alt Hacker NewsFor some reason the bit that stuck out to me in a wild ride of an article was the guy who believed a super-intelligence was a threat to humans but distanced himself from veganism as if that was crazy part of the AI-doom sex cult that he disagreed with.
a) because veganism seems as exotic to me as someone doing CrossFit
b) the very obvious parallels of a more intelligent creature torturing and killing large numbers of other creatures for relatively little benefit.
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I read it more like a conformist performative veganism. I think the implication is that this group treats veganism and all of these beliefs as a kind of shibboleth, an in-group marker for which conformity is expected. The immedaite "feeling" associated with a cult is the feeling of "high control", cf. https://www.google.com/search?q=high+control+group
I read it that EA practices (incl. veganism), beliefs, "rantionalism", and doomerism are all aspects of the high control environment
They also downplay global warming, nuclear war, wealth inequality, and in general anything other, less cool people they didn't want to identify with thought was important.
If they had thought, yeah, "the majority is more or less right about what the big issues are", there wouldn't be enough room to construe themselves as uniquely intelligent.