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Why are there so many rationalist cults?

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Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#921

Post by AnonymousPlanet »

WJW wrote: post #39
mlinhares wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, i'd understand something like Wraith (which I did see people developing issues, the shadow mechanic is such a terrible thing) but Mage is so, like, straightforward? Use your mind to control reality, reality fights back with paradox, its cool for a teenager but you read a bit more fantasy and you'll definitely find cooler stuff. But i guess for you to join a cult your mind must stay a teen mind forever.

I didn't originally write this, but can't find the original place I read it anymore. I think it makes a lot of sense to repost it here: All of the World Of Darkness and Chronicles Of Darkness games are basically about coming of age/puberty. Like X-Men but for Goth-Nerds instead of Geek-Nerds. In Vampire, your body is going through weird changes and you are starting to develop, physically and/or mentally, while realis…

The same is probably also the case for most superhero comics. They are made for teenage boys going through puberty. Boys with a changing body that now is much stronger than the younger kids. The stories try to give guidance: You have to restrain your new power and use it for good. Some aspects of your transformation you should keep to yourself. There are other kids undergoing these changes too who use it to bully their weaker peers. Those are the bad guys. There are also bad girls who abuse their new powers (which are not defined by muscle strength) to entice and manipulate other people.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#922

Post by AnonymousPlanet »

rsynnott wrote: post #770
rglover wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came to comments first. Thank you for sharing this quote. Gave me a solid chuckle. I think people are going nuts because we've drifted from the dock of a stable civilization. Institutions are a mess. Economy is a mess. Combine all of that together with the advent of social media making the creation of echo chambers (and the inevitable narcissism of "leaders" in those echo chambers) effortless and ~15 years later, w…

> I think people are going nuts because we've drifted from the dock of a stable civilization. When was stable period, exactly? I'm 40; the only semi-stable bit I can think of in my lifetime was a few years in the 90s (referred to, sometimes unironically, as "the end of history" at the time, before history decided to come out of retirement). Everything's always been unstable, people sometimes just take a slightly rose…

> Everything's always been unstable, people sometimes just take a slightly rose-tinted view of the past.

No. For the most of history people could look decades into the past and be quite confident that things would be the same decades in the future. The only aspects that mostly changed were local leaders and maybe some fashions. A farmer was a farmer and a carpenter was a carpenter and their sons and grandsons likely too.

Ever changing times with regards to technology and professions is a rather modern thing.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#923

Post by fuzztester »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #868
fuzztester wrote: post #550

Has anyone here ever been a part of a cult? If so, got anything to share - anecdotes, learnings, cautions, etc.? I am never planning to be part of one; just interested to know, partly because I have lived adjacent to what might be one, at times.

There are entire books written by former cult members. Some examples (I just copied the list, didn't check each one of them): "Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape" by Jenna Miscavige Hill "A Billion Years: My Escape From a Life in the Highest Ranks of Scientology" by Mike Rinder "Blown for Good: Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology" by Marc Headley "Satan Created the Cult: Memoi…

wow, interesting. thanks.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#924

Post by coldtea »

ben_w wrote: post #893
coldtea wrote: post #810

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "they" you are describing is a large body of disparate people spread around the world. And that "large body" has a few hundred core major figures and prominent adherents, and a hell of a lot of them seem to be exactly like how the parent describes. Even the "tamer" of them like ASC have that cultish quality... As for the rest of the "large body", the hangers on, those are mostly out of view anyway, but I doubt…

>> Or put it this way: Name one -ism that _doesn't_ have sub/splinter groups that kill people > -isms include fascism, nazism, jihadism, nationalism, communism, nationalism, racism, etc, so not exactly the best argument to make in rationalism's defense. "Yeah, rationalism has groups that murder people, but after all didn't fascism had those too? Catholicism, empiricism, pragmatism, presenteeism. Crusades; French revo…

>More relevantly, given the number of people as per my other comment, multiplied by e.g. the USA per-100k homicide rate* would lead to 166385 / 1e5 * 5.763 ~= 9.6 homicide victims in that group per year. Given many homicides are by people who are very close to the victim, this also suggests a similar (lower, but similar) expectation value for attackers.*

Is that homicide rate equally applicable to all groups within the population? Like the socio-economic groups the rationalists are more likely to belong to? Or is a large chunk of it applicable to gang and drug crime, low income counties, and so on, and thus the expected baseline rate here (given the rationalist group's life circumstances) should have been much lower?

And is comparing to the baseline even relevant, when we're not talking about common homicide motives, like that that occurs to the general population, but homicide specifically motivated and attributed to the ideology emerging in "rationalist" groups?

Or does rationality goes out the window and a less-rigorous argument is made when it comes to defending its honor?

