People connected to LessWrong and the Bay Area surveillance industry often cite David Chapman’s “Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths in Subculture Evolution” to understand why their subcultures keep getting taken over by jerks. Chapman is a Buddhist mystic who seems rationalist-curious. Some people use the term postrationalist.
Have you noticed that Chapman presents the founders of nerdy subcultures as innocent nerds being pushed around by the mean suits? But today we know that the founders of Longtermism and LessWrong all had ulterior motives: Scott Alexander and Nick Bostrom were into race pseudoscience, and Yudkowsky had his kinks (and was also into eugenics and Libertarianism). HPMOR teaches that intelligence is the measure of human worth, and the use of intelligence is to manipulate people. Mollie Gleiberman makes a strong argument that “bednet” effective altruism with short-term measurable goals was always meant as an outer doctrine to prepare people to hear the inner doctrine about how building God and expanding across the Universe would be the most effective altruism of all. And there were all the issues within LessWrong and Effective Altruism around substance use, abuse of underpaid employees, and bosses who felt entitled to hit on subordinates. A '60s rocker might have been cheated by his record label, but that does not get him off the hook for crashing a car while high on nose candy and deep inside a groupie.
I don’t know whether Chapman was naive or creating a smokescreen. Had he ever met the thinkers he admired in person?
No, that sounds about right for many Catholics I know in the US. I was trying to be charitable towards the intent of the practice and use it as an example of something similar to occult practice in mainstream religion. Of course it’s diluted in content and commitment compared to more intense cults, otherwise their base of adherents would only be shrinking. And don’t forget, the veneration of saints is something the weirdo Protestants hold against the Catholics, accusing them of idolatry! So I’d say it does stand as a lightweight form of “inner door” teaching, especially as the saints are pointed out as examples of how to live in accordance with the church’s teachings here on the mortal plane.
We Lutherans have confirmation too, I’ll have you know![1]
Here in heathen People’s Socialist Kingdom of Sweden it’s mostly an occasion to awkwardly flirt with the appropriate sex on church away camps and get a lot of presents. But I was quite impressed by my nieces’, organized by a very woke archbishopric. Another neice got to go to Assizi!
[1] I’m confirmed but very much lapsed