I agree with your description of (your?) beliefs, so if I implied anything else then I expressed myself poorly.

Unfortunately there isn't such a thing as an ideal thought process - that is, if you want to make a correct prediction about the world, there is no demonstratably correct method of doing that. This sort of thing has been tried before (logical positivism) and disproven (Wittgenstein and Gödel's theorem). It's notable that AI research is mostly getting places by just doing gigantic matrix multiplications instead of this.

It can be a useful exercise but it's not a good life philosophy - it's a bit robotic. And it gets cult-like if you add things on like "…and that's why you should live in our group home" or "…and that's why you should get rich and donate it all to evil AGI research".

This isn't very important to me though, it's just something I've noticed. It seem to come up a lot more lately because people reply to every ML story with "oh no the AIs are going to take our jobs" stuff, but still the largest impact it's had on the real world is Roko causing Elon Musk to date Grimes.

I think I meet more people who've developed life philosophies in reaction to knowing about LW ("post rats" or "meta rats") - mostly they explicitly decided to join religions instead of accidentally doing it - and for some reason all of them became Buddhists. That one surprises me.