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Why are there so many rationalist cults?

asteriskmag.com

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Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#541

Post by skybrian »

pavlov wrote: post #398

A very interesting read. My idea of these self-proclaimed rationalists was fifteen years out of date. I thought they’re people who write wordy fan fiction, but turns out they’ve reached the point of having subgroups that kill people and exorcise demons. This must be how people who had read one Hubbard pulp novel in the 1950s felt decades later when they find out he’s running a full-blown religion now. The article see…

The WHO didn't declare a global pandemic until March 11, 2020 [1]. That's a little slow and some rationalists were earlier than that. (Other people too.)

After reading a warning from a rationalist blog, I posted a lot about COVID news to another forum and others there gave me credit for giving the heads-up that it was a Big Deal and not just another thing in the news. (Not sure it made all that much difference, though?)

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7569573/

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#542

Post by [deleted] »

tbrake wrote: post #337
Muromec wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know?

having known dozens of friends, family, roommates, coworkers etc both before and after they started them. The two biggest telltale signs - 1. tendency to produce - out of no necessity whatsoever, mind - walls of text. walls of speech will happen too but not everyone rambles. 2. Obnoxiously confident that they're fundamentally correct about whatever position they happen to be holding during a conversation with you. No…

[deleted]

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#544

Post by skybrian »

qcnguy wrote: post #514
pavlov wrote: post #398

A very interesting read. My idea of these self-proclaimed rationalists was fifteen years out of date. I thought they’re people who write wordy fan fiction, but turns out they’ve reached the point of having subgroups that kill people and exorcise demons. This must be how people who had read one Hubbard pulp novel in the 1950s felt decades later when they find out he’s running a full-blown religion now. The article see…

[flagged]

It was genuinely difficult to persuade people to wear masks before everyone started doing it and it became normal.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#545

Post by dragonwriter »

sien wrote: post #537
samdoesnothing wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they need formal training? Can't they just read Plato, Socrates, etc, and classical lit like Dostoevsky, Camus, Kafka etc? That would be far better than whatever they're doing now.

Trying to do a bit of formal philosophy at University is really worth doing. You realise that it's very hard to do well and it's intellectual quicksand. Reading philosophers and great writers as you suggest is better than joining a cult. It's just that you also want to write about what you're thinking in response to reading such people and ideally have what you write critiqued by smart people. Perhaps an AI could do…

> It's just that you also want to write about what you're thinking in response to reading such people and ideally have what you write critiqued by smart people. Perhaps an AI could do some of that these days.

An AI can neither write about what you are thinking in your place nor substitute for a particularly smart critic, but might still be useful for rubber-ducking philosophical writing if used well.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#547

Post by noqc »

o11c wrote: post #206
noqc wrote: post #15

Perhaps I will get downvoted to death again for saying so, but the obvious answer is because the name "rationalist" is structurally indistinguishable from the name "scientology" or "the illuminati". You attract people who are desperate for an authority to appeal to, but for whatever reason are no longer affiliated with the church of their youth. Even a rationalist movement which held nothing as dogma would attract pe…

> for whatever reason are no longer affiliated with the church of their youth. This is the Internet, you're allowed to say "they are obsessed with unlimited drugs and weird sex things, far beyond what even the generally liberal society tolerates". I'm increasingly convinced that every other part of "Rationalism" is just distraction or justification for those; certainly there's a conscious decision to minimize talking…

No, I really mean atheists that crave religion.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#548

Post by staticman2 »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #247
JKCalhoun wrote: post #235

> Many of them also expect that, without heroic effort, AGI development will lead to human extinction. Odd to me. Not biological warfare? Global warming? All-out nuclear war? I guess The Terminator was a formative experience for them. (For me perhaps it was The Andromeda Strain .)

These aren't mutually exclusive. Even in The Terminator , Skynet's method of choice is nuclear war. Yudkowsky frequency expressses concern that a malevolent AI might synthesize a bioweapon. I personally worry that destroying the ozone layer might be an easy opening volley. Either way, I don't want a really smart computer spending its time figuring out plans to end the human species, because I think there are too many…

Terminator descends from a tradition of science fiction cold war parables. Even in Terminator 2 there's a line suggesting the movie isn't really about robots:

John:We're not gonna make it, are we? People, I mean.

Terminator: It's in your nature to destroy yourselves.

Seems odd to worry about computers shooting the ozone when there's plenty of real existential threats loaded in missles aimed at you right now.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#549

Post by meowface »

wredcoll wrote: post #527
meowface wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's considered the father of rationalism and the father of AI doomerism. He wrote this famous article in Time magazine a few years ago: https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-no... His book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies comes out in a month: https://www.amazon.com/Anyone-Builds-Everyone-Dies-Superhuma... You can find more info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliezer_Yudkowsky

> He's considered the father of rationalism [citation needed] Even for this weird cult that is trying to appropriate the word, would they really consider him the father of redefining the word?

The article you're reading is from the unofficial rationalist magazine and the author is a prominent rationalist blogger, so they (and I) obviously don't consider it a cult. But, yes, Yudkowsky is absolutely considered the founder of the modern rationalism movement. (No relation to the philosophical tradition also called "rationalism". Modern rationalism is mostly actually just empiricism.)
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