this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2026
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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What type of documentation are you looking for? The big picture is easily googleable and wikipediable: EY got a few of the super-rich excited enough about doomer drama to bankroll the founding of OpenAI, whose governing body was mostly EAs (until the Altman-Nadella counter-coup) while Anthropic were the people who bailed because they though OAI weren't serious enough about alignment, and suddenly getting dicked in a rationalist ~~compound~~ group house has immense career implications in the burgeoning AI sector.
Also terms like AGI, ASI, AI alignment, existential risk et al started out as lesswrong shibboleths, and so-called alignment research is almost completely a rationalist circlejerk.
Pinning the EA/rats down as a cult is where it gets murkier because it's mostly them telling on themselves in social media and blog post implications, like how they foster a culture of zero personal boundaries, ingroup overdependence and rigid hierarchies stratified around claimed IQ and proximity to the Great Work of not messing up the robot god incantation that ends the world.
You could do worse than the Behind the Bastards episode on the Zizians, mostly because unlike Leverage or MAPLE who kind of did their own thing but with rationalist funding and human capital, the Zizians can be fairly described as what happens if you actually take the more esoteric aspects of rationalism seriously.
Also, the really powerful people keep the details mercifully secret. My elevator pitch is "remember how the exec team at FTX were living in a penthouse apartment, sleeping together, and posting harem fantasies? People who have met them say the Rationalists and AI company staff live like that."