+> ...(then twitter dogma of the time, and now almost the blue tribe dogma of our time)... that I can understand how someone like Zack, embedded in the rat culture physically and struggling with this reigning ideology, could feel it as gaslighting.
+
+]
+
+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154110278349228
+> Just checked my filtered messages on Facebook and saw, "Your post last night was kind of the final thing I needed to realize that I'm a girl."
+> ==DOES ALL OF THE HAPPY DANCE FOREVER==
+
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sCCdCLPN9E3YvdZhj/shulman-and-yudkowsky-on-ai-progress
+> I'm curious about how much you think these opinions have been arrived at independently by yourself, Paul, and the rest of the OpenPhil complex?
+
+If he's worried about Carl being corrupted by OpenPhil; it make sense for me to worry about him being corrupted by Glowfic cluster
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sCCdCLPN9E3YvdZhj/shulman-and-yudkowsky-on-ai-progress
+> If you mean that say Mike Blume starts getting paid $20m/yr base salary
+Weirdly specific that Mike (random member of your robot cult) is getting namedropped
+
+example of hero-worship, David Pearce writes—
+https://www.facebook.com/algekalipso/posts/4769054639853322?comment_id=4770408506384602
+> recursively cloning Scott Alexander—with promising allelic variations - and hothousing the “products” could create a community of super-Scotts with even greater intellectual firepower
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1434906470248636419
+
+> Anyways, Scott, this is just the usual division of labor in our caliphate: we're both always right, but you cater to the crowd that wants to hear it from somebody too modest to admit that, and I cater to the crowd that wants somebody out of that closet.
+
+Okay, I get that it was meant as humorous exaggeration. But I think it still has the effect of discouraging people from criticizing Scott or Eliezer because they're the leaders of the caliphate. I spent three and a half years of my life explaining in exhaustive, exhaustive detail, with math, how Scott was wrong about something, no one serious actually disagrees, and Eliezer is still using his social power to boost Scott's right-about-everything (!!) reputation. That seems really unfair, in a way that isn't dulled by "it was just a joke."
+
+It's totally understandable to not want to get involved in a political scuffle because xrisk reduction is astronomically more important! But I don't see any plausible case that metaphorically sucking Scott's dick in public reduces xrisk. It would be so easy to just not engage in this kind of cartel behavior!
+
+An analogy: racist jokes are also just jokes. Alice says, "What's the difference between a black dad and a boomerang? A boomerang comes back." Bob says, "That's super racist! Tons of African-American fathers are devoted parents!!" Alice says, "Chill out, it was just a joke." In a way, Alice is right. It was just a joke; no sane person could think that Alice was literally claiming that all black men are deadbeat dads. But, the joke only makes sense in the first place in context of a culture where the black-father-abandonment stereotype is operative. If you thought the stereotype was false, or if you were worried about it being a self-fulfilling prophecy, you would find it tempting to be a humorless scold and get angry at the joke-teller.
+
+Similarly, the "Caliphate" humor only makes sense in the first place in the context of a celebrity culture where deferring to Scott and Eliezer is expected behavior. (In a way that deferring to Julia Galef or John S. Wentworth is not expected behavior, even if Galef and Wentworth also have a track record as good thinkers.) I think this culture is bad. Nullius in verba.