Yep, the above is a snapshot from the middle of an edit war. It’s already been drastically trimmed down. I should have waited for it to settle before sharing it. Please disregard that post!
I don’t wish to hijack this important thread but I must say that the arcane knowledge of the Dope amazes me again.
Thank you. But I am just a nerd. I gather many other Dopers play D&D as well. There is a thread somewhere around here about the lates edition, the changes made in that edition, and how Hasbro is treating the wholly owned subsidiary that owns and publishes D&D.
He’s doing fantastically well, thanks for asking. He just turned five yesterday. BCBA says that in most domains he is “a stone’s throw away” from typical child development for his age. The only areas where he’s still really struggling are his social skills and pragmatic speech, and I think that’s always going to be an issue for him, and his feeding issues, which have not improved after two years of therapy. He is terminating ABA in July (with a regular social skills group 1x per week, OT, speech and feeding 1x per week) and starting mainstream Kindergarten in the Fall, where he is expected to do well, with supports. He remains insanely smart and wants to know about everything, at all hours of the day, and he talks nonstop and obviously has ADHD like his mother, but that’s a problem for another year. 
I’m deeply sorry that people will use this to denigrate trans people and villify them even more than they are already unjustly villified. I can’t imagine what the trans experience is right now but my heart is with you.
I came in to point you to a podcast episode I listened to today on Behind the Bastards. Robert Jordan takes his time with his subjects, so by the end of Episode 1 you’ve only scratched the surface. He introduces the topic, talks a little bit about tactics used by cultists, and then launches into a description of the “Rationalist” subculture this cult came from, which is apparently based mostly on Harlan Ellison’s short story, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. According to him, one of the seminal works of the Rationalist is a Harry Potter fanfiction where Harry Potter is a sociopath who manipulates people to usher in the Singularity. Weird shit.
Part One: The Zizians: How Harry Potter Fan Fiction Inspired a Death Cult
I would consider Robert Jordan, if not an expert, at least expert-adjacent on the subject of cults, as he has covered so many cults extensively. I look forward to the deep dive into this one.
The Pennsylvania official in charge of dealing with covid and explaining things to the public when the pandemic hit, was a trans woman. One of the first questions she was asked was about that. Her answer, in very polite words, was ‘My gender is not important. I am a qualified medical doctor telling you what you need to do to stay alive. You should be quiet and listen’
She will of course not be mentioned by trans phobes. The same way when Americans says socialism does not work, they point to one or two countries having problems and ignore all the others that are fine.
I have never gotten around to reading the story or playing the game. I have heard great things about the story. I, seriously, question any group founded on Ellison’s work. Depending on your viewpoint and sources the man was either a real jerk or a ginormous a-hole. Yes, he could really write. That does not change the fact that he was a ginornous a-hole.
I haven’t read it yet. It’s just kind of funny that they took a compelling short story and tried to create this veneer of credibility that it might actually happen by couching it in various thought experiments, and really it all sounds very silly.
Just read the story for the first time, and holy hell. Tying that to any self-described rationalist ethos is just, well… nuts.
I love Ellison’s stories, but he was almost pure emotion. Rational thought was not his thing.
Then again, that emotion was usually rage against some perceived injustice, so I can see someone getting violent after reading one of his works.
I said I wasn’t going to post in this thread again, but oh dear. Rationalism was started by a guy called Eliezer Yudkovsky who wrote a series of blog posts called the Sequences, originally on economist Robin Hanson’s blog Overcoming Bias, then on his own site called LessWrong. Rationalism itself is about thinking better, avoiding common pitfalls and fallacies, eliminating biases and so on. Yudkovsky also wrote a somewhat famous Harry Potter fanfic called ‘Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality’ in order to illustrate his ideas.
Here’s a very old post where he explains it:
Samples:
I haven’t read the Sequences or very much of LessWrong, I mostly know about it from reading Scott Alexander’s blog SlateStarCodex (now AstralCodexTen); he’s part of the rationalist community and a much more approachable author. I’d 100% recommend reading his most famous essays.
Yudkovsky himself mostly talks about AI safety these days: he’s obsessed with the idea AI superintelligence will almost inevitably lead to the extinction of humanity. But there is a whole ecosystem of related ideas held mostly by techy sorts of people in the Bay Area of California - transhumanists, AI accelerationists, some who want humans to be replaced by AI. For obvious reasons, these groups do not get along.
The Effective Altruism movement also arose out of this subculture: basically, working out how to do the most good with the money you donate, often based on Utilitarian principles. A lot of the original board members of OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT and Dall-E, were Rationalists/Effective Altruists. It’s been pretty influential.
So does anyone keep track of how the Magasphere is covering stuff? Does Ziz come up much there as a horror story to scare the MAGAts about where tolerating trans rights gets you? Or is the 24/7 burning turd-filled dumpster fire show of Trump leaving no room for such trivialities?
Yeah, what’s so arcane about that? doesn’t everybody know about liches and phylacteria? …
Sadly, no. Many children grow up never hearing about liches or beholders. You can help stop this horrible epidemic. Give generously to TSR, just nineteen dollars a month, so that no child grows up without a lucky D20.
From what I’ve seen, the latter. It’s been reported in right-wing media, but hasn’t been made a big deal of.
I almost forgot-
Phylactery are a real thing. The most obvious example is tefilin. These are small, wooden boxes which hold tiny scrolls containing certain verses from the Torah. They are attached to long leather straps. One box is worn on the head. The other is worn on the arm. John of Patmos, author of Revelation, makes a reference to them with the mark of the beast. Instead of wearing the phylactery commanded by the Lord on our forehead and hand, people will wear the mark of the beast there.
To bring things back to topic- A quick Google on phylactery also brings up that one of the Harry Potter books contains The Amulet Of Tyranus, which is also referred to as “The Phylactery”. I never got around to reading the books before Rowling revealed herself as a raging transphobic bigot. I certainly will not read them now.
I may as well post this essay now, about the unihemispheric sleep thing and other Zizian beliefs. It points out that the method of keeping one eye open and focusing on some kind of distraction while the other eye is closed would not actually work, because the two halves of the brain do not each control one eye, they control half of the visual field in each eye (something I did know, but had forgotten). So even with one eye closed, both sides of the brain would be receiving input.
I didn’t know that. Interesting.
And yet it ends up in thought experiments like Roko’s Basilisk and the sham of the “Effective Altruism” movement, which could well go by Galbraith’s tenet that it is “one of man’s oldest, best financed, most applauded and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a truly superior moral justification for selfishness.”
Rationalism means more than one thing.
Historically, there was Cartesian rationalism where knowledge about the world can be gained without any experience of the world. That rationalism was about as dumb as it sounds and is not related to anything in the modern world called “rationalism”. Not really discussed outside of philosophy classrooms. I expect that very few people in the 21st century who call themselves rationalists are Cartesian rationalist.
Prior to the tech bro rationalists, modern rationalism was and is explicitly empiricist and is well described by Yudkovsky’s first point quoted in Demontree’s post above
This involves things like understanding your biases so you can mitigate them and generally thinking with your brain instead of your gut. Science is smarter than my feelings and that sort of thing.
Ziz style rationalism claims to be part of the same thing but expands into unsupportable nonsense like Effective Altruism. It’s a kind of cargo cult rationalism that tries to emulate the form of rationalism without the substance. It starts with the assumption of tech bro superiority and works backward from there.
Global education standards are in sad decline.
If this were true, people like Andrew Tate wouldn’t have millions of dollars from misguided kids trying to unlock the secret to getting laid. Which Tate then uses to buy fancy shit and get himself laid. Who needs to start a cult in your home town these days?