101–110 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.
Also, who would want to join an "irrationalist cult" ?
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.
> 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…
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.
Have you heard of Heavens Gate? [ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven%27s_Gate_(religious_g... ]. There are at least a dozen I can think of, including the ‘drink the koolaid’ Jonestown massacre. People be crazy, yo.
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.
I personally (for better or worse) became familiar with Ayn Rand as a teenager, and I think Objectivism as a kind of extended Ayn Rand social circle and set of organizations has faced the charge of cultish-ness, and that dates back to, I want to say, the 70s and 80s at least. I know Rand wrote much earlier than that, but I think the social and organizational dynamics unfolded rather late in her career.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It is used ti be always religion. But now downsides are well understood. And alternatives that can fill the same need (social activities) - like gathering with your neighbors, singing, performing arts, clubs, parks and paries are available and great.
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 re…
What is the base rate here? Hard to know the scope of the problem without knowing how many non-rationalists (is that even a coherent group of people?) end up forming weird cults, as a comparison. My impression is that crazy beliefs are common amongst everybody . A much simpler theory is that rationalists are mostly normal people, and normal people tend to form cults.
They do note at the beginning of the article that many, if not most such groups have reasonably normal dynamics, for what it's worth. But I think there's a legitimate question of whether we ought to expect groups centered on rational thinking to be better able to escape group dynamics we associate with irrationality.
> 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?
Running a cult is a somewhat reliable source of narcissistic supply. The internet tells you how to do it. So an increasing number of people do it.
One of a few issues I have with groups like these, is that they often confidently and aggressively spew a set of beliefs that on their face logically follow from one another, until you realize they are built on a set of axioms that are either entirely untested or outright nonsense. This is common everywhere, but I feel especially pronounced in communities like this. It also involves quite a bit of navel gazing that m…
There should be an extremist cult of people who are certain only that uncertainty is the only certain thing