They've certainly turned out different than Scott Alexander predicted, once the markets were opened up to people who are not in the wider rationalist community.
Not foreseeing the amount of sports betting that would take place, is kind of a failure of rationality in the first place, and I say this as someone who absolutely respects the community in general.
You should have lost your respect for the "rationalist" "community" a long time ago. They are aggressively wrong about everything, and most of them are eugenicists.
That's not been my observation at all. Rationalists are some of the only people to really embrace fuzzy and probabilistic thinking. Am I missing something?
They were right about Bitcoin getting big (though I'm not aware of anyone putting their money where their mouth was), and they were a decent source of information leading up to the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic (which probably saved a handful of lives). Just because they're almost always aggressively wrong, that doesn't mean they're aggressively wrong about everything.
Rationalists were talking about AI decades before anyone else were talking about it. They were also early on COVID and crypto. They are only "aggressively wrong" about "everything" if you are, ironically, not thinking rationally about it.
It really is a sad, provincial spectacle. Reminds me of the embarrassing "movement" where people called themselves "Brights". I expect we'll soon have a new movement called "The Smart People".
A weird synthesis of the goofy, the immature, the delusional, and the grandiose shot through with mental illness.
