Comment by meowface
4 days ago
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?
In theory, there should be a middle way between "waist deep into the movement" and "my research consists of collecting rumors on the internet, and then calling one or two people to give me a quote".
In practice, I don't remember reading an article on the rationality community written from such position. Most articles are based on other articles, which are based on yet other articles... ultimately based on someone's opinion posted on their blogs. (Plus the police reports about the Zizians.)
I think it would be really nice for a change if e.g. some journalist infiltrated the rationality community under a fake identity, joined one of their meetups or workshops, talked to a few people there, and then heroically exposed to the public all the nefarious plans... or the lack thereof. Shouldn't be that hard, I think. New people are coming all the time, no one does a background check on them. Yet for some mysterious reason, this never happens.
Notice how this article describes more bad things in the community than a typical outsider-written article. Three specific rationalist cults were named! The difference is not insider vs outsider, but having specific information vs vibes-based reporting.
Every reporting is always based on the reporter, so you’re never going to escape the need to just make your own conclusions and decide for yourself whether you think that the piece makes sense or not. There is no conspiracy against rationalists, they’re being reported on with the same methods as everything else; whether you trust journalism in general or not is up to you.
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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.
> the typical outside view that rationalism itself is a cult and Eliezer Yudkowsky is a cult leader, both of which I consider absurd notions
Cults are a whole biome of personalities. The prophet does not need to be the same person as the leader. They sometimes are and things can be very ugly in those cases, but they often aren’t. After all, there are Christian cults today even though Jesus and his supporting cast have been dead for approaching 2k years.
Yudkowsky seems relatively benign as far as prophets go, though who knows what goes on in private (I’m sure some people on here do, but the collective We do not). I would guess that the failure mode for him would be a David Miscavige type who slowly accumulates power while Yudkowsky remains a figurehead. This could be a girlfriend or someone who runs one of the charitable organizations (controlling the purse strings when everyone is dependent on the organization for their next meal is a time honored technique). I’m looking forward to the documentaries that get made in 20 years or so.