Live data from Hacker News

Why are there so many rationalist cults?

asteriskmag.com

261–270 of 947 posts

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#261
For me largley shaped by the westering old Europe creaking and breaking (after 2 WWs) under its heavy load of philosophical/metaphysical inheritance (which at this point in time can be considered effectively americanized).

It is still fascinating to trace back the divergent developments like american-flavoured christian sects or philosophical schools of "pragmatism", "rationalism" etc. which get super-charged by technological disruptions.

In my youth I was heavily influenced by the so-called Bildung which can be functionally thought of as a form of ersatz religion and is maybe better exemplified in the literary tradition of the Bildungsroman.

I've grappled with and wildly fantasized about all sorts of things, experimented mindlessly with all kinds of modes of thinking and consciousness amidst my coming-of-age, in hindsight without this particular frame of Bildung left by myself I would have been left utterly confused and maybe at some point acted out on it. By engaging with books like Der Zauberberg by Thomas Mann or Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften by Robert Musil, my apparent madness was calmed down and instead of breaking the dam of a forming social front of myself with the vastness of the unconsciousness, over time I was guided to develop my own way into slowly operating it appropriately without completely blowing myself up into a messiah or finding myself eternally trapped in the futility and hopelessness of existence.

Borrowing from my background, one effective vaccination which spontaneously came up in my mind against rationalists sects described here, is Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung which can be read as a radical continuation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason which was trying to stress test the ratio itself. [To demonstrate the breadth of Bildung in even something like the physical sciences e.g. Einstein was familiar with Kant's a priori framework of space and time, Heisenberg's autobiographical book Der Teil und das Ganze was motivated by: "I wanted to show that science is done by people, and the most wonderful ideas come from dialog".]

Schopenhauer arrives at the realization because of the groundwork done by Kant (which he heavily acknowledges): that there can't even exist a rational basis for rationality itself, that it is simply an exquisitely disguised tool in the service of the more fundamental will i.e. by its definition an irrational force.

Funny little thought experiment but what consequences does this have? Well, if you are declaring the ratio as your ultima ratio you are just fooling yourself in order to be able to rationalize anything you want. Once internalized Schopenhauer's insight gets you overwhelmed by Mitleid for every conscious being, inoculating you against the excesses of your own ratio. It instantly hit me with the same force as MDMA but several years before.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#262
post #187

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…

I don’t think it’s just (or even particularly) bad axioms, I think it’s that people tend to build up “logical” conclusions where they think each step is a watertight necessity that follows inevitably from its antecedents, but actually each step is a little bit leaky, leading to runaway growth in false confidence. Not that non-rationalists are any better at reasoning, but non-rationalists do at least benefit from some…

Perhaps part of being rational, as opposed to rationalist, is having a sense of when to override the conclusions of seemingly logical arguments.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#263

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…

Saw once a discussion that people should not have kids as it's by far the highest increase in your carbon footprint in your lifetime (>10x than going vegan, etc) be driven all the way to advocating genocide as a way of carbon footprint minimization

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#264
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Her books were very popular with the gifted kids I hung out with in the late 80s. Cool kids would carry around hardback copies of Atlas Shrugged, impressive by the sheer physical size and art deco cover. How did that trend begin?

What's funny is that Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shear already took the piss out of Ayn Rand in Illuminatus! (1969-1971).

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#265
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "bears" story reads a lot more sensibly if you translated it correctly as "a gang of thugs tries to bully Elisha into killing himself." Still reliant on the supernatural, but what do you expect from such a book?

Where do you see that in the text? I am looking at the Hebrew script, and the text only reads that as Elisha went up a path, young lads left the city and mocked him by saying "get up baldy", and he turned to them and cursed them to be killed by two she bears. I don't think saying "get up baldy" to a guy walking up a hill constitutes bullying him into killing himself.

[deleted]

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it’s that people tend to build up “logical” conclusions where they think each step is a watertight necessity that follows inevitably from its antecedents, but actually each step is a little bit leaky, leading to runaway growth in false confidence. Yeah, this is a pattern I've seen a lot of recently—especially in discussions about LLMs and the supposed inevitability of AGI (and the Singularity). This is a go…

Another annoying one is the simulation theory group. They know just enough about Physics to build sophisticated mental constructs without understanding how flimsy the foundations are or how their logical steps are actually unproven hypotheses.

Agreed. This one is especially annoying to me and dear to my heart, because I enjoy discussing the philosophy behind this, but it devolves into weird discussions and conclusions fairly quickly without much effort at all. I particularly enjoy the tenets of certain sects of buddhism and how they view these things, but you'll get a lot of people that are doing a really pseudo-intellectual version of the Matrix where they are the main character.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#267
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, people should understand, what is Scientology based on? The E-Meter which is some kind of cheap shit radio shack lie detector thing. I'm quite sure LLMs would do very well if given the task to spit out new cult doctrines and I would gather we are less than years away from cults based on LLM generated content (if not already).

Terry Davis, a cult of one, believed God spoke to him through his computer's RNG. So... yeah.

If only he installed Dwarf Fortress where he could become one.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why didnt they kill the hippos like we killed the buffalo?

Hippos are more dangerous than emus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#270

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. Specifically, rationalism spends a lot of time about priors, but a sneaky thing happens that I call the 'double update'. Bayesian updating works when you update your genuine prior believe with new evidence. No one disagrees with this, and sometimes it's easy and sometimes it's di…

Thanks, that's a fantastic description of a phenomenon I've observed but couldn't quite put my finger on.
Post reply on HN