Academic Philosophy has a Rat(ionalist) Problem

This is the text of an email that I wrote to my department's listserv on the occasion of a certain famous philosopher's visit to our campus to kick off a new annual lecture series funded by a mysterious AI-affiliated donor (who also funded an endowed chair). I include the name of the philosopher only because I think he is not exceptional in terms of his influences and openness to TESCREAL thought. (A recent graduate of our department also spoke a few years ago at Lighthaven, the former Berkeley Rose Garden Inn-turned-EA/Rationalist cult compound). Despite the professional risk, I have decided that, if I was willing to publish these thoughts to the semi-public department listserv, I should be willing to publish them here (and several people have asked me to). What follows has not been edited since the initial email.

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Hi everyone,

At the risk of becoming the cosmically necessary crazy older grad student on the listserv, I feel compelled to do a small amount of public education about a source cited in an upcoming talk. tl;dr Dave Chalmers cites some real shady shit. Go to the bibliography and look for "lesswrong" and "nostalgebraist". More below.

While reading through the draft paper associated with Dave Chalmer's upcoming talk (a very prominent one, since it's the first one associated with our new chaired position in AI and Philosophy), I noticed that it contains multiple citations to the webforum lesswrong .com and associated figures. While I know many brilliant, upstanding people who have come to philosophy through forums like lesswrong or its cousins like eaforums, or through fanfiction associated with these (primarily lesswrong guru Eliezer Yudkowsky's "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality"), I have come to understand over the years that the "Rationalist" movement, as the community around lesswrong .com and related blogs is known, promotes and hosts a number of contributors with deeply reprehensible views on "race science", eugenics, colonialism, sex and gender, and other topics. For example, a top-voted post from two weeks ago by a prominent member of the site states that the colonization of the Americas by European powers was "worth it", saying: 

"Ok, fine, I'll go even further. I am glad about the colonization of North America. The American experiment was one of the greatest successes in history, and of course, it was a giant fucking mess. But despite it all, despite the Trail of Tears, despite smallpox ravaging the land, despite the conquistadors and the looting and the rapes — it was still worth it. America is worth it. Democracy was worth it."

The writer of this comment, Oliver Habryka, runs local nonprofit Lightcone Infrastructure, which you might know as the possible owner of the former Rose Garden Inn on Telegraph. This venue, now called Lighthaven, hosts events for the rationalist community, including the conference "Manifest", described as "a festival of markets, and predictions thereof [sic]". In 2024, Manifest hosted eight speakers with ties to the so-called "human biodiversity" movement, most closely associated with the infamous book "The Bell Curve" by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein. Lesswrong also hosts more than 850 top-level posts discussing IQ, often in the context of "positive eugenics". Recent example. If you think this stuff is fine, please read this.

More broadly, "Rationalism" is part of a bundle of ideologies now often called "TESCREAL" (a cumbersome acronym that stands for: Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singulatarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, Longtermism). Many of these beliefs started in the Bay Area, including, in the 90s,"Extropianism", which today is largely defunct, but is notable to the philosophical community for hosting the email listserv on which Nick Bostrom used the n-word to express his belief that Black people are inherently less intelligent than white people. If you want to know more about TESCREAL, which I think you should given that it has produced local cults like the Zizians, several members of which are on trial for multiple murders, you can start with the excellent work of the Distributed AI Research Institute. This article in particular is a good resource.

I'm not sharing any of this info to persuade anyone not to go to Chalmer's talk; I simply have noticed that many of us have never heard of any of these online and real communities that play a very large role in our discipline's current landscape (not to mention, through the millions of dollars of donations to associated nonprofits by patrons of the movement, including Jeffrey Epstein and Peter Thiel, our world) and I think all of you deserve to be informed. In a 2018 reddit AMA, Chalmers was asked about lesswrong, and expressed his admiration for the site, saying, "i'm all in favor of having subcultures like this that generate interesting ideas so we can see where they go. maybe they'll have some bad ideas along the way, but those are easy to weed out. it's a small price to pay for generating new good ideas [sic]". I guess my own evaluation of whether support for eugenics and pseudoscience constitute "bad ideas" that are worth it for philosophical progress on "AI" is simply different. (I don't personally want to work in a field where people come up to me at parties to talk about eugenics). 

If anyone is interested in chatting more about this topic (it's been an obsession of mine for the last few years), please feel free to reach out. However, I am not interested in hearing out defenses of HBD, "positive eugenics", or the academic validity of TESCREAL figures. 

Humbly yours,

Teague