Why are there so many cults? People want to feel like they belong to something, and in a world in the midst of a loneliness and isolation epidemic the market conditions are ideal for cults.
It's not particularly unusual, though. See the various kinds of 'Realist' groups, for example, which have a pretty wild range of outlooks. (both Realist and Rationalist also have the neat built-in shield of being able to say "look, I don't particularly like the conclusions I'm coming to, they just are what they are", so it's a convenient framing for unpalatable beliefs)
> One is Black Lotus, a Burning Man camp led by alleged rapist Brent Dill, which developed a metaphysical system based on the tabletop roleplaying game Mage the Ascension.
What the actual f. This is such an insane thing to read and understand what it means that i might need to go and sit in silence for the rest of the day.
How did we get to this place with people going completely nuts like this?
Quite possibly, places like Reddit and Hacker News, are training for the required level of intellectual smugness, and certitude that you can dismiss every annoying argument with a logical fallacy.
That sounds smug of me, but I’m actually serious. One of their defects, is that once you memorize all the fallacies (“Appeal to authority,” “Ad hominem,”) you can easily reach the point where you more easily recognize the fallacies in everyone else’s arguments than your own. You more easily doubt other people’s cited authorities, than your own. You slap “appeal to authority” against a disliked opinion, while citing an authority next week for your own. It’s a fast path from there to perceived intellectual superiority, and an even faster path from there into delusion. Rational delusion.
I keep thinking about the first Avengers movie, when Loki is standing above everyone going "See, is this not your natural state?". There's some perverse security in not getting a choice, and these rationalist frameworks, based in logic, can lead in all kinds of crazy arbitrary directions - powered by nothing more than a refusal to suffer any kind of ambiguity.
Thinking too hard about anything will drive you insane but I think the real issue here is that rationalists simply over-estimate both the power of rational thought and their ability to do it. If you think of people who tend to make that kind of mistake you can see how you get a lot of crazy groups.
I guess I'm a radical skeptic, secular humanist, utilitarianish sort of guy, but I'm not dumb enough to think throwing around the words "bayesian prior" and "posterior distribution" makes actually figuring out how something works or predicting the outcome of an intervention easy or certain. I've had a lot of life at this point and gotten to some level of mastery at a few things and my main conclusion is that most of the time its just hard to know stuff and that the single most common cognitive mistake people make is too much certainty.
We live in an irrational time. It's unclear if it was simply under reported in history or social changes in the last ~50-75 years have had breaking consequences.
People are trying to make sense of this. For examples.
The Canadian government heavily subsidizes junk food, then spends heavily on healthcare because of the resulting illnesses. It restrict and limits healthy food through supply management and promotes a “food pyramid” favoring domestic unhealthy food. Meanwhile, it spends billions marketing healthy living, yet fines people up to $25,000 for hiking in forests and zones cities so driving is nearly mandatory.
Government is an easy target for irrational behaviours.
Perhaps I will get downvoted to death again for saying so, but the obvious answer is because the name "rationalist" is structurally indistinguishable from the name "scientology" or "the illuminati". You attract people who are desperate for an authority to appeal to, but for whatever reason are no longer affiliated with the church of their youth. Even a rationalist movement which held nothing as dogma would attract people seeking dogma, and dogma would form.
The article begins by saying the rationalist community was "drawn together by AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky’s blog post series The Sequences". Obviously the article intends to make the case that this is a cult, but it's already done with the argument at this point.
Rationalism is the belief that reason is the primary path to knowledge, as opposed to, say, the observation that is championed by empiricism. It's a belief system that prioritises imposing its tenets on reality rather than asking reality what reality's tenets are. From the outset, it's inherently cult-like.
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
I actually don't mind Yudkowski as an individual - I think he is almost always wrong and undeservedly arrogant, but mostly sincere. Yet treating him as an AI researcher and serious philosopher (as opposed to a sci-fi essayist and self-help writer) is the kind of slippery foundation that less scrupulous people can build cults from. (See also Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and related trends - often it is just a bit of spiritual goofiness as with David Lynch, sometimes you get a Charles Manson.)
I think we've strayed too far from the Aristotelian dynamics of the self.
Outside of sexuality and the proclivities of their leaders, emphasis on physical domination of the self is lacking. The brain runs wild, the spirit remains aimless.
In the Bay, the difference between the somewhat well-adjusted "rationalists" and those very much "in the mush" is whether or not someone tells you they're in SF or "on the Berkeley side of things"
> One way that thinking for yourself goes wrong is that you realize your society is wrong about something, don’t realize that you can’t outperform it, and wind up even wronger.
Empathy is usally a limited resource of those that generously ascribe it to themselves and it is often mixed up with self-serving desires. Perhaps Rationalists have similar difficulties with reasoning.
