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 have never found sociology which is useful for solving the practical problem of keeping a community for nerdy introverts a community for nerdy introverts. To spot characters like Shermer and keep or shunt them away from power takes experience and judgement and ethics, and as Chapman says the people best equipped to spot them are often poorly equipped to get power in the community and do the shoving. Realizing that you are in a cult and its time to leave (or that Scott Alexander is really in to the race stuff and Yud is serious about the apocalypse) also takes experience and judgement.
By all means try to use this blog post to hold onto whatever community you happen to find yourself in. It is a toolkit for strangling a scene to death and feeling good about it. The gamergate handbook for smearing people (not Shermer, just women) you happen to want out of your company.