r/rational started off as an offshoot of r/hpmor, but they also quite like a particular flavour of power fantasy, stories about progressively getting good at things, litrpgs that "make sense" along a very particular axis, anti-death stories, etc. I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with any of this and I still sometimes dip a toe into the subreddit to find this kind of fiction -- I absolutely adore stories like *Mother of Learning* and *Worth the Candle*, and these are in their wheelhouse. They are mostly unaffected by the r/themotte assholes, but occasionally a redpiller wanders in, someone gets a bit too enamoured with the Cult of Yud, or one of the starslatecodex types comes in to wage the right wing's "culture war", though this last type of post does get shut down by the mods. Part of how I ended up on sneerclub (besides the massive hypocrisy of the author of one of their favorite stories, "Animorphs: The Reckoning", who is unfortunately *also* a major figure in the wider non-fictional 'rational' sphere) was because I frequented r/rational and at one point the culture-war types started a big backlash against someone who was tagging nazi shit or transphobic stories like "With One Ring" as such, and I was just like, yeah, if we can't bring ourselves to to oppose literal nazis, we kind of deserve a sneerclub.

So you're more or less on the money about Eliezer Yudkowsky. Now, here's more about him, that's mostly relevant: He took money from Peter Thiel of Palantir, who may or may not want to become a vampire. This is for his "AI research foundation". However, perhaps his most cited and most well-known publication is the fanfiction "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality," and not any of his papers on "Timeless Decision Theory" or whatever he's trying to sell these days. HPMOR, the fanfic, has had some controversy over the years. First was when EY said that he'd update faster if people donated to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, without mentioning that he owned MIRI. There were a few passages that were fairly racist, but they got edited out after backlash. There's also a history of questionable [reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/HPMOR/comments/3ikzva/hpmor_reading_companion/cuijhq0/) [comments](https://www.reddit.com/r/HPMOR/comments/2ytvky/has_the_author_read_canon_or_just_the_wiki_sources/cpcw71f/) where EY just cannot accept that his fanfiction isn't perfect. Finally, as the capper to it all, he tried to get a fan work Hugo for his fanfiction. Thankfully, he did not. EY also publishes a blog called LessWrong. Usually these are jargon filled and purport to make you more 'rational' but in actuality they are fairly dense and I think they're meant to make you feel smart after reading them without actually teaching you anything? The ideas here are basically Bayes' Theorem can do anything, Many Worlds Interpretation is correct, and the most important thing you can do with your life is prevent Skynet from happening (so you should donate to MIRI). Together with HPMOR, LW 'Sequences' form the core text of Yudkowskian 'rationality'. Also, HPMOR was explicitly written to recruit people to this ideology. Now, I'm moving more onto hearsay as opposed to statements supported by Yudkowsky quotes, but supposedly Yudkowsky used his reputation and his recruiting and the fear of robot Satan to get people to join MIRI and do unpaid labor for him, and also have sex with him. This has led people to accuse LessWrong of being a cult. I'm focusing primarily on the fandom side of things because that is what I'm familiar with. TLDR: consider lurking more.

I would suggest browsing the relevant people and organizations on RationalWiki.

