Off-topic, but it makes me think of "reasoning black holes": you get enough like-minded people together that they start reinforcing each other's logic and beliefs until not only those people get completely detached from reality, but anyone who interacts with them gets sucked in as well unless their own logic ("velocity") is adequate to skirt the edge and escape, forever altered by the experience.

Similar questions arise: how would you know if you were inside one? The laws of logic ("physics") seemingly don't apply, but there's no way to test them in that environment.

▲

PaulHoule 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I dunno. Those rationalists seem to be in some kind of intellectual black hole which never had any danger of sucking me in. Like I have seen many strands of posthumanism and transhumanism, speculations about an intelligence explosion circa 1970, and figure it would have been just as much fun to sit around the campfire, pass a joint around, and talk about crazy stuff with these guys

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cosmism

as it would be to do with anyone contemporary. In their orbit I get periodically annoyed but changed forever, no.

	▲	sfink 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well, the analogy is to something flying by a black hole and having its trajectory altered.[1] It sounds like it fits you, then -- you interacted, and are now forever irritated by them or by things that sound like them, even things that you would not have previously noticed. [1] This is just gravity, nothing specific to black holes, so the analogy isn't doing a lot of work here.

▲

beeandapenguin 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Kinda sounds like a "linguistic manifold."