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Why are there so many rationalist cults?

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Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#71

Post by shadowgovt »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #7

It’s especially popular in Silicon Valley. Quite possibly, places like Reddit and Hacker News, are training for the required level of intellectual smugness, and certitude that you can dismiss every annoying argument with a logical fallacy. That sounds smug of me, but I’m actually serious. One of their defects, is that once you memorize all the fallacies (“Appeal to authority,” “Ad hominem,”) you can easily reach the…

It's generally worth remembering that some of the fallacies are actually structural, and some are rhetorical.

A contradiction creates a structural fallacy; if you find one, it's a fair belief that at least one of the supporting claims is false. In contrast, appeal to authority is probabilistic: we don't know, given the current context, if the authority is right, so they might be wrong... But we don't have time to read the universe into this situation so an appeal to authority is better than nothing.

... and this observation should be coupled with the observation that the school of rhetoric wasn't teaching a method for finding truth; it was teaching a method for beating an opponent in a legal argument. "Appeal to authority is a logical fallacy" is a great sword to bring to bear if your goal is to turn off the audience's ability to ask whether we should give the word of the environmental scientist and the washed-up TV actor equal weight on the topic of environmental science...

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#72

Post by rkapsoro »

Something like 15 years ago I once went to a Less Wrong/Overcoming Bias meetup in my town after being a reader of Yudkowsky's blog for some years. I was like, Bayesian Conspiracy, cool, right?

The group was weird and involved quite a lot of creepy oversharing. I didn't return.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#73

Post by glenstein »

alphazard wrote: post #48

The terminology here is worth noting. Is a Rationalist Cult a cult that practices Rationalism according to third parties, or is it a cult that says they are Rationalist? Clearly all of these groups that believe in demons or realities dictated by tabletop games are not what third parties would call Rationalist. They might call themselves that. There are some pretty simple tests that can out these groups as not rationa…

Yeah, I would say the groups in question are notionally, aspirationally rational and I would hate for the takeaway to be disengagement from principles of critical thinking and skeptical thinking writ large.

Which, to me, raises the fascinating question of what does a "good" version look like, of groups and group dynamics centered around a shared interest in best practices associated with critical thinking?

At a first impression, I think maybe these virtues (which are real!) disappear into the background of other, more applied specializations, whether professions, hobbies, backyard family barbecues.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#74

Post by righthand »

potato3732842 wrote: post #62
righthand wrote: post #13

[flagged]

I think it speaks volumes that you think "american" is the approximate level of scope that this behavior lives at. Stuff like this crosses all aspects of society. Certain americans of certain backgrounds, demographics and life experiences are fare more likely engage in it than others. I think those people are minority, but they are definitely an overly visible one if not a local majority in a lot of internet spaces s…

Sure many people across the globe are susceptible to cult-think. It’s just been a century long trend in America to seek a superior way of living to “save all Americans” is all. No offense to other countries peoples, I’m sure they’re just as good cult members championing over application as any American.

It probably speaks more volumes that you are taking my comment about this so literally.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#75

Post by ljlolel »

shadowgovt wrote: post #45
j_m_b wrote: post #26

> One way that thinking for yourself goes wrong is that you realize your society is wrong about something, don’t realize that you can’t outperform it, and wind up even wronger. many such cases

It is an unfortunate reality of our existence that sometimes Chesterton actually did build that fence for a good reason, a good reason that's still here. (One of my favorite TED talks was about a failed experiment in introducing traditional Western agriculture to a people in Zambia. It turns out when you concentrate too much food in one place, the hippos come and eat it all and people can't actually out-fight hippos…

TEDx

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#76

Post by incomingpain »

codr7 wrote: post #57
incomingpain wrote: post #14

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…

There's nothing irrational about it, this is how you maximize power and profit at any and all costs.

I completely get that point of view; and yes if that's the goal, it's completely rational.

But from a societal cohesion or perhaps even an ethical point of view it's just pure irrationality.

When typing the post, I was thinking, different levels of government, changing ideologies of politicians leaving inconsistent governance.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#77

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

optimalsolver wrote: post #3

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

To be honest I don't understand that objection. If you strip it from all its culty sociological effects, one of the original ideas of rationalism was to try to use logical reasoning and statistical techniques to explicitly avoid the pitfalls of known cognitive biases. Given that foundational tenet, "rationalism" seems like an extremely appropriate moniker.

I fully accept that the rationalist community may have morphed into something far beyond that original tenet, but I think rationalism just describes the approach, not that it's the "one true philosophy".

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#78

Post by Barrin92 »

alphazard wrote: post #48

The terminology here is worth noting. Is a Rationalist Cult a cult that practices Rationalism according to third parties, or is it a cult that says they are Rationalist? Clearly all of these groups that believe in demons or realities dictated by tabletop games are not what third parties would call Rationalist. They might call themselves that. There are some pretty simple tests that can out these groups as not rationa…

>so world models including demons have never predicted any of their sense data.

There's a reason they call themselves "rationalists" instead of empiricists or positivists. They perfectly inverted Hume ("reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions")

These kinds of harebrained views aren't an accident but a product of rationalism. The idea that intellect is quasi infinite and that the world can be mirrored in the mind is not running contradictory to, but just the most extreme form of rationalism taken to its conclusion, and of course deeply religious, hence the constant fantasies about AI divinities and singularities.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#79

Post by mlinhares »

reactordev wrote: post #46
SirFatty wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s always been like this, have you read the Bible? Or the Koran? It’s insane. Ours is just our flavor of crazy. Every generation has some. When you dig at it, there’s always a religion.

Mage is a game for teenagers, it doesn't try to be anything else other than a game where you roll dice do to stuff.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#80

Post by shadowgovt »

api wrote: post #2

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.

The book Imagined Communities (Benedict Anderson) touches on this, making the case that in modern times, "nation" has replaced the cultural narrative purpose previously held by "tribe," "village," "royal subject," or "religion."

The shared thread among these is (in ever widening circles) a story people tell themselves to justify precisely why, for example, the actions of someone you'll never meet in Tulsa, OK have any bearing whatsoever on the fate of you, a person in Lincoln, NE.

One can see how this leaves an individual in a tenuous place if one doesn't feel particularly connected to nationhood (one can also see how being too connected to nationhood, in an exclusionary way, can also have deleterious consequences, and how not unlike differing forms of Christianity, differing concepts on what the 'soul' of a nation is can foment internal strife).

(To be clear: those fates are intertwined to some extent; the world we live in grows ever smaller due to the power of up-scaled influence of action granted by technology. But "nation" is a sort of fiction we tell ourselves to fit all that complexity into the slippery meat between human ears).

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