When I was 15, I was a stereotypical autistic white male nerd. I had few friends, none of them close, and I spent a large fraction of my time in front of a PC, playing video games or learning to program. Throughout middle and high school, I was always bullied by the “popular kids” because I was a “weird loser”.
One day I was reading Hacker News and I come across a link to a blog post by this man, Eliezer Yudkowsky, basically talking about how religion was stupid. I too was an edgy atheist back then (cringe), and I ate it up. LessWrong became my “special interest”; I digested dozens of blog posts written by this guy every month. His writings appealed to me because they taught a highly systemizing and logical way of viewing the world. I had always found it overwhelming to deal with the actual messy world full of uncertainties and social-emotional factors, so being able to simply plug things into an equation seemed like a relief. Around this time, I also started feeling like EY was one of the few people in the world who was actually enlightened, and that LessWrong members were somehow superior to everyone else because they knew about cognitive biases or some shit. God just thinking about this makes me cringe.
Back then, LessWrong was full of articles about topics like “Human Biodiversity” and “Pick-Up Artistry”. Nowadays LessWrong has much less discussion of these topics, but I still think they’re popular in the wider “rationalist” orbit. There is hardly anything more toxic to expose a young male to than these terrible ideas. I started reading Chateau Heartiste and practicing negging on my female classmates; suffice it to say that I didn’t lose my virginity until much later in life.
When I graduated high school, I moved to the Bay Area so I could be around these “superior” rationalist people instead of all the worthless plebeians of my hometown. Once I actually met them in person, I stopped thinking of them as Gods of rationality who were sent from above to reveal timeless truths to humanity. They were just nerds who shared similar interests to me. Nonetheless, this was the first time I had a real sense of belonging or community in my life, since my family disowned me for being an atheist and my classmates never treated me with respect. Almost all of them were white and male, and some of them were autistic, so I felt like I fit in completely.
Over the years, I started to question the core LessWrong dogma. Is science flawed because they don’t use Bayes’ Theorem? Is it really true that an artificial intelligence is soon going to come into existence and kill all humans? Does learning about cognitive biases even make you more successful in life? Are different races superior or inferior based on their average IQ?
When I told my rationalist friends about my doubts, they’d always come up with some plausible-sounding response to justify the ideology. But through reading actual philosophy and science books, learning about social justice, and personal reflection, I decided that basically none of the core LessWrong dogma is even right. It is just designed to appeal to nerdy white males who want to feel elite and superior to everyone else. And I believe Yudkowsky made up this ideology in order to attract donations to his scam institute.
The moment when I decided I could no longer call myself a rationalist is when I realized that Jaron Lanier has more insightful things to say about technology than Nick Bostrom. I cut all my rationalist “friends” out of my life, moved back to my hometown of Raleigh NC, and tried to learn to become a good person instead of a heartless, calculating robot. I read books about emotional intelligence, sociology, and feminism. While I was working in a library, I met my first girlfriend and now wife, a black psychology student, and we now have a baby on the way. I am so glad that I left this terrible cult and learned to live in the real world.
/rant
As a spectrum person, I feel bad for my ND brothers and sisters who fell for that stuff and I’m glad you got out OP. Thankfully I was a humanities nerd so I already disliked Big Yud’s rhetoric, and I, through chance, had a lot of LGBT friends so I knew enough to suspect the right wing currents in Less Wrong thinking.
This is where I sort of fell out with Rationalism to begin with. People so obsessed with X-Risk, and the most they have to say about climate change is “AI will solve it”. And it’s… not good?
You should still cryogenically freeze your brain though, just in case.
Your family disowned you for being an atheist?? That’s awful, hope things are better now
Reading this is actually pretty helpful for me. I used to be attracted to the rationalist mindset and even went to one of their retreats. Like you, I felt accepted there in my nerdiness. But something felt not quite right. My doubts started creeping in when the host of one of their central events was called out for serially abusing women, and the “community council” decided that he is a “valuable contributor to the community” and as such will face no consequence. I’ve never looked at them the same since.
A sense of superiority and a desire to control everything with logic are nothing more than illusions that isolate you from other people. Proud of you for choosing happiness my guy, and best of luck being a father!
I’m new here.
Is this sub for nerdy autist white guys who have decided to trade in one overly simplistic, mechanical view of humanity (rationalism) for another (woke leftism)?
I despise the rationalists, but citing your wife’s identity as a “black psychologist” like some badge of honor is Richard Dawkins-level cringe.
Congratulations on your journey. This was a great read and it made me happy to hear you’ve reached a better place in life. And hey, cut your past self a little slack, eh? No one’s born with it all figured out.
