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Comment by meroes | Hacker News Reader

It grew out of many different threads: different websites, communities, etc all around the same time. I noticed it contemporaneously in the philosophy world where Nick Bostrom’s Simulation argument was boosted more than it deserved (like everyone was just accepting it at the lay-level). Looking back I see it also developed from less wrong and other sites, but I was wondering what was going on with simulations taking over philosophy talk. Now I see how it all coalesced.

All of it has the appearance of sounding so smart, and a few sites were genuine. But it got taken over.

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To be clear, this article isn't calling rationalism a cult, it's about cults that have some sort of association with rationalism (social connection and/or ideology derived from rationalist concepts), e.g. the Zizians.

This article attempts to establish disjoint categories "good rationalist" and "cultist." Its authorship, and its appearance in the cope publication of the "please take us seriously" rationalist faction, speak volumes of how well it is likely to succeed in that project.

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'.

The phrase you failed to find is "crab-bucket thinking," but the one you really should have paid attention to this morning is "take with food."

I am interested in your ideology and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

It's been 17 years since the series was written and rationalists haven't become a cult with Yudkowsky as leaders, so it's safe to say those were false alarms

Not with Yudkowsky as leader, that much is true.

I think it's a meaningful distinction- most rationalists aren't running murder cults.

That we know about, I suppose. We didn't know at one point there were any outright rationalist cults, after all, whether involved in sex, murder, both, or otherwise. That is, we didn't know there were subsets of self-identifying "rationalists" so erroneous in their axioms and tendentious in their analysis as to succeed in putting off others.

But a movement, that demonstrates so remarkably elevated rate of generating harmful beliefs in action as this, warrants exactly the sort of increased scrutiny this article vainly strives to deflect. That effort is in itself interesting, as such efforts always are.

I mean, as a rationalist, I can assure you it's not nearly as sinister a group as you seem to make it out to be, believe it or not. Besides, the explanation is simpler than this article makes it out to be- most rationalists are from California, California is the origin of lots of cults.

> Besides, the explanation is simpler than this article makes it out to be- most rationalists are from California, California is the origin of lots of cults

This isn't the defense of rationalism you seem to imagine it to be.

I don't think the modal rationalist is sinister. I think he's ignorant, misguided, nearly wholly lacking in experience, deeply insecure about it, and overall just excessively resistant to the idea that it is really possible, on any matter of serious import, for his perspective radically to lack merit. Unfortunately, this latter condition proves very reliably also the mode.

> his perspective radically to lack merit

What perspective would that be?

None in particular, as of course you realize, being a fluent reader of this language. It was just a longwinded way of saying rationalists suck at noticing when they're wrong about something because they rarely really know much of anything in the first place. That's why you had to take that scrap of a phrase so entirely out of context, when you went looking for something to try to embarrass me with.

Why? Which perspective of yours has you so twitchingly desperate to defend it?

Funny how the comment making a factual correction gets downvoted.

For me, that is the crucial information in the article: Yes, multiple people have succeeded to create a cult within the rationality community, but it always involved isolating their victims from the rest of the rationality community. (Now that we see the pattern, could it possibly help us defend against this?)

If it took you this long to see a pattern that anyone with any experience at all can trivially recognize, why should anyone trust you to defend against anything? You are plainly incompetent.

Yes, I am definitely plainly incompetent for not noticing a trivially recognizable pattern...

> This article attempts to establish disjoint categories "good rationalist" and "cultist."

...that you have denied in another comment in the same thread. I guess that makes two of us plainly incompetent.

I can't even tell what you mean to try to criticize here. Are you saying that because one may tell what the article tried to do and failed, it didn't fail? I can try to answer your point here, but you need to put in the effort of making it make sense, first.

Yeah, a lot of the comments here are really just addressing cults writ large and opposed to why this one was particularly successful.

A significant part of this is the intersection of the cult with money and status - this stuff really took off once prominent SV personalities became associated with it, and got turbocharged when it started intersecting with the angel/incubator/VC scene, when there was implicit money involved.

It's unusually successful because -- for a time at least -- there was status (and maybe money) in carrying water for it.

Paypal will be traced as the root cause of many of our future troubles.

Wish I could upvote this twice. It's like intersectionality for evil.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barth%C3%A9lemy-Prosper_Enfa...

Sometimes history really does rhyme.

> Enfantin and Amand Bazard were proclaimed Pères Suprêmes ("Supreme Fathers") – a union which was, however, only nominal, as a divergence was already manifest. Bazard, who concentrated on organizing the group, had devoted himself to political reform, while Enfantin, who favoured teaching and preaching, dedicated his time to social and moral change. The antagonism was widened by Enfantin's announcement of his theory of the relation of man and woman, which would substitute for the "tyranny of marriage" a system of "free love".[1]

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