Comment by ImaCake
5 days ago
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.
"Unofficial?" Was that a recent change? But my point is that because the author neither can nor will criticize the fundamental axioms or desiderata of the movement, their analysis of how or why it spins off cults is necessarily footless. In practice the result amounts to a collection of excuses mostly from anonymees, whom we are assured have sufficient authority to reassure us this smoke arises from no fire. But of course it's only when Kirstie Alley does something like this we're meant to look askance.
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'.
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