Oliver wrote an internal Lightcone Infrastructure memo that lists the top enemies of the Rationality movement. He saw fit to post his Enemies List to the site, because that's a very normal thing to do.

no. 2 is a neoreactionary troll who ran a downvote bot in 2013-2014.

Emile Torres is only #3, sorry Emile some of us are just better at increasing existential risk

no. 4 is Ziz. I am officially considered worse than the literally murderous death cult.

what can i say some of us have just got it

also I trounce complete pikers like (checks notes) Peter Thiel

LessWrong used to call themselves a "phyg" in the hope that the word "cult" would not show up in Google so much as being associated with them

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[–] scruiser@awful.systems 11 points 2 days ago (1 children)

This is somewhat reassuring, as it suggests that he doesn’t fully understand how cultural critiques of LW affect the perception of LW more broadly;

This. On Reddit (which isn't actually mainstream common knowledge per se, but I still find it encouraging and indicative that the common sense perspective is winning out) whenever I see the topic of lesswrong or AI Doom come up on unrelated subreddits, I'll see a bunch of top upvoted comments mentioning the cult spin offs or that the main thinker's biggest achievement is Harry Potter fanfic or Roko's Basilisk or any of the other easily comprehensible indicators that these are not serious thinkers with legitimate thoughts.

[–] hrrrngh@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I've seen the same thing and it's reassuring lol.

I lurk on subreddit drama and curated tumblr, and I feel like the common reaction to LW has gone from a few negative comments and "really? that's crazy"'s five years ago to being much more aware. Years ago you'd see maybe one person familiar with them and then a couple people respond who are totally out of the loop and maybe you'd see one crazy rationalist chime in to nuh-uh them. Now, anything rationalist-related usually has a bunch of people bringing up the harry potter or acausal robot god stuff right away.

I use the tag feature a lot in RES to keep track of people who I like hearing what they have to say. Years ago I mostly saw the same names when LW stuff came up, but now there's always a ton of people I've never seen before who are familiar with it.

It's also reassuring because I really don't want to be the person to say anything first and it's easier to chime in on a discussion someone else has already started.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago

The problem with writing a Harry Potter fanfic as your cult recruitment tool is that you end up having written a Harry Potter fanfic as your cult recruitment tool.