-If the people _marketing themselves_ as the good guys who are going to save the world using systematically correct reasoning are _not actually interested in doing systematically correct reasoning_ (because systematically correct reasoning leads to two or three conclusions that are politically "impossible" to state clearly in public, and no one has the guts to [_not_ shut up and thereby do the politically impossible](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nCvvhFBaayaXyuBiD/shut-up-and-do-the-impossible)), that's arguably _worse_ than the situation where "the community" _qua_ community doesn't exist at all.
+If the people _marketing themselves_ as the good guys who are going to save the world using systematically correct reasoning are _not actually interested in doing systematically correct reasoning_ (because systematically correct reasoning leads to two or three conclusions that are politically "impossible" to state clearly in public, and no one has the guts to [_not_ shut up and thereby do the politically impossible](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nCvvhFBaayaXyuBiD/shut-up-and-do-the-impossible)), that's arguably _worse_ than the situation where "the community" _qua_ community doesn't exist at all.
+
+In ["The Ideology Is Not the Movement"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/) (April 2016), Alexander describes how the content of subcultures typically departs from the ideological "rallying flag" that they formed around. [Sunni and Shia Islam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shia%E2%80%93Sunni_relations) originally, ostensibly diverged on the question of who should rightfully succeed Muhammad as caliph, but modern-day Sunni and Shia who hate each other's guts aren't actually re-litigating a succession dispute from the 7th century C.E. Rather, pre-existing divergent social-group tendencies crystalized into distinct tribes by latching on to the succession dispute as a [simple membership test](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests).
+
+Alexander jokingly identifies the identifying feature of our robot cult as being the belief that "Eliezer Yudkowsky is the rightful caliph": the Sequences were a rallying flag that brought together a lot of like-minded people to form a subculture with its own ethos and norms—among which Alexander includes "don't misgender trans people"—but the subculture emerged as its own entity that isn't necessarily _about_ anything outside itself.
+
+No one seemed to notice at the time, but this characterization of our movement [is actually a _declaration of failure_](https://sinceriously.fyi/cached-answers/#comment-794). There's a word, "rationalist", that I've been trying to avoid in this post, because it's the subject of so much strategic equivocation, where the motte is "anyone who studies the ideal of systematically correct reasoning, general methods of thought that result in true beliefs and successful plans", and the bailey is "members of our social scene centered around Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander". (Since I don't think we deserve the "rationalist" brand name, I had to choose something else to refer to [the social scene](https://srconstantin.github.io/2017/08/08/the-craft-is-not-the-community.html). Hence, "robot cult.")
+
+What I would have _hoped_ for from a systematically correct reasoning community worthy of the brand name is one goddamned place in the whole goddamned world where _good arguments_ would propagate through the population no matter where they arose, "guided by the beauty of our weapons" ([following Scott Alexander](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/) [following Leonard Cohen](https://genius.com/1576578)).