing their following.

I also prefer to highlight Kurzweil's obsession with perpetual exponential growth curves as a central point. That's often what I start with when I'm explaining it all to somebody. It provides the foundation for the bullshit towers that Yudkowsky and friends have erected. And I also think that long-term, the historiography of this stuff will lean more heavily on Kurzweil as a source than Yudkowsky, because Kurzweil is better-organized and professionally published. It'll most likely be the main source in the lower-division undergraduate/AP high school history texts that highlight this stuff as a background trend in the 2010s/2020s. Right now, we live in the peak days of the LessWrong bullshit volcano plume, but ultimately, it will probably be interpreted by the specialized upper-division texts that grow out of peoples' PhD theses.

awful.systems

I propose we pool funds, buy an old motel on the other side of the city limits in Oakland, and rename it Farthaven

Time magazine is, of course, now a property of Salesforce bobblehead Marc Benioff. So one wonders if there are editorial decisions being made at a high level, much like the Washington Post.

so an alternative, somewhat weaker fireball spell

Mr. Blott is what Mr. Bean became when all his old movies started paying streaming royalties

HQ sez the grift is pivoting back to puritanical virtue ethics, we need to have cleansing struggle memes ready by next week so we can hit it hard over the holidays. Did you not get the memo?

But we suspect Extropic is just burning through the $14 million and will go broke within a year or two, if that. We look forward to Verdon’s “our fabulous journey” post.

This guy seems like the type to totally skip that, embezzle the last million or two, and go straight for "messianic cult in the woods." Possibly with a side order of "amateur experimental stimulant laboratory"

Well, he was already practically an SS-Mann without the neck lapels, so why be surprised about this?

what if I continually remind it to be flatulent instead? has anyone tried that?

Do you think they will manage to issue a coherent Incredible Journey post before their mugshot turns up in their local newspaper?

At the very least, the supply chain of meth is likely to be more robust than the supply chain for GMO mouth bacteria.