iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Replies

Surplus Cornbread @surpluscornbread.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Worry about if the machine might be too smart and convert everyone into chips, but don't ask use to watermark AI results to consistently identify deepfakes or cheating in schools. The issue is the real issues we see need to be ignored in favor of a hypothetical issue that allows market concentration

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Surplus Cornbread @surpluscornbread.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

And finally a word on "cults" in general. I advise against using it, because you can get to describing groups as a problem without it, and you're lazily relying on associations that are likely not true of a given group. For a discussion on this I recommend (see next reply) bsky.app/profile/segy...

SE Gyges@segyges.bsky.social

Any time you get more than a few people who are deeply concerned with AI doom together, it seems like their natural form of organization looks like a cult; rationalism as a whole is less of a cult than it is a cult factory. Some of these cults have gone very badly. One of them is the Zizians.

asteriskmag.com

Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults?

There’s a lot to like about the Rationalist community, but they do have a certain tendency to spawn — shall we say — high demand groups. We sent a card-carrying Rat to investigate what’s really going ...

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Surplus Cornbread @surpluscornbread.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Dr. Joseph Laycock's article "A Cult by Any Other Name: Is "High Demand Group" a Useful Category?" in the journal Nova Religio available at a local sci hub near you! A key take-away from the essay:

*highlighted text*When someone calls a group a “cult,” it is not clear whether they object to the group’s theology, have concerns about its social structure, are unimpressed by the size of its membership and the date of its founding, or if they simply do not like it.

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