Post by @Architeuthis@awful.systems

2026-09-17 11:15 UTC

51-post long thread on why rats are a cult, Jjust finished reading it. woke: Everyone is polyamorous, everyone attends the same events, everyone lives in group homes together, everyone venerates the same few authors, and everyone is very worried about AI doom. They are all very contrarian together. Rationalism as a whole is a religious movement. Not everyone takes marching orders. The core people who mostly live together and attend events and especially orgies in Berkeley are a sex cult, and the ones that aren’t having any sex are part of the wider movement and are its recruiting funnel. Any time you get more than a few people who are deeply concerned with AI doom together, it seems like their natural form of organization looks like a cult; rationalism as a whole is less of a cult than it is a cult factory. Some of these cults have gone very badly. One of them is the Zizians. broke: I feel about [CEOs talking about AI progress slowdown] roughly the same way I would feel about all the pharmaceutical companies getting together to say they wanted to waive anti-trust laws so they could form a cartel to ban medical research: these people are the enemies of humanity. Also: Much of AI research IS medical research. They are very literally proposing to stop a pretty good chunk of medical research in its tracks so that they don’t have to fear the paperclipper. It’s possible he has a similar affliction to Doctorow, where he thinks this tech is neutral on its own and can be sufficiently decoupled from its hypercapitalist pushers who would much prefer democracy be swapped for modernised feudalism, or who at least think it’s fine to collapse global systems of knowledge transfer for a quick buck. Still, attributing medical research to AI without discriminating between LLMs and vintage orthodox machine learning that doesn’t actually need infinity GPUs inside a climate regulated warehouse the size of the Peloponnese that also needs to be powered by two active volcanos to work is very TESCREAL coded, LLMs doing Great Things Worth Ruining The World Over in medical research only works under the assumption of some singularity type event being just around the corner. And also the part where he thinks it’s normal to declare people who fuck with AI as enemies of humanity. Basically segyges feels like controlled opposition, just not by EAs, perhaps other people who don’t mind that he never brings up the pervasive eugenics angle? He certainly posts (including in LessWrong) like it’s his day job. Or maybe he just really wants the basilisk to like him.

Replies (5)

@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-09-17 13:08

he has a slobstack (ofc) btw did you know the Luddites weren’t actually working class (n/m they predated the Marxist proletariat by like 75 years or so) www.verysane.ai/p/against-the-luddites

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@Soyweiser@awful.systems 2026-09-17 14:37

is less of a cult than it is a cult factory. Cult incubator. Use the correct Silicon Valley terms please.

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@o7___o7@awful.systems 2026-09-17 16:46

I feel like he lifted “cult factory” without attribution. Was that Robert Evans?

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@istewart@awful.systems 2026-09-17 20:09

Basically segyges feels like controlled opposition, just not by EAs, perhaps other people who don’t mind that he never brings up the pervasive eugenics angle? He certainly posts (including in LessWrong) like it’s his day job. Maybe, but I’m also willing to buy that Gyges (and the other tech-employed wannabe-calm AI centrists populating Bluesky) genuinely believes in the broad concept of “AI” as the necessary next stage of techno-progressivism. He and his fellow travelers are just positioning themselves as the sane, sober, starched-shirt Presbyterian sort of believer, as opposed to the tongue-speaking, snake-handling Pentacostals that are the hardcore rationalists. It’s important to understand that the eugenics aspects are never going to be a particularly high concern for people like Gyges. They’ve comfortably made it past the selection filters in education and employment that are relics of the eugenics movement, so they think IQ-supremacy and neo-phrenology can’t hurt them anymore. It’s when this attitude curdles into fear that someone might revoke the status conferred by passage through such selection filters that you get a DHH, Shuttleworth, etc. I think that’s a prominent root cause as to why I, and many of us here, can’t trust a Gyges type. They may differ with the fascists right now, but they also have no innate defense against ethical freefall.

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@fullsquare@awful.systems 2026-09-18 06:28

now you have it straight from source: e/acc, distinct from EA, is a rival ideology about technology. (somewhere in this mix someone called me e/acc. i am not. if you’re going to classify me in this space, i am something like a Kurzweilian h+ e/acc is a troll ideology for upsetting EA people and scamming pmarca.) then he complains about sneerclub for some reason, damn i can’t guess why LLMs doing Great Things Worth Ruining The World Over in medical research there are entire wet labs whose software stack predates openai. go and ask anyone who works in a moderately long operating lab if there’s any load bearing Thing that runs under windows xp control or older (there will be). there are some extremely limited applications of pre-llm ml in drug design, but it’s trained on entirely different type of data and it does entirely different thing and i’d say it’s not load bearing. these things are expected to be fed with new data from testing new things provided in previous iterations and if you hit something you’ll get there on your own. all of that data is noisy

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