People connected to LessWrong and the Bay Area surveillance industry often cite David Chapman’s “Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths in Subculture Evolution” to understand why their subcultures keep getting taken over by jerks. Chapman is a Buddhist mystic who seems rationalist-curious. Some people use the term postrationalist.
Have you noticed that Chapman presents the founders of nerdy subcultures as innocent nerds being pushed around by the mean suits? But today we know that the founders of Longtermism and LessWrong all had ulterior motives: Scott Alexander and Nick Bostrom were into race pseudoscience, and Yudkowsky had his kinks (and was also into eugenics and Libertarianism). HPMOR teaches that intelligence is the measure of human worth, and the use of intelligence is to manipulate people. Mollie Gleiberman makes a strong argument that “bednet” effective altruism with short-term measurable goals was always meant as an outer doctrine to prepare people to hear the inner doctrine about how building God and expanding across the Universe would be the most effective altruism of all. And there were all the issues within LessWrong and Effective Altruism around substance use, abuse of underpaid employees, and bosses who felt entitled to hit on subordinates. A '60s rocker might have been cheated by his record label, but that does not get him off the hook for crashing a car while high on nose candy and deep inside a groupie.
I don’t know whether Chapman was naive or creating a smokescreen. Had he ever met the thinkers he admired in person?
I was somewhat influenced by Chapman myself, so naturally I find it hard to call his efforts a complete smokescreen. I think it’s more a matter of the subculture he’s addressing simply being too damned insular and full of itself. A little less than a decade ago, he seemed like one of the few people trying to help the extremely online think past Yuddite rationalism, EA longtermism, and the incipient weirdo cryptocurrency cults that were springing up. He has expressed being somewhat baffled and bemused by “TPOT,” such as it was, but I think it’s fair to say that his writings were one very important nucleus around which the TPOT social graph coalesced. That said, my impression of TPOT quickly became, and has since always been, that it’s mainly a bunch of people with advanced degrees and/or technical training and experience who are resentful that all that hasn’t given them greater status and influence. Hence the commitment to pseudonymy among many of the bigger personalities; that ship may still come in one of these days. Alex Karp is what TPOT people would become if they had the power they thought they deserved. Thus, up until the current rules-free era, the Bay Area moneymen have been careful to fund very very few of these guys, because they risk bringing the whole edifice down with their severe personal instability.
The “Geeks, Mops, Sociopaths” article is what’s most commonly passed around, but the foundational material of Chapman’s project is this developmental psychologist Robert Kegan: https://vividness.live/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence Kegan builds on theories of childhood psychological development from people like Jean Piaget*, and seeks to extend them into adulthood. As Chapman says:
Stage 3 in this model finds one conceiving of one’s identity relative to communal relationships such as family, cohort, and local community, while stage 4 has one conceiving of oneself relative to rationally-designed systems of laws and processes, i.e. a modern professional organization. Stage 5 is something that both Kegan and Chapman seem to be conjecturing about and actively seeking, rather than living or cultivating in others. Its ideal is for one to be able to hold the rules of various social systems and modes of interpersonal relation as objects separate from the self, rather than something in which one is irretrievably subjectively embedded, and to be able to gracefully transition between these systems as a given situation demands. Chapman’s Meaningness project is all about building a framework for people to transition from a stage 4 personality to a stage 5 personality, even though the stage 5 personality is as yet loosely defined.
On Chapman’s suggestion, I read Kegan’s “The Evolving Self,” and at the time it did in fact help me make sense of people I knew who had gone to prestigious schools and attained advanced degrees, but nonetheless allowed themselves to be heavily influenced by woo and toxic spiritualism. But herein lies the pebble under the mattress of Chapman’s program: I was able to understand and deplore these people as stuck in a “less developed” “stage 3” personality and that they simply hadn’t made the most of the opportunities they had with the “stage 4-scaffolding” institutions they had been associated with. But you see, I had the key now, I was able to understand myself as a “stage 4” personality who wanted to make sense of the world via necessarily flawed rational systems, and I’m going to transcend beyond that any day now!
Better understanding of myself came later; suffice it to say that I’ve gotten more out of the material on resentment and personal accountability in 12-step programs than I have from Chapman and Kegan. The last fucking thing I, or any of these other weirdos, needed was another progressive framework for personal development. The in-built ability to hold oneself up as more advanced or more capable is a fatal flaw for the people Chapman was trying to reach, who already had plenty of excuses to see themselves as superior. Chapman’s biggest vulnerability is that he insists on practicing empathy for people who are at best selectively empathetic, and at worst have abandoned empathy entirely. If he wants to hold onto that as a core spiritual commitment, fine, but it’s been long enough now to reflect that his project so far has basically been a failure. I don’t think he’s lived in the Bay Area for a while now, so I have to imagine his direct interaction with a lot of the big-name “stage 4” personalities he was implicitly criticizing has been limited, but it’s pretty plain to see that there has been no progress towards spiritually reforming the scene that he and they both influence.
*Jean Piaget was really influential on a lot of the early computer-interaction thinkers like Alan Kay and the Macintosh design team, so having that link is another big “in” for savvier Silicon Valley types.
I think one of the biggest flaws of our friends is that they want there to be one hierarchy of power and capability, with Electric Jesus at the top, then them, then their admirers, then the rest of us. Yukowsky is brilliant at getting people to give him money, good at getting them to give him sex, but not a scientist or a skeptic (I am told he asked for special powers to delete LessWrong comments which explain what he got wrong or did not see).
The “geeks, mops, and sociopaths” model does not encourage people to look at themselves and ask whether their community’s problems are their own fault. It also does not encourage them to ask “I am a drama kid, you are a min-maxer, can we find a way to have a fun game of D&D together or should we find our own groups?”
Alex Karp’s Wikipedia page has a wild gap from “trying to raise enough money to be a Bohemian in Berlin in 2002” to “senior exec at Palantir with a Norwegian bodyguard and spicy takes on the Gaza war.”