As found by @gerikson here, more from the anti anti TESCREAL crowd. How the antis are actually R9PRESENTATIONALism. Ottokar expanded on their idea in a blog post.
I have not read the bigger blog post yet btw, just assumed it would be sneerable and posted it here for everyone’s amusement. Learn about your own true motives today. (This could be a troll of course, boy does he drop a lot of names and thinks that is enough to link things).
E: alternative title: Ideological Turing Test, a critical failure
That’s true. “Passing itself off as scientific” also describes Young Earth Creationism and Intelligent Design and various other pseudosciences. And in terms of who is pushing pseudoscience… the curent US administration is undeniably right-wing and opposed to all mainstream science.
Also, I would at least partially disagree with this:
I would identify as an atheist, if not a militant one. And looking at Emile Torres’ Wikipedia page, he is an atheist also. Judging by the uncommon occasions it comes up on sneerclub, I think a lot of us are atheist/agnostic. Just not, you know, “militant”. And in terms of political allegiance, a lot of the libertarians on lesswrong are excited for the tax cuts and war on woke of the Trump administration even if it means cutting funding to all science and partnering up with completely batshit Fundamenalist Evangelicals.
I think the religious angle isn’t a general criticism as much as a counter to the specific narrative that the TESCREAL ideology is somehow rooted purely in logic and realistic evaluations of technology rather than in fantasy and wild speculation. The criticism of how it rhymes with certain elements of fundamentalist Christianity are usually rooted in this same observation, as well as in the fact that the elements of Christianity that TESCREALism most closely rhymes with are themselves harmful or insane regardless of what kind of wrapper you put them in. Like, both Christian and Singularitarian eschatologies use their faith in apocalyptic prophecies/predictions to devalue action to address very real suffering in the here-and-now in favor of trying to improve the lot of humanity in this hypothetical future, which just so happens to involve preaching more Christian/Singularitarian end times crap and also giving insiders to associated organizations lots of money and power. There’s a leftist version of that too and it’s also pretty fucked up.