Comment by knallfrosch
4 days ago
I think it's perfectly fine to read these articles, think "definitely a cult" and ignore whether they believe in spaceships, or demons, or AGI.
The key takeaway from the article is that if you have a group leader who cuts you off from other people, that's a red flag – not really a novel, or unique, or situational insight.
That's a side point of the article, acknowledged as an old idea. The central points of this article are actually quite a bit more interesting than that. He even summarized his conclusions concisely at the end, so I don't know what your excuse is for trivializing it.
The other key takeaway, that people with trauma are more attracted to organizations that purport to be able to fix and are thus over-represented in them (vs in the general population), is also important.
Because if you're going to set up a hierarchical (explicitly or implicitly) isolated organization with a bunch of strangers, it's good to start by asking "How much do I trust these strangers?"
> The key takeaway from the article is that if you have a group leader who cuts you off from other people, that's a red flag
Even better: a social group with a lot of invented lingo is a red flag that you can see before you get isolated from your loved ones.
By this token, most scientists would be considered cultists: normal people don't have "specific tensile strength" or "Jacobian" or "Hermitian operator" etc in their vocabulary. "Must be some cult"?
Edit: it seems most people don't understand what I'm pointing out.
Having terminology is not the red flag.
Having intricate terminology without a domain is the red flag.
In science or mathematics, there are enormous amounts of jargon, terms, definitions, concepts, but they are always situated in some domain of study.
The "rationalists" (better call them pseudorationalists) invent their own concepts without actual corresponding domain, just life. It's like kids re-inventing their generation specific words each generation to denote things they like or dislike, etc.
> social group
4 replies →
So every fandom in history?
> The key takeaway from the article is that if you have a group leader who cuts you off from other people, that's a red flag – not really a novel, or unique, or situational insight
Well yes and no. The reason why I think the insight is so interesting is that these groups were formed, almost definitionally for the purpose of avoiding such "obvious" mistakes. The name of the group is literally the "Rationalists"!
I find that funny, ironic, and saying something important about this philosophy, in that it implies that the rest of society wasn't so "irrational" after all.
As a more extreme and silly example, imagine there was a group called "Cults suck, and we are not a cult!", that was created for the very purpose of fighting cults, and yet, ironically, became a cult into and of itself. That would be insightful and funny.