Question for the hive mind

[entanglingbriars]

Does anyone either a) know of some good academic literature on the Rationalist cult or the Rationalist diaspora or b) have any clue how the hell you'd look for it?

Comments

[unknought]

I don't know of any, and I think if it existed I probably would have heard about it. The closest thing that comes to mind is Elizabeth Sandifer's Neoreaction: A Basilisk, which discusses Eliezer Yudkowsky as one of its main subjects and writes from a critical theory perspective. But it's not an academic work and not really subject to an academic level of rigor. I haven't read it but my impression is that it functions more as a clever and articulate attack than a sincere attempt at understanding anything, and that it overidentifies Yudkowskyian rationalism with neoreaction a la Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land. To be fair there are some unfortunate albeit indirect links between the two if you go a few years back, but I think that outside of the AI stuff Yudkowsky's a pretty boring California liberal in most of his politics, whereas Moldbug and Land want to reinstate feudalism and end humanity, respectively. Certainly I don't think the people you're likely to run into here or on Tumblr agree with neoreactionaries about much of anything.

[isaacsapphire]

Weirdly enough, I think I'd actually look at fanfiction studies to try to find academic reference to Rationalists. Their main form of initial recruitment was via a Harry Potter longfic, so I'd start there.

[entanglingbriars]

I'm not familiar with Land. When you say he wants to end humanity do you mean he wants us extinct or just the end of civilization?

[unknought]

Okay, that was pretty glib and probably wrong. But the impression I have of Land is that a) he thinks that machines will come to replace humans in every part of the economy and thence replace humans entirely, creating a world of production for its own sake without any beneficiary, and b) for some reason he thinks we should accelerate the process and bring that about as quickly as possible. I'm probably deeply confused about something here, but Land's philosophy is very weird and opaque and all of his object-level prescriptions that I've encountered seem pretty evil, so it's never seemed worthwhile to me to really understand what's going on there.

[are_youready]

From quietly lurking on the blogs of the like three rationalists I actually respect, NRX A Basilisk was pretty viciously mocked within the rationalist community. That's not an instant disqualification but it does suggest that the book should be viewed with a grain of salt. At this point in history, you could probably look into a) literature about effective altruism or b) essentially do oral history via reading things rationalists say on blogs, but that sounds both hard and obnoxious.