AI Ascendant is a Substack with essays on AI and LLMs, including a long series tracing the roots of Effective Altruism.
Commenters recommend its seven-part Extropia's Children series on Effective Altruism, LessWrong and related groups, and some use it to argue EA resembles a cult.
There were 7 parts, and the last one actually addresses exactly the issue we're talking about:
https://aiascendant.substack.com/p/extropias-children-chapter-7 (and I still recommend all 7 parts)
It's hard for me to respond to the rest your comments, because I simply don't agree with the framing. To me I see a big trap where people read a lot of words, but don't connect those words to reality, which requires action.
If you only manipulate words (e.g. "intelligence" and "AGI" are big ones), then you're prone to believing in and reflecting illusions.
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You didn't ask for advice, but you say you're not feeling good. I would draw an analogy to a friend who in 2017 was preoccupied with Trump possibly causing a nuclear war with North Korea. There were a lot of memes in the news about this.
Now certainly I couldn't say at the time that it was impossible. But looking back 6 years, I'm glad that I completely ignored it and just lived my life. And that isn't to say it's gone, and not real -- certainly something like that could happen in the future, given the volatile political situation. But it's simply out of my control. (And that's what I told my friend -- are you going to DO anything about it?)
Regardless of what you believe, I think if you just stop reading memes, and do other stuff instead, you won't regret it in 6 years.
I agree with the Substack in that rationalists can be curiously irrational when it comes to examining where they get their own beliefs. (Or…
Oh wow, hello!
Seems like it was quite a time to be online. I mostly know of it through this version of events. Not sure how accurate you'd find it:
https://aiascendant.substack.com/p/extropias-children-chapter-1-the-wunderkind
The word "extropy" itself seems to go back several decades before the mailing list, if I'm reading correctly here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extropianism. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if many/most of the original mailing list members found this usage a corruption.
A series of blog posts about it[1]: https://aiascendant.substack.com/p/extropias-children-chapter-1-the-wunderkind
[1] I think, this is Yudkowsky, Lesswrong, MIRI, the doom cult it became, the crazy revelations like https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe and https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/qa14kg/my_experience_at_and_around_miri_and_cfar/
If you'd like to read more about the roots of Effective Altruism, ranging from old mailing lists, LessWrong, bitcoin, cults, AI and the surprising connections to many well known figures in tech, I highly recommend the 7-part Extropia's Childen series from Jon Evans [1]
1. https://aiascendant.substack.com/p/extropias-children-chapter-1-the-wunderkind
I don't want to speak for GP, but I doubt it's coincidental. Many if not most people's first exposure to "rationalism" was via Yudkowsky's Harry Potter fanfic. There's a pretty decent rundown of rationalism's history in Extropia's Children [1].
[1] https://aiascendant.substack.com/p/extropias-children-chapter-1-the-wunderkind
"Effective Altruism Is Not A Cult" sounds like what a cult would say :)
Sure sounds like a cult in practice, especially in the whole context ( https://aiascendant.substack.com/p/extropias-children-chapter-4-what-you-owe the other 6 parts of the series are great reading too).