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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?

#771

Post by rsynnott »

guerrilla wrote: post #417

> One way that thinking for yourself goes wrong is that you realize your society is wrong about something, don’t realize that you can’t outperform it, and wind up even wronger. I've been there myself. > And without the steadying influence of some kind of external goal you either achieve or don’t achieve, your beliefs can get arbitrarily disconnected from reality — which is very dangerous if you’re going to act on the…

> Why are rationalists not able to write less?

The 'less' in LessWrong very much does not refer to _volume_.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#772

Post by PicassoCTs »

My pet theory is - that as a rationalist, you have a idealized view of humanity by nature. Your mirror neurons copy your own mind for interpolating other peoples behavior and character.

Which results in a constant state of cognitive dissonance, as the people of normal society around you behave very differently and often more "rustically" then expected. The education is there- all the learning sources are there- and yet are rejected. The lessons learned from history go unlearned and are often repeated.

You are in a out-group by definition and life-long, so you band together with others and get conned by cult-con-artists into foolish projects. For the "rational" are nothing but another deluded project to hijack by the sociopaths of our society. The most rational being- in fact a being so capable to predate us, society had to develop anti-bodies against socio-paths, we call religion and laws!

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#773

Post by tim333 »

username332211 wrote: post #413
vehemenz wrote: post #344

I get the impression that these people desperately want to study philosophy but for some reason can't be bothered to get formal training because it would be too humbling for them. I call it "small fishbowl syndrome," but maybe there's a better term for it.

The reason why people can't be bothered to get formal training is that modern philosophy doesn't seem that useful. It was a while ago, but take the infamous story of the 2006 rape case in Duke University. If you check out coverage of that case, you get the impression every member of faculty that joined in the hysteria was from some humanities department, including philosophy. And quite a few of them refused to change…

I figure there are two sides to philosophy. There's the practical aspect of trying to figure things out, like what it matter made of - maybe it's earth, water, air, and fire as the ancient Greeks proposed? How could we tell - maybe an experiment? This stuff while philosophical leads on to knowledge a lot of the time but then it gets called science or whatever. Then there's studying what philosophers says and philosophers said about stuff which is mostly useless, like a critique of Hegel's discourse on the four elements or something.

I'm a fan of practical philosophical questions like how does quantum mechanics work or how can we improve human rights, and not into the philosophers talking about philosopers stuff.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#774

Post by projektfu »

EGreg wrote: post #430
projektfu wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"genetically engineers high fructose corn syrup into everything" This phrase is nonsense, because HFCS is a chemical process applied to normal corn after the harvest. The corn may be a GMO but it certainly doesn't have to be.

Agreed, that was phrased wrong. The fruits across the board have been genetically engineered to be extremely sweet (fructose, not the syrup): https://weather.com/news/news/2018-10-03-fruit-so-sweet-zoo-... While their nutritional quality has gone down tremendously, for vegetables too: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10969708/

Again, the term GMO is not what you're looking for. In the first article, a zookeeper is quoted making much the same mistake.

Here is a list of approved bioengineered foods in the US:

https://www.ams.usda.gov/rules-regulations/be/bioengineered-...

All the fruits on the list are engineered for properties other than sweetness.

The term you're looking for is "bred". Fruits have been bred to be sweeter, and this has been going on a long time. Corn is bred for high protein or high sugar, but the sweet corn is not what's used for HFCS.

Personally, I think the recent evidence shows that the problem is not so much that fruit is too sweet, but that everything is made to be addictive. Satiety signals are lost or distorted, and we are left with diseases of excess consumption.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#775

Post by meowface »

low_tech_love wrote: post #705
meowface wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asterisk is basically "rationalist magazine" and the author is a well-known rationalist blogger, so it's not a surprise that this is basically the only fair look into this phenomenon - compared to the typical outside view that rationalism itself is a cult and Eliezer Yudkowsky is a cult leader, both of which I consider absurd notions.

The view from the inside, written by a person who is waist deep into the movement, is the only fair look into the phenomenon?

Okay, true, that was a silly statement for me to make. It's just a look that's different from the typical media treatment of the rationalist community, and is as far as I know the first time there's an inside view of this cult-spawning phenomenon from a media outlet or publication.

