Comment by 6177c40f
5 days ago
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.
5 days ago
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.
Not sure why you got down voted for this. The opening paragraph of the article reads as suspicious to the observant outsider:
>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.
Anyone who had just read a lot about Scientology would read that and have alarm bells ringing.
Asterisk magazine is basically the unofficial magazine for the rationalist community and the author, Ozy Brennan, is a prominent rationalist blogger. Of course the piece is pro-rationalism. It's investigating why rationalism seems to spawn these small cultish offshoots, not trying to criticize rationalism.
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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?
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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.
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Funny how the comment making a factual correction gets downvoted.
For me, that is the crucial information in the article: Yes, multiple people have succeeded to create a cult within the rationality community, but it always involved isolating their victims from the rest of the rationality community. (Now that we see the pattern, could it possibly help us defend against this?)
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