SneerClub

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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.

AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)

This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.

[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]

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The Oblivious Inside Story Of Leverage Research 1.0 (lydialaurenson.substack.com)

submitted 3 months ago by Architeuthis@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems

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Copied from the stubsack:

The Inside story of Leverage Research

This should be interesting, it's about an organisation in the EA milieu that even other EAs though might be a bit too culty. Don't know who the writer Lydia Laurenson is, but she does come off as a bit of a cult enthusiast herself, and is probably more than a bit rationalist adjacent.

edit: The companion piece about the background of why she wrote it is quite a ride, if only for the biographical tidbits: she is indeed very cult adjacent, she had a spiritual experience and now believes in capital G god, she got engaged to an unnamed far-right writer but they broke up when she got pregnant.

Also the Leverage article was contracted to appear in the New York Magazine but she pulled the story because of uh declining trust in the field of journalism, but then she goes on to imply that the real problem was that the article was shaping up as a bit too pro-Leverage:

I pulled the story once I started feeling like it simply wouldn’t be possible for me to publish a version with NYMag that didn’t carry a subtle hostility towards Leverage, not to mention affiliated communities in Silicon Valley — and, more importantly to me, hostility towards a core spiritual sensibility that I see in both myself and in the people the story describes.

edit edit: Why can't these people ever be normal: Why I Was Part Of The Neoreactionary or Dissident Right Movement In 2020

edit edit edit: Jesus fucking christ she's Curtis Yarvin's baby momma.

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[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 0 points 3 months ago

It's weird to see the Great Founder Theory laid out so clearly because it's basically explicitly declaring allegiance to what I was starting to call the Great Man Theory of Everything - the belief that rather than being historically contingent and reliant on circumstances as much as any personal characteristics some people are just innately "agentic" in a way that others aren't and the key to success isn't in finding a way to navigate the world but in unlocking this "agentic" quality in yourself. Notably the corollary of doing this (or of being one of those special innately "agentic" people) is that you have the right and duty to impose your will on the malleable clay of the world and people around you. I maintain that this is the rotten kernel at the heart of so many of the batshit weird things that the rats believe and do, and the fact that it simply isn't true is why their broader schemes keep sputtering out or failing, though with enough money and power behind them that they continue to leave a frankly impressive amount of human suffering in their wake.