Doomers and Groypers
CrowdSource 2.3.2025
Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements, and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: ideas and idea-makers.
Join us! CrowdSource features the best comments from The Crowd — our cherished readers and subscribers who, with their comments and emails, help make Wisdom of Crowds what it is.
Ideas and Consequences
Last week’s news about a murder cult — the “Zizians” — founded by members of the Rationalist community, has people asking whether ideas can drive people to do crazy things, including commit murder.
“The Zizians and the Rationalist Death Cults.” Here’s a thorough account of the story by
.
Many commentators have specifically wondered whether the cult’s “doomerism” — the conviction that humanity’s end is near, because of AI, climate change or something else — drove them to violence.
Yes. Tech muckraker
writes: “Apocalyptic predictions, asserted with a confidence buttressed by weaponized misuse of ‘Bayesian’ logic, is driving young people insane by convincing them that they must take extreme steps to halt an imagined doom.”Qualified yes. “Maybe the Zizians are true believers. The point is not that ideology, or the will to ideology, is absent. It’s that ideology itself has become a joke even among those who want to believe,” writes Freddie deBoer. “Chaos is coming, and it will come packaged in boutique philosophies the shooters don’t honestly believe.”
Maybe. This weekend, WoC contributor and playwright
premiered a new play titled Doomers, about the Bay Area tech scene. Last week, Gasda wrote about his experience conducting research for the play: “I discovered that while nearly everyone in the AI world had come up with statistical models or analytical inferences about the likelihood of doom, nobody seemed to possess humanistic or theological intuition about why they should, perhaps, back away.”It’s possible. This seems a logical implication in
essay, which criticizes Doomers: “The AI Doomers’ plans are based on an urgency which is widely assumed but never justified. For many of them, the urgency leads to a rush to do something — anything — even if their strategy is unsound and has historically done exactly the opposite of what they profess to want.”Prophetic. In 2023,
predicted that “Silicon Valley’s AI obsession” would lead to bad consequences.
Do Intellectuals Matter on the Right?
A recent New York Times interview with alt-right intellectual and monarchist
has people asking: are intellectuals important to the Right? Do they matter in the Trump White House?Yes. Reporter Ian Ward describes “the new conservative counter-elite that has risen to power on the tide of Trump’s reelection — and Yarvin, who has arguably done more than anyone to shape the thinking of that nascent group, was an informal guest of honor.”
Yes. Writer
defends J. D. Vance as an intellectual.Yes and No. In our latest podcast,
believes ideas have influence in the Trump White House; disagrees.No. Writer
says: “While mainstream media is still chasing after master figures and hidden intellectuals shaping elite consensus, the real story is that young righties look at the opinions and trends among the groypers as being far more interesting and important than respectable intellectuals.”What is a groyper? “a subculture of online trolls with extreme right views who use the groyper cartoon (a fat toad a kind of more sinister, repulsive Pepe the Frog) as an avatar, but now in many cases do not. It’s sort of the grassroots (or netroots) successor to what was once called ‘the alt-right.’ ”
From the Crowd
- challenges a statement made by in last week’s debate about deportations:
“It’s legitimate to vote to regulate the inflow of foreign workers and to demand greater security along the border”
Why is it legitimate? Does the “demand” spring from our generous, compassionate, and empathetic impulses? Or the impulses of fear, xenophobia, and aggrievedness?
It seems that every WoC article is about sympathy for the grievances of Trump voters. “Of course I’m on the left, a liberal, but you have to hand it to the put upon Trump voter on this one.”
You’re a liberal, maybe even a leftist. We should be working towards a world without borders, where membership in the political communities isn’t enforced with violence. I wish more intelligence here went towards this project.
Read Santiago’s response here.
- defends the Effective Altruism movement against critiques in our recent podcast, “How Will the Left Respond to Trump?”:
Scott Alexander, for the record, is a passionate Effective Altruist who has explicitly compared the movement to a religion:
“Your father’s ancestors called them Torah and tikkun olam; your mother’s ancestors called them Truth and Beauty; your current social sphere calls them Rationality and Effective Altruism. You will learn other names, too: no perspective can exhaust their infinite complexity. Whatever you call them, your lives will be spent in their service, pursuing them even unto that far-off and maybe-mythical point where they blur into One.”
I suppose that is at least potentially metaphysical! It might depend on how you look at it. But yes, when Scott begins his post with “Whenever I write about charity …” he is referring to his many prior Effective Altruist posts. When he accuses his targets of “caring about poor people you’ll never meet, suffering in far-off countries” he is talking about motivations for donating to effective charities even if the best value for money is in locations far from you. And so on.
I note this in part due to my inevitable sympathy for atheist morality, and in part because I honestly think that, high-profile exceptions aside, Effective Altruists are some of the most passionately moral people you’re likely to meet. They are an interesting bunch, and they get a lot of dismissals that they don’t deserve.
Sierra makes an important correction to
’ piece, “Only the Mexican President Knows how to Deal with Emperor Trump”:
Loved reading this article. One small note though — while Colombia was not the first free territory, it did have the first free African town in the Americas, called San Basilio de Palenque, founded in 1619 by Domingo Biohó and a group of enslaved Africans who escaped their captors. I can only guess that this is probably what Petro was referring to, though he should've been more specific. Anyway — thanks for the entertaining and thoughtful analysis!
See you next week!
Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!