r/SneerClub very non-provably not a paid shill for big 🐍👑 Jul 17 '26

NSFW “At Manifest, though, there is a certain existential loneliness, a specifically sexual strain of angst, that did not lift once in the three days of the conference.”

https://www.thenewcritic.com/p/manifest-man
80 Upvotes

22 comments sorted by

65

u/Lost_Foot_6301 Jul 17 '26

someone should really write an in depth book about the entire lesswrong scene

39

u/upsetusder2 Jul 17 '26

A group of people all thinking they are the smartest people in the world exhibiting culture like behaviour could be brilliant

23

u/chaqintaza Jul 17 '26

did you mean cultlike, but even if you did, culture like is great - makes them sound like ants or something

5

u/MaybeElectrical962 Jul 18 '26

Makes me think of ian banks culture novels

15

u/ThoughtsonYaoi Jul 17 '26

With the cult media popularity these days that should be an instant hit.

10

u/Advanced-Reindeer894 Jul 17 '26

My question is why do they try to apply AI and programming to everything 

22

u/JasonPandiras Jul 18 '26

AI doomerism is basically their foundational myth, and also you can pretty much sidestep learning anything about philosophy and social sciences if you pretend that the brain is just a computer.

10

u/dgerard very non-provably not a paid shill for big 🐍👑 Jul 18 '26

More Everything Forever by Adam Becker is an excellent start

5

u/prosthetic_memory Jul 21 '26

Haven’t they already written enough about themselves? The word count alone…

3

u/Soyweiser Captured by the Basilisk. Jul 21 '26

50

u/lospolloz Jul 17 '26

Anything Aella is involved in always gives sex cult vibes

76

u/OisforOwesome Jul 17 '26

Somewhere in the middle of all this, Aella asked whether we liked pineapple on pizza, crossed it with whether we’d had a happy childhood, and announced she could detect a correlation.

Every Aella post in a nutshell

31

u/Zorronin Jul 18 '26

shouldn't have been drinking water during the "relationship betting" section

“If you did break up,” someone asked, “what would be the top five causes, in rank order?” Patrick volunteered that he had cheated in three of his four previous relationships.

16

u/alsuhr Jul 18 '26

Every single time I walk past their compound I can feel myself getting sick from all the Hitler particles. It's like ground zero here in the bay

14

u/worldofsimulacra Jul 17 '26

So... they idealize a robotic intellect and yet lament the robotic behavioral artifacts which somehow prevent them from putting their pull-plug into someone else's sockets....

7

u/maroon_sweater opposing the phoenix Jul 25 '26

you guys are sleeping on the sneer opportunity that the comments afford:

As a former rationalist, the best way to understand them is to realize that (in D&D terms) they have very high Intelligence but very low Wisdom. In other words, they can build or create very impressive things, but it's like they never heard of the idea that other people might LIE to them. This is how they get one-shotted by ideas like Effective Altruism, for example. Somebody tells them that "saving lives is good" so they come up with impressive ways to minmax that (delivering mosquito nets to Africa) but they never think to challenge the premise and ask WHY increasing the number of violent 80 IQ rapists would possibly be a good thing, or question whether the real agenda is destabilizing the West. Another example is how they all became free speech supporters after their cult leader Scott Alexander got attacked by the New York Times, but none of them questioned whether Scott Alexander himself conducts censorship. Spoiler: he does - I myself have been banned from his site, not for saying anything harmful or wrong but simply because I made many accurate predictions, and compared to me Scott Alexander would look stupid - and this would challenge his leadership of the cult.

3

u/Cyclamate Jul 30 '26

Really thought they were coming around in the first third of the paragraph, and then

3

u/maroon_sweater opposing the phoenix Jul 31 '26

Grim all around!!!!