The story from the outside is usually reduced to something like "rationalism is a wacky cult", with the recent ones tacking on "and some of its members include this Ziz gang who murdered many people". Like the NYT article a week ago.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#776

Post by aa-jv »

throwanem wrote: post #757
aa-jv wrote: post #737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, why would the bells be ringing in this case? Is it just the fact that a single person is exerting influence over their followers by way of essays?

Even a marginal familiarity with the history of Scientology is an excellent curative for the idea that you can think yourself into superpowers, or that you should ever trust anyone who promises to teach you how. The consequences of ignorance on this score are all drearily predictable to anyone with a modicum of both good sense and world knowledge, which is why they've come as such a surprise to Yudkowsky.

You can say all of this of drug-oriented seekers of superpowers, too. Trust the SSRI cult much?

It just seems to be a human condition that whenever anyone tries to find a way to improve themselves and others, there will always be other human beings who attempt to prevent that from occurring.

I don't think this is a cult thing - I think its a culture thing.

Humans have an innate desire to oppress others in their environment who might be making themselves more capable, abilities-wise - this isn't necessarily the exclusive domain of cults and religions, maybe just more evident in their activities since there's not much else going on, usually.

We see this in technology-dependent industries too, in far greater magnitudes of scale.

The irony is this: aren't you actually manifesting the very device that cults use to control others, as when you tell others what "specific others" should be avoided, lest one become infected with their dogma?

The roots of all authoritarianism seem to grow deep in the fertile soil of the desire to be 'free of the filth of others'.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#777

Post by NoGravitas »

1attice wrote: post #393
analog31 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

> While there are plenty of non-religious (and thus, small-r rationalist) alternatives to consequentialism, none of them seem to make it past the threshold in these communities.

I suspect this is because consequentialism is the only meta-ethical framework that has any leg to stand on other than "because I said so". That makes it very attractive. The problem is you also can't build anything useful on top of it, because if you try to quantify consequences, and do math on them, you end up with the Repugnant Conclusion or worse. And in practice - in Effective Altruism/Longtermism, for example - the use of arbitrarily big numbers lets you endorse the Very Repugnant Conclusion while patting yourself on the back for it.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#778

Post by [deleted] »

doubleunplussed wrote: post #676
morleytj wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The built in assumptions are always interesting to me, especially as it relates to intelligence. I find many of them (though not all), are organized around a series of fundamental beliefs that are very rarely challenged within these communities. I should initially mention that I don't think everyone in these communities believes these things, of course, but I think there's often a default set of assumptions going int…

I think you'll indeed find, if you were to seek out the relevant literature, that those claims are more or less true, or at least, are the currently best-supported interpretation available. So I don't think they're assumptions so much as simply current state of the science on the matter, and therefore widely accepted among those who for whatever reason have looked into it (or, more likely, inherited the information f…

[deleted]

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#779

Post by BrawnyBadger53 »

pavlov wrote: post #706
stickfigure wrote: post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're falling into some sort of fallacy; maybe a better rationalist than I could name it. The "they" you are describing is a large body of disparate people spread around the world. We're reading an article that focuses on a few dysfunctional subgroups. They are interesting because they are so dysfunctional and rare. Or put it this way: Name one -ism that _doesn't_ have sub/splinter groups that kill people. Even Paci…

The article specifically defines the rationalists it’s talking about: “The rationalist community was drawn together by AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky’s blog post series The Sequences, a set of essays about how to think more rationally.” Is this really a large body of disparate people spread around the world? I suspect not.

It's large in the sense that it's not a single well connected group. There are subgroups within the rationalists

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#780

Post by EGreg »

projektfu wrote: post #774
EGreg wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, that was phrased wrong. The fruits across the board have been genetically engineered to be extremely sweet (fructose, not the syrup): https://weather.com/news/news/2018-10-03-fruit-so-sweet-zoo-... While their nutritional quality has gone down tremendously, for vegetables too: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10969708/

Again, the term GMO is not what you're looking for. In the first article, a zookeeper is quoted making much the same mistake. Here is a list of approved bioengineered foods in the US: https://www.ams.usda.gov/rules-regulations/be/bioengineered-... All the fruits on the list are engineered for properties other than sweetness. The term you're looking for is "bred". Fruits have been bred to be sweeter, and this has been…

Well, either way, you agree with me. Government and corporations work together and distract the individual telling them they can fix the downstream situation in their own, private way.
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