Every rationalist I've met has been nice and smart and deserved better. These are nerds and not in a bad way, but in a way that gets them bullied and shamed and gaslit. And in practice I can come to agreement with them on lots of issues.

On this issue I can never pin them down -- responding with what I think are reasonable questions gets me shut down with what I believe is thought-stopping behavior. They rarely state the actual reasons and the actual reasons are always slippier when they have to verbalize them to people who don't agree.

No doubt if you're a cynical manipulator, "having your followers lie about what you believe" works for you. But a lot of these are going to be nice normal guys who are tired of being laughed at and, worryingly, tired of being made to think.

In this respect they have a lot in common with, say, high school kids who became communists in part to piss off their parents. I'm not saying that to mock those kids, because I was one of them -- and I think there's a huge part of this that they're not wrong about and they're entitled to demand to be taken seriously, and precious few people do take nerds seriously. And for that matter, there's philosophically sophisticated people doing the same work as them.

I don't know how we get them into spaces where something is actually done -- if not for humanity or whatever, for people very close to them who actually need it -- and where the seduction of ego and money isn't like, so readily and constantly available.