Eliezer Yudkowsky was a self-described "child prodigy" who was heavily influenced by time spent, in the late '90s and early '00s, on a transhumanist mailing list called "extropy". (Transhumanism is, broadly speaking, the aim of using technology to improve humanity by such means as, for example, turning everyone into cyborgs or developing life extension technology. There's a Wikipedia article.) He became a prominent personality on the extropy list and eventually wrote a large document about creating "friendly AI", a superhumanly intelligent machine that is compatible with human life i.e. will not just kill or enslave everyone in order to fulfill its own alien, inhuman goals. He founded the "Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence", an organisation devoted to ensuring that, when AI is eventually created, it is "friendly". He wrote a lot of wacky stuff around this time. A lot of this writing he has now disavowed, but he is still big on the "friendly AI" idea. [Here's a link to one page from around 2000](http://web.archive.org/web/20011123134822/http://sysopmind.com/tmol-faq/miscellaneous.html). (The Singularity Institute has since been renamed to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. "Singularity" refers to the science-fictional concept of developing a smarter-than-human AI, which can then develop an AI smarter than itself, and so on, with this rapid increase in intelligence causing an enormous increase in the general level of technology.) He joined a blog called "Overcoming Bias", where his co-author was economist Robin Hanson. Hanson is, in general, a deeply weird guy who tends to have pretty oddball libertarian beliefs. Yudkowsky's posts on the blog tended to be about things like teaching yourself to be smarter (by, say, *overcoming* cognitive *biases*). Eventually, Yudkowsky started his own blog called "Less Wrong" where he shifted to more of a focus on his idiosyncratic views on robots and quantum mechanics. He wrote a series of very lengthy posts called "the Sequences" where he goes into his beliefs in great detail. Less Wrong built up a pretty substantial community, who came to call themselves "rationalists". It was also a group blog that ran on the reddit software, so anyone could make an account, make a post, and the post would be voted on by other users. The heyday of Less Wrong was maybe some time around 2008-2012ish? It was over this period when Yudkowsky was writing his Harry Potter fanfic in an effort to promote and publicise his views. One very popular user on Less Wrong was Scott Alexander, who wrote many posts for the blog. He eventually started his own blog, called Slate Star Codex. Less Wrong eventually died down and Yudkowsky stopped making new posts, while Slate Star Codex grew more popular. The comment section there developed a reputation in certain circles as being a bit... soft (to put it charitably) on certain forms of right wing extremism related to novel variants of neo-fascism and scientific racism. (Scott Alexander has denied that the comment section was generally right-wing. By his self-descriptions, he is a libertarian-minded Clinton/Biden voter. If the topic of race and racism comes up, he will vaguely hint that he believes the scientific establishment is suppressing the truth about connections between race and intelligence.) /r/slatestarcodex is a subreddit for fans of the blog. /r/TheMotte was created to move "culture war" topics out of the main subreddit. /r/SneerClub is named after a Yudkowsky comment about people whose main mode of engagement is "sneering" at things. He was talking about a forum that didn't like his Harry Potter fanfic. Quote is in the sidebar. ----------- Here are some interesting quotes from Eliezer Yudkowsky (he does not necessarily stand by all of them): > I think my efforts could spell the difference between life and death for most of humanity, or even the difference between a Singularity and a lifeless, sterilized planet […] I think that I can save the world, not just because I'm the one who happens to be making the effort, but because I'm the only one who can make the effort. # > Striving toward total rationality and total altruism comes easily to me. […] I'll try not to be an arrogant bastard, but I'm definitely arrogant. I'm incredibly brilliant and yes, I'm proud of it, and what's more, I enjoy showing off and bragging about it. I don't know if that's who I aspire to be, but it's surely who I am. I don't demand that everyone acknowledge my incredible brilliance, but I'm not going to cut against the grain of my nature, either. The next time someone incredulously asks, "You think you're so smart, huh?" I'm going to answer, "*Hell* yes, and I am pursuing a task appropriate to my talents." If anyone thinks that a Friendly AI can be created by a moderately bright researcher, they have rocks in their head. This is a job for what I can only call Eliezer-class intelligence. # > If you don't sign up your kids for cryonics then you are a lousy parent. # > I am tempted to say that a doctorate in AI would be negatively useful, but I am not one to hold someone's reckless youth against them – just because you acquired a doctorate in AI doesn't mean you should be permanently disqualified. # > If you haven't read through the MWI sequence, read it. Then try to talk with your smart friends about it. You will soon learn that your smart friends and favorite SF writers are not remotely close to the rationality standards of Less Wrong, and you will no longer think it anywhere near as plausible that their differing opinion is because they know some incredible secret knowledge you don't. # > I must warn my reader that my first allegiance is to the Singularity, not humanity. I don't know what the Singularity will do with us. I don't know whether Singularities upgrade mortal races, or disassemble us for spare atoms. While possible, I will balance the interests of mortality and Singularity. But if it comes down to Us or Them, I'm with Them. You have been warned. # > I would be asking for more people to make as much money as possible if they're the sorts of people who can make a lot of money and can donate a substantial amount fraction, never mind all the minimal living expenses, to the Singularity Institute. > This is crunch time. This is crunch time for the entire human species. […] and it's crunch time not just for us, it's crunch time for the intergalactic civilization whose existence depends on us. I think that if you're actually just going to sort of confront it, rationally, full-on, then you can't really justify trading off any part of that intergalactic civilization for any intrinsic thing that you could get nowadays […] > […] having seen that intergalactic civilization depends on us, in one sense, all you can really do is try not to think about that, and in another sense though, if you spend your whole life creating art to inspire people to fight global warming, you're taking that 'forgetting about intergalactic civilization' thing much too far. # > Find whatever you're best at; if that thing that you're best at is inventing new math of artificial intelligence, then come work for the Singularity Institute. If the thing that you're best at is investment banking, then work for Wall Street and transfer as much money as your mind and will permit to the Singularity institute where [it] will be used by other people.

Ooh, thank you for the recommendation lmao

sometimes I genuinely miss The Last Psychiatrist, who could at least land a joke

That's a pretty big thing to ignore, but-- they were meant to become the resistance against skynet but instead they became nazis. Blindsight's probably a good option. The commenters gave the standard recommendations like Brandon Sanderson. Honestly the most effective suggestion there probably would've been literary fiction. EDIT: let me just rephrase that with qualifiers since someone was justifiably upset about me referring to painting a broad group as 'Nazis.' The people who read HPMOR and the Sequences were supposed to become the resistance against Skynet. However, a small minority, but one large enough that Eliezer Yudkowsky has expressed discomfort that they admire him so much, have adopted views that, if not literally the tenets of National Socialism, are similar enough to make a casual onlooker both deeply uncomfortable with the people and comfortable with calling them Nazis -- such as "Human Biodiversity" or unironic support of "The Bell Curve".

I loved hpmor when it started and I thought it was just a comedic deconstruction. Then the author Got Serious and while I still like bits of it, as a whole it has so many flaws.

I’m unconvinced that the project of eliminating one’s biases with the employment of dubious ontological claims about human nature and the scientific image is a “fair concern” on the level of ER

*The Last Samurai* by Helen DeWitt fits IMO. I'm looking at my bookshelves and it occurs to me that most of the "rationalist" types remind me of the narrator of *The Eye* by Nabokov.

I gotta imagine The Left Hand of Darkness would enrage them on every front, as well as being great. It's more about learning empathy with a truly alien experience than starting with it, I think which might make it even better.