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 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.”