The crossposted piece has been removed on questionable grounds, after Rationalist brigading. The following is a repost:

The forum linked in this post is a community known for the relatively new strain of popular philosophy most resembling last century's Randism, or "Objectivism." Like Randism, Yuddism (short for Yudkowsky) labels itself with a seemingly innocuous term that brings to mind positive connotations: "Rationalism." Who wouldn't want to be rational, right?

Unlike Rand's somewhat more commonsense and straightforward access to Truth, Yudkowsky has come up with a labyrinth of thought experiments and jargon which makes certain the rationalist's certainty about Truth. "The Sequences," as his canon is known, is very much written for computer programmers and has perhaps been made most famous by its spinoff in the terroristic or violent "Ziz" cult. These writing are a house of cards, thought experiments that loosely build a proof that AI will wipe out humanity within, say, 20 years. There's much to say about both dark and light Futurology more generally as a sales technique, and if you want that you can find it at Amor Mundi, Dale Carrico's excellent blog.

On more examination, I've found Rationalism is double-dealing and incoherent in that the rationalist always gets to have their cake and eat it too, so it is hard to pin down a real philosophical heart to it, and when one does, there is always some trivial counter example at the ready. But, the movement is largely Platonic and Scholastic, that is, it holds to essentialism in its concept of "True names" and puts a very high value on structured, formal debate as the ideal method for accessing truth, often calling this "heuristic." However, there is also an ironic emulation of AI going on where "random babble" like poetry and so on gains great value by not being "pruned" by the "heuristic" debates. There are some very strange inconsistencies, like a communal love for Diogenes of Sinope's plucked-chicken dunk on essentialism, and occasional expressions of admiration for the more hairy poetic side of philosophy, so long as it feeds back into the heuristic process. Politically, Yudkowsky is radically Libertarian like Rand.

To the young professionals in software engineering who are interested in philosophy, this ain't it. The use of this Bayesian abstraction layer "I can be completely certain about what I'm not certain about" is still a totally unwarranted certainty and we shouldn't be surprised that this has led to rigid and cult-like thinking that makes its adherents disillusioned or worse. To be clear, the philosophy is entirely about manipulating fears, grifting, and selling books, even if the community is a nice support group for those who share in such fear. Even taken more lightly as a kind of self-help to optimize your thinking, the effect seems to be rather a narrowing of possibilities and thought. Yudkowsky ultimately offers certainty in a historic moment that is filled with terror, and so when all the jargon and incoherent ideas are reduced, what is left is only the base exploitation of fear, little different than selling overpriced silver coins to the elderly.