Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Why are there so many rationalist cults?
591–600 of 947 posts
Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?
#592Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be clear, this article isn't calling rationalism a cult, it's about cults that have some sort of association with rationalism (social connection and/or ideology derived from rationalist concepts), e.g. the Zizians.
This article attempts to establish disjoint categories "good rationalist" and "cultist." Its authorship, and its appearance in the cope publication of the "please take us seriously" rationalist faction, speak volumes of how well it is likely to succeed in that project.
I think it's a meaningful distinction- most rationalists aren't running murder cults.
Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?
#593Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the downvotes are because rationalism isn't a cult and people take offense to being blatantly insulted. This article is about cults that are rationalism-adjacent, it's not claiming that rationalism is itself a cult.
That's almost word for word what I said...
You're right, I misread you.
Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?
#594> 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?
People are wired to worship, and want somebody in charge telling them what to do. I'm a staunch atheist and I feel the pull all the time.
I slowly deconverted from being raised evangelical / fundamentalist into being an atheist in my late 40s. I still "pray" at times just to (mentally) shout my frustration at the sorry state of the world at SOMETHING (even nothing) rather than constantly yelling my frustration at my family.
I may have actually been less anxious about the state of the world back then, and may have remained so, if I'd just continued to ignore all those little contradictions that I just couldn't ignore anymore...... But I feel SO MUCH less personal guilt about being "human".
Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?
#595Earlier quoted context omitted.
From false premises, you can logically and rationally reach really wrong conclusions. If you have too much pride in your rationality, you may not be willing to say "I seem to have reached a really insane conclusion, maybe my premises are wrong". That is, the more you pride yourself on your rationalism, the more prone you may be to accepting a bogus conclusion if it is bogus because the premises are wrong.
Then again, most people tend to form really bogus beliefs without bothering to establish any premises. They may not even be internally consistent or align meaningfully with reality. I imagine having premises and thinking it through has a better track record of reaching conclusions consistent with reality.
> I imagine having premises and thinking it through has a better track record of reaching conclusions consistent with reality.
Why do you imagine that? Have you tested it?
Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?
#596Earlier quoted context omitted.
In philosophy grad school, we described this as 'being reasonable' as opposed to 'being rational'. That said, big-R Rationalism (the Lesswrong/Yudkowsky/Ziz social phenomenon) has very little in common with what we've standardly called 'rationalism'; trained philosophers tend to wince a little bit when we come into contact with these groups (who are nevertheless chockablock with fascinating personalities and compelli…
I actually think that the fact that rationalists use the term "steel manning" betrays a lack of charity. If the only thing you owe your interlocutor is to use your "prodigious intellect" to restate their own argument in the way that sounds the most convincing to you, maybe you are in fact a terrible listener.
Listening to other viewpoints is hard. Restating is a good tool to improve listening and understanding. I don't agree with this criticism at all, since that "prodigious intellect" bit isn't inherent to the term.
Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?
#597I think the comments here have been overly harsh. I have friends in the community and have visited the LessWrong "campus" several times. They seemed very welcoming, sincere, and were kind and patient even when I was basically asserting that several of their beliefs were dumb (in hopefully somewhat respectful manner).
As for the AI doomerism, many in the community have more immediate and practical concerns about AI, however the most extreme voices are often the most prominent. I also know that there has been internal disagreement on the kind of messaging they should be using to raise concern.
I think rationalists get plenty of things wrong, but I suspect that many people would benefit from understanding their perspective and reasoning.
Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?
#598Earlier quoted context omitted.
Worth noting that solution only works if the false positives are totally random, which is probably not true of many real world cases and would be pretty hard to work out.
Definitely. Real world adds lots of complexities and nuances, but I was just trying to make the point that it matters how those inferences compound. That we can't just conclude that compounding inferences decreases likelihood
Well they were talking about a chain, A->B, B->C, C->D.
You're talking about multiple pieces of evidence for the same statement. Your tests don't depend on any of the previous tests also being right.
Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?
#599Earlier quoted context omitted.
This article attempts to establish disjoint categories "good rationalist" and "cultist." Its authorship, and its appearance in the cope publication of the "please take us seriously" rationalist faction, speak volumes of how well it is likely to succeed in that project.
I think it's a meaningful distinction- most rationalists aren't running murder cults.
That we know about, I suppose. We didn't know at one point there were any outright rationalist cults, after all, whether involved in sex, murder, both, or otherwise. That is, we didn't know there were subsets of self-identifying "rationalists" so erroneous in their axioms and tendentious in their analysis as to succeed in putting off others.
But a movement, that demonstrates so remarkably elevated rate of generating harmful beliefs in action as this, warrants exactly the sort of increased scrutiny this article vainly strives to deflect. That effort is in itself interesting, as such efforts always are.
Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?
#600This article is beautifully written, and it's full of proper original research. I'm sad that most comments so far are knee-jerk "lol rationalists" type responses. I haven't seen any comment yet that isn't already addressed in much more colour and nuance in the article itself.
> I haven't seen any comment yet that isn't already addressed in much more colour and nuance in the article itself. I once called rationalists infantile, impotent liberal escapism, perhaps that's the novel take you are looking for. Essentially my view is that the fundamental problem with rationalists and the effective altruist movement is that they are talking about profound social and political issues, with any and…