Nick Land’s drugs got him there well before everyone else, but I’m talking about the right wing cranks such as Big Yud that have kept up a mask of “grey tribe” pretenses, said stupid stale memes like “politics is the mind killer,” and worshipped billionaires as the more radiant energy beings they are, being of the sky while we are of the dirt.
Sure, it seemed inevitable all along, especially when billionaires started outright buying ownership stakes in “futurology” conventions. It got especially creepy when the United States Department of Defense openly peddled contractor wares in such places.
It isn’t fun being the Cassandra, seeing it happening in real time, warning people, then getting laughed off about it. I’ve lost real life friends to this stuff, people that were superficially just open minded and quirky in college but now wear the metaphorical armband and goosestep to wherever Sam Harris or other crypto-bigoted cranks tell them to go.
after dabbling with them in my teens, I grew to eventually largely disdain the rationality community for the general ignorance of social science that extended outside of claims or theories that sigh confirmed their priors. Let alone all of the humanities or arts. The more I learned about methodology and deeper I delved into the fields of social science and biology, the clearer the ignorance of folks whose primary training was software, physics, math, etc was.
STEM Zombies who think that being good at math gives them great wisdom have been a disaster for the human race.
As a stem zombie I resemble that remark!
I prescribe a program of thinking very hard about the epistemological consequences of Goedel’s Theorem and reading a lot of Lakatos.
Laka-tose nuts amiright?
It’s not to late you can read Anthropology 101 books and learn to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange. Save yourself.
101… that’s 5 in binary. Hey this anthropology ain’t so hard