this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2025
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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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I know this is a shit post but I think we should probably spare some thought for the connection between Adam Weishaupt and modern technofascist grifters in the sense of trying to profit from building a social club/identity around a set of ideas that are broadly popular among a subset of wealthy elites but not necessarily powerful in wider society. Given their shared (professed) allegiance to the enlightenment and progress I cannot see him being anything other than proud of what Lighthaven or MIRI have accomplished in the field of separating people from their money.
The Behind The Bastards podcast had a sequence of episodes looking at the idea of The Illuminati (from Weishaupt, through anti-Masonic panics, Discordianism, and the idea’s inglorious most recent resting place, Qanon), and their summary of Weishaupt’s organisation was that it was a grift: an organisation whose ostensible purpose was to provide an endless ladder of “esoteric knowledge” the idle rich would pay to climb, with its actual “inner teachings” being the advancement of controversial ideas like secularism and human rights, which many of the marks climbing the ladder would have doubtlessly found objectionable, so they were palmed off with recycled alchemy/kabbalah and secret codes.
That's exactly what I was thinking of, only with the kabbalah replaced by generic self-help and a list of cognitive biases.
Ed: or, y'know, kabbalah