51–60 of 947 posts
Why are there so many cults? People want to feel like they belong to something, and in a world in the midst of a loneliness and isolation epidemic the market conditions are ideal for cults.
Your profile says that you want to keep your identity small, but you have like over 30 thousand comments spelling out exactly who you are and how you think. Why not shard accounts? Anyways. Just a random thought.
Why are there so many cults? People want to feel like they belong to something, and in a world in the midst of a loneliness and isolation epidemic the market conditions are ideal for cults.
> One is Black Lotus, a Burning Man camp led by alleged rapist Brent Dill, which developed a metaphysical system based on the tabletop roleplaying game Mage the Ascension. What the actual f. This is such an insane thing to read and understand what it means that i might need to go and sit in silence for the rest of the day. How did we get to this place with people going completely nuts like this?
Once you see them listed (social pressure, sleep deprivation, control of drinking/bathroom, control of language/terminology, long exhausting activities, financial buy in, etc) and see where they've been used in cults and other cult adjacent things it's a little bit of a warning signal when you run across them IRL.
Thinking too hard about anything will drive you insane but I think the real issue here is that rationalists simply over-estimate both the power of rational thought and their ability to do it. If you think of people who tend to make that kind of mistake you can see how you get a lot of crazy groups. I guess I'm a radical skeptic, secular humanist, utilitarianish sort of guy, but I'm not dumb enough to think throwing a…
There's a point where more passive thinking stops adding value and starts subtracting sanity. It's pretty easy to get to that point. We've all done it.
> One is Black Lotus, a Burning Man camp led by alleged rapist Brent Dill, which developed a metaphysical system based on the tabletop roleplaying game Mage the Ascension. What the actual f. This is such an insane thing to read and understand what it means that i might need to go and sit in silence for the rest of the day. How did we get to this place with people going completely nuts like this?
Came to ask a similar question, but also has it always been like this? The difference is now these people/groups on the fringe had no visibility before the internet? It's nuts.
We live in an irrational time. It's unclear if it was simply under reported in history or social changes in the last ~50-75 years have had breaking consequences. People are trying to make sense of this. For examples. The Canadian government heavily subsidizes junk food, then spends heavily on healthcare because of the resulting illnesses. It restrict and limits healthy food through supply management and promotes a “f…
Pertinent Twitter comment: "Rationalism is such an insane name for a school of thought. Like calling your ideology correctism or winsargumentism" https://x.com/growing_daniel/status/1893554844725616666
Rationalism is the belief that reason is the primary path to knowledge, as opposed to, say, the observation that is championed by empiricism. It's a belief system that prioritises imposing its tenets on reality rather than asking reality what reality's tenets are. From the outset, it's inherently cult-like.
That is the definition of “rationalism” as proposed by philosophers like Descartes and Kant, but I don’t think that is an accurate representation of the type of “rationalism” this article describes. This article describes “rationalism” as described in LessWrong and the sequences by Eliezer Yudkowsky. A good amount of it based on empirical findings from psychology behavior science. It’s called “rationalism” because it…
Many of their "beliefs" - Super-duper intelligence, doom - are clearly not believed by the market; Observing the market is a kind of empiricism and it's completely discounted by the lw-ers
> One is Black Lotus, a Burning Man camp led by alleged rapist Brent Dill, which developed a metaphysical system based on the tabletop roleplaying game Mage the Ascension. What the actual f. This is such an insane thing to read and understand what it means that i might need to go and sit in silence for the rest of the day. How did we get to this place with people going completely nuts like this?
I'm a staunch atheist and I feel the pull all the time.