How to spot cult leader personalities • Hacker News Board

Re: How to spot cult leader personalities

#61

Post by gwern » Wed, May 17, 2023, 1:46 AM UTC

alexb_ wrote: post #44

gwern wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not interesting at all, because it was written partially to target Yudkowsky, with the goal that you won't "Pascal's mug"* yourself eg https://twitter.com/sashachapin/status/1657063187655843841 Keep in mind that a lot of tech-adjacent writing these days is just AI debates (and this is why he is not engaging with the actual cult literature or providing examples); this is not the place to debate the object-level…

I'm saying more that it's "interesting" in an argumentative way, not that it's actually of interest about how this is about EY. It should be interesting to followers of EY because all of these traits are things that cult leaders do, and are things that EY does, because EY is (intentionally or not) running a doomsday cult. It's impressive how much reach he's been able to get, to the point where his ideas of control an…

> It should be interesting to followers of EY because all of these traits are things that cult leaders do

It's not really because it's glib pattern-matching. It's roughly "Is the NIH a cult?" https://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1217 level. Go compare Eliezer to say, NXIVM, to see what a real cult looks like.

> It's made me very sad to see extremely smart people, who I once looked up to and really found very interesting (you're included in here!) fall victim to the irrational fear of AI spurred on by Eliezer. You can create as much literature as you want, and you can create as many hypothetical scenarios as possible, but it's not going to change the fact that dedicating your life into controlling AI so that you can "logically" justify your own life is nonsense...You're an extremely smart person. I love your blog posts, and I love the depth and time you put into them. It's incredible how disappointing it is for me to see you become another "rationalist" obsessed with a fantasy of AI doom.

I feel I should point out that you have not seen me 'become another rationalist' because this is what I have been since around 2004, long before I started any writing or even was 'gwern'. 'AI doom' has always driven my writing (even if I sometimes wander quite far afield before eg. concluding that nootropics are a dead end for intelligence augmentation that might help with AI risk - on the bright side, I think DL scaling may have helped answer why nootropics have been such a bust in general). I just thought we'd have way more time.

> Someone who is wealthy and has nothing to lose quitting his job to join the cult of AI doomerism is, in no way, proof that AI xrisk is meaningful. I trust you are smart enough to know why this is awful logic.

'some wealthy dude' is not the relevant description here for Geoff Hinton. I trust you are smart enough to see the problem with your even glibber comment there.

Re: How to spot cult leader personalities

#62

Post by dang » Wed, May 17, 2023, 2:20 AM UTC

alexb_ wrote: post #60

dang wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please let's not cross into personal attack on HN. I gather that's not your intent, but threads can too easily turn that way unintentionally. A substantive discussion of this topic isn't going to work if it veers into dissecting particular personalities. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I see your point, but EY is a huge figure - I think that more leeway should be given for criticism, in the same way people can criticize Tim Cook or Sam Altman.

I don't think hugeness is the criterion here, since personal attacks wouldn't be ok on HN for those characters either.

The question is, where's the line that crosses into getting too personal? Criticism of someone's views is fine, criticism of their actions is fine (though people tend to slip into worse while conducting it), criticism of personality traits starts to be a different story.

This is not a binary thing. I can see good aspects to the kind of discussion you were starting there—I just think the bad aspects outweigh the good.

A lot of this is about the difference between personal conversation and online conversation. One can have a fun and harmless personal conversation about this kind of thing with friends, but the same thing broadcasted to thousands of strangers (and other commenters) online leads to different dynamics, a lot of which get pretty ugly and are best nipped in the bud.

Re: How to spot cult leader personalities

#63

Post by Quinzel » Thu, May 18, 2023, 5:28 AM UTC

This just comes across to me as a nice description of the dark triad of personality traits which actually exist in all types of organisations and social situations, which is not very exclusive to cult leaders at all. Below are some interesting resources on this topic that I have read as I have an interest in this subject. You may have read them already, but I thought I would pop them below as there were no resources in the article.

Hogan, J., Hogan, R., & Kaiser, R. B. (2011). Management derailment. In S. Zedeck (Ed.), APA Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology (vol. 3, pp. 555–575). American Psychological Association.

Tourish, D. (2018). Dysfunctional leadership in corporations. In P. Garrard (Ed.), The Leadership hubris epidemic: Biological roots and strategies for prevention (pp. 137–162). Palgrave Macmillan.

Tourish, D. (2013). The dark side of transformational leadership: A critical perspective. Routledge. Chapter 3: Coercive persuasion, power and corporate cults

Alvesson, M., & Blom, M. (2019). Beyond leadership and followership: Working with a variety of modes of organizing. Organizational Dynamics, 48(1), 28–37.

However, as was pointed out in the post it is never just a cult leader, there are always those who are complicit, and additionally there are those who just want someone to follow, which is really what gives cult leaders their "power" or their "authority". This is where the concept of relational leadership is interesting:

Hughes, R. L., Ginnett, R. C., & Curphy, G. J. (2014). Leadership: Enhancing the Lessons of Experience. McGraw-Hill Higher Education. Chapter 1: What do we mean by leadership

Haslam, S. A., & Reicher, S. D. (2016). Rethinking the psychology of leadership: From personal identity to social identity. Daedalus, 145(3), 21–34.

Cunliffe, A. L., & Eriksen, M. (2011). Relational leadership. Human Relations, 64(11), 1425–1449.

I don't think there is necessarily anything wrong with the traits described here, but rather there can be a problem with the way certain people abuse their power once they have it. The burning question that bugs me in life, is why do so many humans just follow the leader, even when the leader is a total piece of shit.