Comment by gjm11

I should maybe clarify that when I say "I see this said all the time" I don't mean specifically the version targeted at internet-rationalists. There's the version aimed at singularitarians (not all internet-rationalists are singularitarians nor vice versa) and a slightly different version claiming that atheism is just another religion, and so forth. The general template is: Thing X is just another religion / just warmed-over Christianity, because here are half a dozen things about it that have some loose resemblance to some religious thing. I find such things uniformly unconvincing; it seems to me that one can draw loose parallels between almost anything and almost anything else.

And: where are the rationalists', or the singularitarians', or the atheists', sacred places? what are their regular religious rituals? what organization corresponds for them to churches and the like? what things are they obliged to believe, as opposed to believing by definition as a member of whatever group? what ancient traditions do they preserve or claim to preserve? Of course you can have a religion without any single one of those things, but the more common features of religion a thing doesn't have the less plausible it is to call it a religion.

I've never seen an argument like this that if applied consistently wouldn't equally assert that many academic disciplines, large companies, political movements, etc., are "religions".

I'm not going to get drawn into a thousands paragraph debate about rationalists belief, so this will be my only reply and I'll welcome your rebottle.

Your evidence isn't very convincing. I think the singularity is actually framed as a battle between good and evil. How else could Sam Altman be accused of betraying humanity if what his company does isn't framed as that? Moreover, that quote pretty much proves what I'm saying about tech CEOs, how the rationalists view them. There's no "betrayal" here, Sam is and always has been a craven capitalist. One would only feel betrayed by him if they believe in him as someone who violated an implicitly shared dogma.

And that's the big reason for the fallout you're identifying. Early on people like Sam Altman and Elon Musk pretended to be saving humanity through their investments and corporations. It was a marketing ploy and rationalists bought into it hook line and sinker. Of course it was always a ruse, of course these guys were never going to deliver, because at the end of the day their goals were to become rich. Which they achieved. So now the world-saving facade is dropped, and the rationalists who bought into it are none too pleased. Even this line:

"Elon is widely known to be a strong engineer, as well as a strong designer, and spends much of his time arguing details of that kind of work with his reports. Mark Zuckerberg is known to do similarly."

Is very flattering of Musk's and Zuckerberg's supposed engineering prowess. One only need look at the Cyber Truck to understand what kind of designer and engineer Musk is.

> Clearly he's a theologian and computer science is just another religion!

I mean you could take it in that direction. Various cults like the cult of Apple that flourished around Steve Jobs, who himself was a bit of a cult leader. There's a cult around Elon Musk. The thing that's missing is the deity of AI, which is unique to the rationalist community. You might even be able to say that academia is a religion that's formed around to worship science, and there's a lot of parallels between religion there too, down to the dresses and funny hats.

> every field will have its "theologians"

They're theologians when they talk of theology rather than theory. Knuth is a practician. People talking about the singularity are like the guy on the street saying the end is nigh, and people writing blogs about it are essentially priests saying the same thing from a pulpit, the equivalent of theologians are the ones writing scientific papers about it.

> If someone mixes up "A implies B" and "B implies A" or something, you don't need to be an internet-rationalist to think they're wrong or to criticize their argument.

That's not exactly what I'm talking about, logical fallacies are fine and you should point them out when it's relevent. What I mean is for example if you're talking to a rationalist, and you make an appeal to emotion, that's regarded as an invalid argument. Or an even better example is when you make an appeal to authority when it matters, and you get into an argument about whether it's valid or invalid ad hominem. In normal discourse, people make emotional and authoritative arguments and those are valid to consider. In rationalist communities, that's considered a logical fallacy, and the discussion is over. So more often than not when you're talking to a rationalist, the conversation devolves into a debate about which fallacies are being applied and whether they're valid or invalid, because the only thing they'll consider is logos. The doctrine here is that pathos and ethos are invalid forms of persuasion. This is why they're so comfortable rejecting expertise, and why it was so easy to be fooled by people like Musk who used good arguments but lacked actual expertise.