Comment by low_tech_love
5 days ago
The view from the inside, written by a person who is waist deep into the movement, is the only fair look into the phenomenon?
5 days ago
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.
> There is no conspiracy against rationalists, they’re being reported on with the same methods as everything else
No conspiracy, I agree. Only clickbait, and one obsessed Wikipedia admin.
However, different newspapers have different quality; sometimes dramatically different. Ironically, Zizians are usually reported on by the ones that keep professional standards. So it's quite funny to see how psychopathic murderers are treated with respect and reported on factually, while nerds who study artificial intelligence and send money to anti-malaria charities are accused of... well, whatever the journalists' imagination can accuse them of.
(Have you heard of the "TESCREAL" theory? Apparently, effective altruists are secretly Nazis, because... you know, the idea of improving the world is related to the genre of science fiction, and some science fiction fans in previous century also happened to be fans of eugenics, therefore... you know, wink wink. Seriously, this is documented in Wikipedia, because it comes from a "reliable source".)
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.