7 ms·

"Ratinalists" are basically libertarians that are coy about it.

• antonvs 1y ago
  They're more culty than libertarians. They're a lot like the modern-day version of Ayn Rand's Objectivism, which is also libertarian. I remember people getting involved in that at university in the '80s and thinking how cult-like it all was - people feeling they had "found the truth" and wanting to recruit new members. Rationalism seems to be playing a similar role for a certain type of person in Silicon Valley today, fulfilling an emotional/religious need. Another way to look at it: Scientology, but replace Xenu with Yudkowsky and volcanoes with Harry Potter, or something.
  • krapp 1y ago
    It will never cease to amuse me that people calling themselves "rationalists" wound up recreating Pascal's Wager from first principles, just with time travelling robots, and drove themselves to sometimes murderous insanity over it. And that their Bible is essentially a Harry Potter fanfic. These are the dipshits conspiring to shape our future, control our destiny and create the Machine God in their image. They make the billionaires messing around the big owl at Bohemian Grove look positively tame and... rational.
    • antonvs 1y ago
      In my more benevolent moments, despite not being religious, I take a Jesus-like attitude: "Forgive them, they know not what they do." It all seems to have been a very predictable consequence of the de-emphasis of teaching any humanities at all in favor of STEM uber alles. It's like the line from "Kung Pow: Enter the Fist": "Pay no attention to Wimp Lo, we purposely trained him wrong... as a joke." Except it wasn't a joke, it was an economic strategy. > time traveling robots Won't someone think of the children, I mean, future simulated me?
• lanfeust6 1y ago
  You don't know what you're talking about. There are just as many socialists among them.