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Why are there so many rationalist cults?

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Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#141

Post by handoflixue »

Isamu wrote: post #113

So I like Steven Pinker’s book Rationality, to me it seems quite straightforward. But I have never been able to get into the Rationalist stuff, to me it’s all very meandering and peripheral and focused on… I don’t know what. Is it just me?

https://www.lesswrong.com/highlights this is the ostensible "Core Highlights", curated by major members of the community, and I believe Eliezer would endorse it.

If you don't get anything out of reading the list itself, then you're probably not going to get anything out of the rest of the community either.

If you poke around and find a few neat ideas there, you'll probably find a few other neat ideas.

For some people, though, this is "wait, holy shit, you can just DO that? And it WORKS?", in which case probably read all of this but then also go find a few other sources to counter-balance it.

(In particular, probably 90% of the useful insights already exist elsewhere in philosophy, and often more rigorously discussed - LessWrong will teach you the skeleton, the general sense of "what rationality can do", but you need to go elsewhere if you want to actually build up the muscles)

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#142

Post by biophysboy »

ameliaquining wrote: post #126
biophysboy wrote: post #122

> “There’s this belief [among rationalists],” she said, “that society has these really bad behaviors, like developing self-improving AI, or that mainstream epistemology is really bad–not just religion, but also normal ‘trust-the-experts’ science. That can lead to the idea that we should figure it out ourselves. And what can show up is that some people aren't actually smart enough to form very good conclusions once th…

Sure, but that doesn't say anything about why one particular social scene would spawn a bunch of cults while others do not, which is the question that the article is trying to answer.

Maybe I was too vague. My argument is that cults need a secret. The secret of the rationalist community is "nobody is rational except for us". Then the rituals would be endless probability/math/logic arguments about sci-fi futures.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#143

Post by potatolicious »

meroes wrote: post #47

It grew out of many different threads: different websites, communities, etc all around the same time. I noticed it contemporaneously in the philosophy world where Nick Bostrom’s Simulation argument was boosted more than it deserved (like everyone was just accepting it at the lay-level). Looking back I see it also developed from less wrong and other sites, but I was wondering what was going on with simulations taking…

Yeah, a lot of the comments here are really just addressing cults writ large and opposed to why this one was particularly successful.

A significant part of this is the intersection of the cult with money and status - this stuff really took off once prominent SV personalities became associated with it, and got turbocharged when it started intersecting with the angel/incubator/VC scene, when there was implicit money involved.

It's unusually successful because -- for a time at least -- there was status (and maybe money) in carrying water for it.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#144

Post by tuesdaynight »

SirFatty wrote: post #98
lazide wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course, Jim Jones and L Ron Hubbard, David Kersh. I realize there have always been people that are coocoo for cocoa puffs. But so many as there appear to be now?

Internet made possible to know global news all the time. I think that there have always been a lot of people with very crazy and extremist views, but we only knew about the ones closer to us. Now it's possible to know about crazy people from the other side of the planet, so it looks like there's a lot more of them than before.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#145

Post by handoflixue »

alphazard wrote: post #111
glenstein wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It would seem like the quintessential Rationalist institution to congregate around is the prediction market. Status in the community has to be derived from a history of making good bets (PnL as a %, not in absolute terms). And the sense of community would come from (measurably) more rational people teaching (measurably) less rational people how to be more rational.

The founder of LessWrong / The Rationalist movement would absolutely agree with you here, and has written numerous fanfics about a hypothetical alien society ("Dath Ilan") where those are fairly central.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#146

Post by bobson381 »

rpcope1 wrote: post #131
bobson381 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should be an extremist cult of people who are certain only that uncertainty is the only certain thing

More people should read Sextus Empiricus as he's basically the O.G. Phyrronist skeptic and goes pretty hard on this very train of thought.

Cool. Any specific recs or places to start with him?

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#147

Post by empath75 »

JTbane wrote: post #20
mlinhares wrote: post #4

> 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 don't know how you can call yourself a "rationalist" and base your worldview on a fantasy game.

Most "rationalists" throughout history have been very deeply religious people. Secular enlightenment-era rationalism is not the only direction you can go with it. It depends very much, as others have said, on what your axioms are.

But, fwiw, that particular role-playing game was very much based on trendy at the time occult beliefs in things like chaos magic, so it's not completely off the wall.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#148

Post by sunshowers »

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…

While deployment of logical fallacies to win arguments is annoying at best, the far bigger problem is that people make those fallacies in the first place — such as not considering base rates.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#149

Post by empath75 »

dfabulich wrote: post #82

The whole game of Rationalism is that you should ignore gut intuitions and cultural norms that you can't justify with rational arguments. Well, it turns out that intuition and long-lived cultural norms often have rational justifications, but individuals may not know what they are, and norms/intuitions provide useful antibodies against narcissist would-be cult leaders. Can you find the "rational" justification not to…

> The whole game of Rationalism is that you should ignore gut intuitions and cultural norms that you can't justify with rational arguments.

The game as it is _actually_ played is that you use rationalist arguments to justify your pre-existing gut intuitions and personal biases.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#150

Post by pingou »

AIPedant wrote: post #49
polytely wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget the biggest scifi guy turned cult leader of all L. Ron Hubbard

I don't think Yudkowski is at all like L. Ron Hubbard. Hubbard was insane and pure evil. Yudkowski seems like a decent and basically reasonable guy, he's just kind of a blowhard and he's wrong about the science. L. Ron Hubbard is more like the Zizians.

I don't have a horse in the battle but could you provide a few examples where he was wrong?
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