Comment by Viliam1234

> What about donating half of your salary to charity? I think many people would consider that quite extreme, too.

Maybe, but there are also degrees of extremity in terms of stuff like how broadly you donate (like there's a difference between donating a huge amount to one charity vs. spreading it around 10). Also I don't think the mere fact of donating half your salary would itself necessarily be seen as extreme; it would depend on the person's total wealth. It seems not unusual for wealthy individuals who get certain jobs to donate (or refuse) their entire salary (like Arnold Schwarzenegger declining his salary as CA governor).

Ultimately though I don't agree that this is anywhere close to as extreme as cold-blooded murder.

> I mean, prisons are full of murderers; they are not so exceptional.

I have a hunch that a large proportion of murderers in prisons are not comparable to rationalist murderers. There's a difference between just killing someone and killing someone due to your belief that that is the rational and correct thing to do. A lot of murders are crimes of passion or occur in the commission of other crimes. I could see an intermediate case where someone says "We're going to rob this bank and if the guard gives us any trouble we'll just shoot him", which is perhaps comparable to "always escalate conflict", but I don't think most murders even reach that level of premeditation.

> The difference is that the bad ones are willing to take abusive actions.

I'm not so sure that that is the difference, rather than that they are willing to take extreme actions, and then the extreme actions they wind up taking (for whatever reason) are abusive. It's sort of like, if you fire a gun into a crowd, your willingness to do so is important whether or not you actually hit anyone. Similarly a willingness to go well outside the bounds of accepted behaviors is worrisome even if you don't happen to harm anyone by doing so. I could certainly imagine that many rationalists do indeed formulate belief systems that exclude certain kinds of extreme behavior while allowing others. I'm just saying, if I found out that someone was spending all their days doing any spookily extreme thing (e.g., 8 hours a day building a scale model of Hoover Dam one grain of sand at a time) I would feel a lot less safe around them.

> > It's also interesting to me that the article focuses a lot not on rationalist belief per se, but on the logistics and practices of rationalist communities.

> That's what happens when you read about the rationality community from someone who is actually familiar with it. If you want to determine whether a group is dysfunctional (i.e. a cult), the actual practices are much more important than the stated beliefs.

Sure. My point is just that, insofar as this is true, it means what the article is saying is more about cults in general and less about anything specific to rationalism.