alt Hacker NewsOff-topic, but it makes me think of "reasoning black holes": you get enough like-minded people together that they start reinforcing each other's logic and beliefs until not only those people get completely detached from reality, but anyone who interacts with them gets sucked in as well unless their own logic ("velocity") is adequate to skirt the edge and escape, forever altered by the experience.
Similar questions arise: how would you know if you were inside one? The laws of logic ("physics") seemingly don't apply, but there's no way to test them in that environment.
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I dunno. Those rationalists seem to be in some kind of intellectual black hole which never had any danger of sucking me in. Like I have seen many strands of posthumanism and transhumanism, speculations about an intelligence explosion circa 1970, and figure it would have been just as much fun to sit around the campfire, pass a joint around, and talk about crazy stuff with these guys
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cosmism
as it would be to do with anyone contemporary. In their orbit I get periodically annoyed but changed forever, no.
Kinda sounds like a "linguistic manifold."
I believe that's called an echo chamber, and exemplified by a board meeting.