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#925

Post by thedudeabides5 »

doubleunplussed wrote: post #679
throw0101a wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Purity Spirals This is an interesting idea (phenomenon?): > A purity spiral is a theory which argues for the existence of a form of groupthink in which it becomes more beneficial to hold certain views than to not hold them, and more extreme views are rewarded while expressing doubt, nuance, or moderation is punished (a process sometimes called "moral outbidding").[1] It is argued that this feedback loop leads to me…

Certainly something they're aware of - the same concept was discussed as early as in 2007 on Less Wrong under the name "evaporative cooling of group beliefs" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporativ...

haha, classic LWer reply

"someone wrote a weirdly labeled thing about this once so they must not be subject to the phenomena'

does the existence of a piece of writing on a topic really immunize the community from the disease @doubleunplussed?

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#926

Post by thedudeabides5 »

doubleunplussed wrote: post #639
thedudeabides5 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, shows little interest in running one. He has consistently been distant from and uninvolved in rationalist community-building efforts, from Benton House (the first rationalist group house) to today’s Lightcone Infrastructure (which hosts LessWrong, an online forum, and Lighthaven, a conference center). He surrounds himself with people who disagree with him, discourages social isolation. Ummm, EY lit…

Blocking people on Twitter doesn't necessarily imply intolerance of people who disagree with you. People often block for different reasons than disagreement.

He surrounds himself with people who disagree with him, discourages social isolation.

lol blocking people is literally encouraging social isolation by limiting your exposure to people who disagree with you.

not very rational mind you

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#927

Post by ben_w »

coldtea wrote: post #924
ben_w wrote: post #893

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Or put it this way: Name one -ism that _doesn't_ have sub/splinter groups that kill people > -isms include fascism, nazism, jihadism, nationalism, communism, nationalism, racism, etc, so not exactly the best argument to make in rationalism's defense. "Yeah, rationalism has groups that murder people, but after all didn't fascism had those too? Catholicism, empiricism, pragmatism, presenteeism. Crusades; French revo…

> More relevantly, given the number of people as per my other comment , multiplied by e.g. the USA per-100k homicide rate* would lead to 166385 / 1e5 * 5.763 ~= 9.6 homicide victims in that group per year. Given many homicides are by people who are very close to the victim, this also suggests a similar (lower, but similar) expectation value for attackers.* Is that homicide rate equally applicable to all groups within…

> Or does rationality goes out the window and a less-rigorous argument is made when it comes to defending its honor?

Honour is irrelevant.

If you have better stats, please actually suggest them rather hypothesising bad faith.

--

Edit: This was all at the top initially, but it's just an expansion of that core point of "provide better stats if you want to change my mind":

> Is that homicide rate equally applicable to all groups within the population? Or is a large chunk of it applicable to gang and drug crime, low income counties, and so on, and thus the expected baseline rate here (given the rationalist group's life circumstances) should have been much lower?

Dunno. What even are the mean "rationalist group's life circumstances" here? Is e.g. Aella's use of LSD unusual or representative? I have no knowledge of these things, so the only thing I can reach for is gross population statistics.

Should I also account for the homicide victimisation rate being 3.51 higher amongst USA men than USA women, and that according to first search result that's massively out of date because 2009* that says the rationalists' gender split is male-biased?

Should I instead be making a better estimate for where the rationalists actually live, because if they're all in Germany the average is about 7x lower and the gender ratio is close to 1?

What's the age effect? What's the age distribution, given young adults have the highest risk?

Should I be integrating over community size per year given it's been around over a decade?

etc. etc.

> And is comparing to the baseline even relevant, when we're not talking about common homicide motives, like that that occurs to the general population, but homicide specifically motivated and attributed to the ideology emerging in "rationalist" groups?

What else should I compare it to if not that? Consider that at the numbers due to the actually named cultish sub-group (Zizians) is a single digit, surely the correct position is "how many murderers do you expect in a group this big?"?

* https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xsyG7PkMekHud2DMK/of-gender-...

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#928

Post by ben_w »

rsynnott wrote: post #764
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 .)

I mean, this is the religion/philosophy which produced Roko's Basilisk (and not one of their weird offshoot murder-cults, either, it showed up on LessWrong, and was taken at least somewhat seriously by people there, to the point that Yudkowsky censored it. Their beliefs about AI are... out there.

> and was taken at least somewhat seriously by people there, to the point that Yudkowsky censored it.

Roko isn't taken seriously. What was taken seriously is ~ "if you've had an idea that you yourself think will harm people to even know about it, don't share it".

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#929

Post by throwanem »

JTbane wrote: post #20
mlinhares wrote: post #4

> 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?

I don't know how you can call yourself a "rationalist" and base your worldview on a fantasy game.

They all do this, only most prefer to name the fantasy they play with something a little more grounded like "mathematics" or "statistics" or "longtermism" or "rationality."

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#930

Post by 77pt77 »

ItsMattyG wrote: post #789
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…

FWIW, my rationalist friends were warning about Covid before I had heard about it from others, and talking about AI before it was on others radar.

Covid specifically or a pandemic in general?

Also AI doesn't really count because plenty of people have been riding that train for decades.

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