The article could have done more to condemn this group and line of thinking.
Also the part of the story on Curtis Lind is both sad and impressive, that old man was built of true grit:
"As he bent to look, something hit him on the head and he blacked out. When he woke up, at least three of the Zizians were allegedly standing around him with knives.
“[T]he right side of my skull was shattered,” Lind later said. “And I was bleeding from numerous puncture wounds … The back of my neck had some severe cuts. Like somebody was trying to cut my head off.” His torso was impaled with a samurai sword.
Lind drew his gun, which was concealed in a pocket, and started shooting. He wounded Leatham and killed Borhanian. He stumbled away with the sword still in him. He survived, but lost an eye."
Yes, also ironic how they were, per the article, very intrigued by the concept that ideas themselves could be like viruses but were unaware of how they seemed to be heavily impacted by that very thing, many times over.
See SBF. The fringes of the 'rationalism' are pretty much a series of rather nasty cults.
Lots of highly exploitative groups don't get to violent assaults. That's got me wondering why.
With the hyperbolic rhetoric about false threats, I'm surprised we haven't seen more violence from "rationalists"; if they really believed we were in that imminent danger, violent attacks would have been the rational thing to do.
That's what these guys figured. But if we're being rational and realistic, all it accomplishes is getting your group killed or imprisoned.
But drugs seem to be a way that people are destabilized outside of norms.
What is it with cults and boats? L Ron Hubbard did this, too (albeit for different stated reasons).
> The Coast Guard declared the ship a “threat to the public health” and demanded an improvement plan.
Ah, see, they should have adopted the Hubbard approach of just completely ignoring authorities' complaints about his various dubious boats (this, somehow, tended to more or less work out for him).
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/twenty-employees-of-us...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-timeline-of-cultlike-z...
https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/02/15/northern-california-z...
That said, this stylistic choice works for computer security related things (e.g. the spy genre of news). It feels like a waste of time everywhere else.
I would summarize it as not being about AI per se. It's nominally about "rationalism," or the inclination to boil everything down to mathematics to an extreme degree. The story points out a growing subculture of rationalist who have become quite radicalized.
For a community like HN, which (rightly, IMO) places high value on rational and critical thought, it can seem strange that there could be a degree at which that sort of thinking is harmful. But there are a lot of examples where taken to an extreme, it can allow people to "rationalize" all sorts of actions. And the article goes into detail about some of the pitfalls this small group fell into.
It was a few years later that "behavioral economics" began to make inroads. The moniker of "behavioral economics" itself was to distinguish it from "real economics." Alas (for the establishment), behavioral economics proved very popular, and the genie was out of the bottle. It turns out mathematic equations are not all-powerful when it comes to describing certain phenomena, especially when it comes to individual or collective human behavior.
Collective blind faith in models built on dubious assumptions is what gave us the mortgage crisis.
By the way, for what it is worth, only 2% of the population can read at a college level. It had been that way for so long that I heard that the category was merged into the high school level several years ago to make the literacy rate in the top bracket 4% instead of the prior 2%. i.e. “modern illiteracy” started a long time ago if we go by numbers.
It seems only rational to doubt ones rationality.
Depending on your definition. But taken literally, no, obviously not.
Regardless of your skill level, would you ever assume that you were playing a perfect (in the information theoretic sense) game of chess?
Whether chess or real life, all of us merely make the best choices we can given our skill and the information available to us. That includes imperfectly modeling the other agents in the world around us. In that sense, "being rational" means something like "deliberately analyzing the situation" and "more rational" means something like "a superior approach to analysis".
"Years before she became the peculiar central thread linking a double homicide in Pennsylvania, the fatal shooting of a federal agent in Vermont and the murder of an elderly landlord in California, a computer programmer bought a sailboat."
I wanted to keep reading, so I guess I was their audience - not everything has to be up to your personal standards to be worth while.
As parent mentioned. You do have a choice not to read novels, or to read novels. That doesn't make a novel bad because it is a novel.
Perhaps AI could help here by rewriting the article into the format it should have used, but then you risk hallucinations.
In short, you appear to only be familiar with the mandated style for factual news-reporting - not for other journalistic output - and seem to think all deviation is in error.
Here's an example from one of the kings of the form - Michael Lewis - and his award-winning piece of financial journalism regarding the Greek bond crisis that nearly brought down the Euro:
https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/2010/10/beware-of-gre...
Thankfully, there's a variety of writing styles, so that every one of us can find something we enjoy reading and skip the stuff we don't enjoy.
I don't see why you should be the sole arbiter of what writing style is allowed.
They were terrified of some AI Roko's Basilisk they imputed some fantastic power to.
Mao Tse Tung when he decided to become a "mountain bandit" and formed the basis for future Red Army may have had no greater advantage. Except he was a military genius and these guys were just geniuses.
Before I am downvoted into oblivion, the above text is half joking and half serious. Socrates in Plato’s Republic really does make the case that formal training via methods intended to teach is pointless by comparing education to training horses. I made that point in my college philosophy class hoping the professor would skip it on the basis that it was a bad book (my thoughts on a book that suggested you could not learn its material by being lead to it - see the cave analogy). The professor then stopped the entire class to try to make sure everyone understood the point and then continued as if the material was not criticizing him.
"From the beginning of his career in the 1830s, his achievements in English literature were compared to those of Shakespeare."
in his time he was not 'literature', it was pulp, common, 'popular'.
is Stephen King today, 'literature' or just 'pulp fiction'?
this is a subjective thing. authors that are 'popular' sometimes aren't considered 'literature'.
in your very own citation:::
"Among fellow writers, there was a range of opinions on Dickens. Poet laureate, William Wordsworth (1770–1850), thought him a "very talkative, vulgar young person", adding he had not read a line of his work, while novelist George Meredith (1828–1909), found Dickens "intellectually lacking"."
"Henry James denied him a premier position, calling him "the greatest of superficial novelists":
But maybe, it's not population wide.
More people were reading Dickens, so rate of reading in population was increasing. But the elites that thought everything should be in Greek/Latin, thought everyone reading Dickens was a downgrade.
Every generation argument.
Weren't Egyptian hieroglyphs basically emoji's.
The real argument against Dickens at the time was more to do with his habit of serialising his novels in cheap newspapers. This then rendered his subject matter of choice - social commentary, fiscal egalitarianism, and empathy for the poor - a little too accessible for the comfort of the ruling classes.
He did so even in his own Newspaper 'Household Words' - which while championing the cause of the poor and working classes, did so by addressing itself almost exclusively to the middle classes!
"...We seek to bring to innumerable homes, from the stirring world around us, the knowledge of many social wonders, good and evil, that are not calculated to render any of us less ardently persevering in ourselves, less faithful in the progress of mankind, less thankful for the privilege of living in this summer-dawn of time." Charles Dickens
He started this with 'Hard Times' - a thinly veiled socialist critique against unbridled capitalism and immorality. It specifically targeted Edwin Chadwick, who helped design the Malthusian basis of the appalling Poor Law of 1834, but was more generally an attack on the Utilitarians of the time. Shaw described it as a "passionate revolt against the whole industrial order of the modern world".