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Sorry, did I touch a nerve? The thing is, being the kind of guy who needs to do a GPT-style "Thinking..." before every line of dialogue is not being good at overcoming bias, it's figuring out how to spend a lot of your tokens to get where a wise dentist (a small subset of dentists, of course) just kind of is.
I give kudos to rationalists figuring out the importance of AI, but they were not exactly the first to do so (the theories they're working with have not meaningfully changed since Turing and von Neumann, they've just added a lot of epicycles on top of what the greats had figured in 1950). This has been a longtime preoccupation of the smartest people in tech, particularly when not distracted by profitable fads. Rationalism got them, through great struggle, where they should have been anyway. Which is great! You can get a lot of clarity out of not being an alcoholic, too.
I am not a rationalist, not particularly a Yud-style FOOM-doomer, I have never made a habit of reading LessWrong, I don't particularly like Yud beyond greatly appreciating him as a unique historical character, and I think Yud is spiralling here and too (honestly! he actually believes this!) terrified to control himself anymore.
That is immaterial to this argument. LessWrong/rationalism/etc, as a loose association of people, tendencies, discussions, thoughts, and downstream influencees, is incredibly substantially tied to the ongoing revolution in AI, and not just or even primarily through dogmatic hard-dooming.
It's not just a coincidence that they ended up there and your dentist did not. To develop a novel thought beyond your priors, you need to actually do some rollouts. Their rollouts without feedback did much better than a streetwise normie. What did your dentist think mattered in 2026 from his 2022?
Some of their rollouts turn out to have been wrong and some of them have now become too fixated to update about it. Fine. "They could have just been von Neumann instead" is not much of an attack.
People purely reacting to AI-doomerism (you) have become ahistorically unhinged about this.
I am reacting to the original premise of LessWrong/rationalism, the idea that you can improve your life and decisions through the explicit cultivation of rational judgment, and the personality type it attracted 10-15 years ago. I'll leave it to the audience to decide who's acting unhinged.
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