>>11816
>I have no idea why Judeo-Luddites still proclaim it to be da truth
I think a psychologist who wasn't afraid of being deplatformed and maybe even assassinated could have a field day with these people.
I have this very cynical belief that a very significant part of normal standard baseline human psychology is what a few bold souls have termed "the God-shaped hole." The vast majority of human beings have this extremely strong, very deeply seated emotional need to believe they're part of something bigger, something transcendent. They want a belief system with clear moral sides, good guys and bad guys, and simple rules they can follow so that they can be the Good Guys, so that they can matter, so that they can feel a deep connection to something important.
One of the more obviously counterfactual parts of the universally agreed-upon "postwar narrative" (see also, "consensus reality") is that in the West people are becoming better and better educated, that everybody is getting smarter and smarter every single day, that everything is getting better in every way. People will tell you that Science, with a capital S, is vanquishing superstition and ignorance, and the New Man of the New Century has outgrown such things.
Except that this is all risible bullshit. Every printed newspaper, back when such things existed, had a horoscope column right up until the end. Christianity has become unfashionable, I think in large part because it has mutated from a form that, two hundred years ago, promoted social capital and cultural cohesion, into this wishy-washy candy-ass one-from-column-A-one-from-column-B cafeteria belief system that is all about fuzzy feel-good universal unconditional unlimited divine love, with all that inconvenient, un-funny, un-fun, depressing stuff about "sin" and "rules" edited out, where the only rule left is the rule against being a white man, where you have replaced the Devil as the cause of all the world's problems and you get to be everybody else's whipping boy for eternity. Even the normies, the endless army of interchangeable, fungible IQ-90 NPCs, have begun to perceive just how corrosive, destructive, and negative "woke Christianity" is and are rejecting it. But they aren't rejecting it in favor of Sunday mornings spent studying calculus or electrical engineering. No, that'd be hard work. They aren't rejecting it in favor of whites-only churches that preach a message of cultural solidarity and women staying barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, either. No, that's no fun. They've rejected it in favor of shitlib political tribalism, muh sportsball, muh teevee, muh Facebook, and a motley assortment of objectively weird imported foreign cults like Islam and the Hare Krishnas and those flying saucer cults that commit mass suicide, all of which may be even more destructive, both to their believers and to societies that permit them to exist, than "woke Christianity."
And so another meme that a number of very highly technically educated people have grabbed onto, to slot into that aching hole in their hearts, is what the late Dr. Jerry Pournelle, a science fiction author who also worked for the Air Force and NASA at his day jobs, called "the doomster stuff." Muh globalwarmenism is one prominent example. Muh globalwarmen is gonna destroy the world and kill everybody, no, you gotta listen to me, you gotta do what I say! You gotta join my movement and help us save the world! If you look at history with a cynical eye, right here and the US there have been lots of these cultural manias, all of which seem to originate from the same emotional place, appeal to the same kind of person, and, currently, point in the same direction, politically. Environmentalist doomerism, AI doomerism, militant veganism, "universal human rights," "anti-racism," and all the rest of that fashionable pernicious nonsense. I think they're all of a piece, and I think they attract the same kind of person who would have joined Carrie Nation's army of psychologically disturbed termagants to chase men out of bars with hatchets a hundred and fifty years ago, or joined the Shakers to edit themselves out of the gene pool entirely two hundred years ago. These are apocalyptic belief systems, where the participants get to feel like the main characters of an adventure story, with evil foes who are Out To Getcha, to whom the sole proper and permissible response is endless incoherent perpetual rage, and who can only be defeated if you Believe in your Heart, and the Bad Guys can be held at bay with These Rules, and the Movement has to convince everybody else to get on board so we can Save the World, and so on. Just as Sonic the Hedgehog is a magnet for autism, these movements are magnets for Cluster B personality disorders. The kind of people they attract would have appeared in a James Thurber story written a hundred years ago and been the guy standing on the corner wearing the hand-painted "sandwich board sign" that said THE WORLD IS COMING TO AN END, GET READY, with the R's and E's, charmingly, painted backwards, ringing a bell and shouting "GET READY GET READY" while the main characters were trying to have a conversation.
It was never really reasonable to expect the normies to embrace a belief system and a paradigm in which everyone's life is basically an accident, there's no kindly bearded old man in the sky to bargain with when things go wrong, and death is the end. It isn't easy or pleasant to think about it. Very few people are tough enough, mentally speaking, to inhabit that world and think about it at any length without retreating or censoring themselves. Drag the normies out into the sunlight and they stand there squinting and blinking and resent you for taking away their coping mechanisms. They fight and claw to get back to their beloved Stygian darkness, to the comfy, comforting old superstitions. And if one set of superstitions no longer seems to suit, they'll seek out another to replace it. Some of the especially unstable sorts have convinced themselves that something out there, usually something absolutely fundamental to civilization, like power generation, or the ability to travel and transport goods further and faster than we can walk on foot, or basic engineering R&D, or electricity, is going to Kill Us All Right Now and We Have to Band Together and DOOOOOOOOOO SOMETHING. They've got Main Character Syndrome and this is the cope without which they immediately fall into nihilism and destroy themselves and everyone around them with booze and dope. These people have always been around, but a hundred years ago they were discouraged from acting quite so crazy in public, much less organizing to bounce the crazy off one another and purify it. There was a time that a lot of these people would have ended up as monks and nuns, or as hermits, and maybe a few of the loudest, most belligerent cases would have ended their days in Bedlam. Now they're "activists" and lots of them have pages on Substack.
I personally think that the current trend of Cluster B types congregating and organizing online to plan and act in large numbers is a much bigger threat to civilization than AI research, but that's, like, just my opinion, man.