I’m a skeptic about this post. The story it tells, seems just too perfect (from a SneerClub perspective).
I’m always so delighted to read posts like this. I was attracted to that cult in undergrad and it colored my worldview for much too long after that. Jaron Lanier is definitely a big inspiration for me as well, he has such a more well-rounded intelligence, including emotional, as opposed to the narrow hyper-rationalist myopia of mathing the world to bits.
Nice post & congrats on the kid! I had a similar experience moving to the Bay Area (but less rationalist-exposed I guess),
It’s weird how seeing people whom you know from the internet in person changes your perception of them. They seem fine up until they brag that they voted for the (extremely San Francisco) ballot proposition allowing police to destroy more houseless people’s few possessions. I executed my “gtfo now or you’ll turn into that” plan back then, haven’t looked back.
I’ve said before that I’m glad that I didn’t have the internet when I was a teenager. The more obvious reason is that having access to social media when I was younger–and thus a digital trail that would follow me around forever–would have ruined my life permanently. The other is that I can absolutely imagine getting roped into some of these online cults if I’d been exposed to them as a teen. (It wouldn’t have helped that the whole PUA thing wasn’t viewed very critically when it first got exposure in places like Rolling Stone and the NYT.)
Yuds is proving to be an inconsequential B-lister in his super niche field. He had plans to save the world but it turned out there were nicer, smarter, better looking people with more to offer humanity. As such, the only thing he’s really good at is being the #1 sneering logical fallacy guy on the internets.
This post is super interesting to me. I came across the “rationalists” and lesswrong about 2 years ago after becoming interesting in AI safety. I think coming across it when I was older (around 22) meant I was a lot more ready to be critical. For what it’s worth for this post, I did an undergrad in computer science, now I’m a PhD student studying the alignment problem and explanation.
I found some of Yudkowsky’s writing on superintelligence interesting, and I think some of his articles are well written (although a lot of the times he veers off in some wild unnecessary direction). However, I do recognise much of his ideology is flawed. I don’t think his institute (MIRI) is a scam - they are clearly dedicated to making progress on problems. I’ve generally stayed away from lesswrong - it has never been something that I have been involved with. Tbh most of what I know about them was from reading Tom Chiver’s book.
I think this crowd is right about a lot of things regarding rationality, and I think its interesting to see a group of people really trying to shake things up and challenge existing schools of thought. However, this does not excuse them from failing to understand the things they are criticising. I haven’t read much from this community, but if what you’re saying is true about their perspectives on race, feminism and politics - then clearly they are too dogmatically tied to their ideology.
It kind of feels like you’re moving from one icon to another. I think you had a really unhealthy experience and you are now trying to distance yourself from everything. IMO Bostrom’s perspective is important, but that doesn’t mean that he’s right about everything. I try to read as broadly as possible: multiple schools of AI, “continental” vs analytic philosophy, cognitive science vs psychoanalysis. Reading social science is so important for trying to understand the impacts that technology might have - even if to just break free from Dunning-Kruger. Anyways, to give something concrete: for AI safety, undoubtedly the best popsci books to read are Stuart Russell’s Human Compatible, or Brian Christian’s The Alignment Problem.
Otherwise, I totally agree with your assessment of how this environment lures in a particular demographic! I think much the same can be said about the “YouTube Skeptic” community and alt-right ideology. When I was 16/17 I started to get tugged in that direction. The furthest I got was watching Sargon of Akkad and thinking Milo Yiannolopous was some a funny guy with some good points (yuck!). I have since disengaged with that nonsense and have read actual feminism and social philosophy. I stopped even thinking about any of those things for a good few years, but now I have Contrapoints, PhilosophyTube and Shaun to thank for really hitting the final nail in the coffin for whatever was leftover.
Many such cases!
Glad to hear you’re doung so well! Also love me some Jaron Lanier.
Also on the spectrum, and while I was only ever Rationalist adjacent, I feel grateful to have found feminism first. I think it inoculated me from going down a very dark path.
Why did you cut off all your friends? Ideology aside, you said you had a sense of belonging so why why the drastic cutoff?
Rationalists are not nerds, they’re jocks.
What is “edgy” about atheism, and how is it “cringey?”
I was gonna upvote your post until seeing this comment. Now it’s downvoted.
Banning Roko’s Basilisk attested to me that the wiki is childish and actually pseudoscience, imagine calling yourself a rationalist and can’t cope with basic existencial crysis, for a moment I thought it could be cool, I just read one article.
No kink shaming.
traded one cult for another lol