Siddhartha (1922) by Hermann Hesse | ACX Review Archive<br>Voting is open for the 2026 Book Reviews. Rate any reviews you’ve read.Closes Jun 15, 2026

Competence Porn - before it was cool

At the meetup

You show up to the ACX meetup a few minutes late. You drift through the room. There is a lot of Buddhism talk today, not exactly your favorite thing rationalists get into. You see Linda by the sourdough, not obviously part of any conversation.

You've seen Linda at meetups before and you're pretty sure she works at an AI lab, which sounds more promising, so you walk over. "There's no alpha left in secular scientific interpretations of Buddhism," you say, dryly. Little did you know you'd just approached the instigator of the entire thing.

"Well, most people are not trying to squeeze alpha out of propagating their newest interpretation of Buddhism, the interest is more bottom up and personal than that, don't you think?"

Huh, this did not go as planned. Exit the conversation or try to not look like a total ass? Well, it's not like you will get a non-Buddhism conversation elsewhere.

"Sure, but this is something that always confused me a little bit. I totally get the point to find the useful bits of a religion to adapt, but even in rationalist circles there is a weird tendency for people to get into Buddhism in particular a little more than that, starting to use Sanskrit terms, and suddenly knowing and discussing way more of the metaphysical aspects of it. It's almost like Buddhism is immune to our general distrust in religion."

"So you noticed that you are confused," she winks at you, "for me, it's fascinating how much many rationalists just ignore most aspects of religion. I mean, they are actually very impressive."

"Impressive in the way they hoodwink people and make them spout nonsense? Sure."

"... well, admittedly, that, too. But also... okay, imagine, just epistemically, you walk into an ACX meetup and all those people you actually trust, who have proven they can think about things clearly, are all enamored with this one new person you've never heard of. Excited, like, glowing. You start trying to figure out what's going on, and..."

"If inside the story someone starts telling someone about a future ACX meetup, I'm out."

She makes a face, then says "Relax. I would never go more than two levels of meta. That would be ridiculous."

She keeps going.

"So. You walk in. People you respect, highly educated and epistemically rigorous people, are all excited about this one new guy you don't know. You start asking questions, turns out he is some new rationalist blogger. But his focus is slightly different, he talks a lot about happiness and how to live life in a very basic way. You know about some people writing about this, but it isn't the center of rationalists' attention and there is way more disagreement around it, people don't really galvanize around it. And it's kind of tripping you up, your cult senses are tingling." She makes the spidey-sense gesture.

"You know me so well."

"Yes, yes, fair. So you think this interest will blow over in a while for most of them, and a few will be embarrassed to talk about this in a few months. So you want to be the voice of reason, ask some pointed questions to these people you thought would never fall for something like that.

"But before you can really get anywhere, the room freezes. A light appears. An octopus materializes next to the sourdough." She points at the actual sourdough. "He says: I have information for you about the future. Do you want it?"

You open your mouth. "Wait. Why are you an oct..."

"That's exactly how you react in my story, too! And the octopus says," she slips into a deeper voice, "Don't ask questions about that." She glares at you, then drops the voice. "And so you don't."

You make a face. She ignores you and just assumes that you do want information about the future, yes please... Fair.

"Octopus tells you: in a hundred years, the descendants of these specific people, your friends in this room, the people they go on to influence, are going to live the most wildly successful, morally pure, happiest lives. They will be icons of history, and their blogs will have sooo many subscribers. They will still be quoting this man verbatim. They will gather and try to reconstruct, word for word, what he said. And then, years later," she suddenly looks nervous, "in gatherings that are definitely not an ACX meetup,” side eye “they try to actually put it all into one framework they can pass through the generations. And even this modified, watered down version then sprouts into a movement that is still so persuasive that people 2500 years later talk about it at... fine, at ACX meetups, I'm done anyway."

She looks at you.

"Conditioning on the octopus being believable, wouldn't you then be curious what that guy had to say?"

You think about it. "Yeah, fine, I see what you did there. Honestly, I'd still mostly bet on manipulation and standard cult dynamics....