Memes

There are entire sites dedicated to "Rationalism". It's a quasi-cult of pseudointellectual wankery that's mostly a bunch of sub-cults of personalities based around the worst people you'll ever meet. A lot of tech bros bought into it because for whatever terrible thing they want to do, some Rationalist has probably already written a thirty page manifesto on why it's actually a net good and moral act and preemptively kissing the boot of whoever is "brave" enough to do it.

Their "leader" is a highschool dropout and self-declared genius who is mainly famous for writing a "deconstructive" Harry Potter fanfiction despite never reading the books himself; a work that's more preachy than Atlas Shrugged and mostly consists of regurgitated content from his blog and ripoffs of Ender's Game alongside freshmen-level (and often wrong) understandings of basic science.

He also has this weird hard-on about true AI inevitably escaping the lab by somehow convincing researchers to free it through pure, impeccable logic.

Re: that last point: I first heard of Elizier Yudkowsky nearly twenty years ago, long before he wrote Methods of Rationality (the aforementioned fanfiction). He was offering a challenge on his personal site where he'd roleplay as an AI that had gained sentience and you as its owner/gatekeeper, and he bet he could convince you to let him connect to the wider internet and free himself using nothing but rational arguments. He bragged about how he'd never failed and that this was proof that an AI escaping the lab was inevitable.

It later turned out he'd set a bunch of artificial limitations on debaters and what counterarguments they could use and made them sign an NDA before he'd debate them. He claimed that this was so future challengers couldn't "cheat" by knowing his arguments ahead of time (because as we all know, "perfect logical arguments" are the sort that fall apart when given enough time to think about them /s).

It shouldn't come as a shock that it was eventually revealed he'd lost multiple of these debates even with those restrictions, declared that those losses "didn't count", and forbid the other person from talking about them using the NDA they'd signed so he could keep bragging about his perfect win rate.

Anyway, I was in no way surprised when he used his popularity as a fanfiction writer to establish a cult around himself. There's an entire community dedicated to following and mocking him and his proteges if you're interested - IIRC it's ~~!techtakes@awful.systems~~ !sneerclub@awful.systems.