You never see these obnoxious nerds converting to Lutheranism or whatever, it's always Catholicism or less often some form of Orthodox Christianity because they want to imagine themselves as DnD paladins
Catholicism is unironically better than any branch of American Protestantism*
*Methodism not included
edit: I am not very familiar with Lutheranism, but I am fairly confident it is better than Catholicism but it is very much not American.
Counterpoint, the absolute least favorite person I have the dissatisfaction of knowing is both a virulent race science dweeb but also a Methodist. And like a good Methodist too, specifically into Methodism or whatever the fuck. I've known some pretty based methodists, episcopalians, and presbyterians though.
I can't be certain having never met them but I'm guessing the race science part is the most objectionable.
Quakers have their moments. And I have a soft spot for Mennonites despite a lot of horrible takes.
I would describe the type of mainstream Lutheranism the average Finnish person grows up with as mild and mostly inoffensive
There's female priests and they don't even hate gay people that much
The songs we had to sing in religious school morning assemblies were very lame and cringe though
They are looking for a illiberal ideology, so they turn towards branches of Christianity that predate liberalism. Protestantism is just liberalized Christianity, after all.
There's something to be said for them choosing the feudal aesthetic fascist fundamentalism over the settler-colonialism aesthetic fascist fundamentalism. For tech nerds and their hangers on, including the R rationalists, this tracks as more exotic and magical (which considering the shallowness of their lives, it gives them rituals to do) than the coffee bar mega church that is targeting lower and upper middle class people to build a petit bourgeois minded death cult.
Yeah, Evangelical movements are slop for hooting and hollering peasant morons like Chris Pratt, not for cool & edgy dark intellectuals like these people
Yeah, it seems to have at least something to do with the crowds these people run with. It looks like Libresco is closely associated with a bunch of Catholic sugar-daddy-funded make-work "journals" (First Things, Crisis), at least partly through her husband. I don't know if that came before or after her conversion. There is a definite "type" here: the Breunigs, quasi-paleocons like Damon Linker, radtrads like Andrew Bacevich, etc. You see it even in the pop culture with the very public conversion of Dasha from Red Scare. It's probably an aesthetic preference as least as much as an intellectual conversion, but it's not just aesthetics for most of them. Protestant fundamentalism has become anti-intellectual to the point of hostility toward any form of higher education. So radtrad Catholicism and nonsense like ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, basically Orthodox radtrad-ism) are really the only options for the educated. I think Rod Dreher eventually joined ROCOR after leaving Catholicism.
Simple ego probably drives people like this as well. Libresco is a rising "star" on Catholic networks like EWTN. She is now on the tradcath/radtrad speaking circuit and playing the prodigal daughter on Catholic TV.
The complex theology at least partially accounts for it. When you can't rationalise your chuddery through science you can usually find some extremely cranky catholic theologian who was considered heretical at the time but was boosted so that Pius IX could dunk on the guy who stole his country.
Bit of a tangent, but how the fuck does anyone take Yud seriously? The man never even went to high school let alone college. He's set himself up as some sort of expert on artificial intelligence when for all we know he's never even written a goddamn helloworld program.
Grabbing big money donations from rich idiots to start an "AI safety research institute" and then proceeding to publish 0 AI safety research, choosing instead to write fanfiction is a respectable career decision. You don't have to like the man, but you do have to respect the grift
He waas extremely online at a point when being so pretty much guaranteed a certain amount of long term notoriety, wrote a few extremely wrong and extremely compelling pieces of work in the late 90s that got him attention from real scholars in the USENET boards, leveraged that into a blog with Robin Hanson, and has been coasting on the laurels since.
It took until 1992 for the Pope to recognize that the earth revolved around the sun.
Rationalist to fundamentalist pipeline is no big surprise when you realize that reddit/lesswrong rationalism is just repackaging millennia-old theological debates with scifi wrapping to people who are ignorant to both theology and science.
AI singularity is literally just messianism but with a silicone god. Mind upload/teleportation debate is just nerds rediscovering the concept of soul. Quantum immortality is just afterlife mixed with quantum bullshit. Rokko's
modern lifebasilisk is just an evil god for people with their head way deep inside their ass to realize that it's literally just the plot of Terminator.Yeah, its been pointed out (even from within the group) that they are repeatedly reinventing religion.