While I believe Rationalism can be some form of occupational disease in tech circles, it sometimes does pose interesting questions. You just have to be aware that the perspective to analyse circumstances is intentionally constrained and in the end you still have to compare your prognosis to a reality that always choses empiricism.
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.
The terminology here is worth noting. Is a Rationalist Cult a cult that practices Rationalism according to third parties, or is it a cult that says they are Rationalist?
Clearly all of these groups that believe in demons or realities dictated by tabletop games are not what third parties would call Rationalist. They might call themselves that.
There are some pretty simple tests that can out these groups as not rational. None of these people have ever seen a demon, so world models including demons have never predicted any of their sense data. I doubt these people would be willing to make any bets about when or if a demon will show up. Many of us would be glad to make a market concerning predictions made by tabletop games about physical phenomenon.
It's really worth reading up on the techniques from Large Group Awareness Training so that you can recognize them when they pop up.
Once you see them listed (social pressure, sleep deprivation, control of drinking/bathroom, control of language/terminology, long exhausting activities, financial buy in, etc) and see where they've been used in cults and other cult adjacent things it's a little bit of a warning signal when you run across them IRL.
Cue all the surface-level “tribalism/loneliness/hooman nature” comments instead of the simple analysis that Rationalism (this kind) is severely brain-broken and irredeemable and will just foster even worse outcomes in a group setting. It’s a bit too close to home (ideologically) to get a somewhat detached analysis.
What is the base rate here? Hard to know the scope of the problem without knowing how many non-rationalists (is that even a coherent group of people?) end up forming weird cults, as a comparison. My impression is that crazy beliefs are common amongst everybody.
A much simpler theory is that rationalists are mostly normal people, and normal people tend to form cults.
because humans are biological creatures iterating through complex chemical processes that are attempting to allow a large organism to survive and reproduce within the specific ecosystem provided by the Earth in the present day. "Rational reasoning" is a quaint side effect that sometimes is emergent from the nervous system of these organisms, but it's nothing more than that. It's normal that the surviving/reproducing organism's emergent side effect of "rational thought", when it is particularly intense, will self-refer to the organism and act as though it has some kind of dominion over the organism itself, but this is, like the rationalism itself, just an emergent effect that is accidental and transient. Same as if you see a cloud that looks like an elephant (it's still just a cloud).
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 109 ms ] thread"Rationalism is such an insane name for a school of thought. Like calling your ideology correctism or winsargumentism"
https://x.com/growing_daniel/status/1893554844725616666
What the actual f. This is such an insane thing to read and understand what it means that i might need to go and sit in silence for the rest of the day.
How did we get to this place with people going completely nuts like this?
God died and it's been rough going since then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_Reason
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/rational-magic
and its discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35961817
Quite possibly, places like Reddit and Hacker News, are training for the required level of intellectual smugness, and certitude that you can dismiss every annoying argument with a logical fallacy.
That sounds smug of me, but I’m actually serious. One of their defects, is that once you memorize all the fallacies (“Appeal to authority,” “Ad hominem,”) you can easily reach the point where you more easily recognize the fallacies in everyone else’s arguments than your own. You more easily doubt other people’s cited authorities, than your own. You slap “appeal to authority” against a disliked opinion, while citing an authority next week for your own. It’s a fast path from there to perceived intellectual superiority, and an even faster path from there into delusion. Rational delusion.
I guess I'm a radical skeptic, secular humanist, utilitarianish sort of guy, but I'm not dumb enough to think throwing around the words "bayesian prior" and "posterior distribution" makes actually figuring out how something works or predicting the outcome of an intervention easy or certain. I've had a lot of life at this point and gotten to some level of mastery at a few things and my main conclusion is that most of the time its just hard to know stuff and that the single most common cognitive mistake people make is too much certainty.
People are trying to make sense of this. For examples.
The Canadian government heavily subsidizes junk food, then spends heavily on healthcare because of the resulting illnesses. It restrict and limits healthy food through supply management and promotes a “food pyramid” favoring domestic unhealthy food. Meanwhile, it spends billions marketing healthy living, yet fines people up to $25,000 for hiking in forests and zones cities so driving is nearly mandatory.
Government is an easy target for irrational behaviours.
The article begins by saying the rationalist community was "drawn together by AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky’s blog post series The Sequences". Obviously the article intends to make the case that this is a cult, but it's already done with the argument at this point.
Outside of sexuality and the proclivities of their leaders, emphasis on physical domination of the self is lacking. The brain runs wild, the spirit remains aimless.
In the Bay, the difference between the somewhat well-adjusted "rationalists" and those very much "in the mush" is whether or not someone tells you they're in SF or "on the Berkeley side of things"
many such cases
Because empathy is hard.
While I believe Rationalism can be some form of occupational disease in tech circles, it sometimes does pose interesting questions. You just have to be aware that the perspective to analyse circumstances is intentionally constrained and in the end you still have to compare your prognosis to a reality that always choses empiricism.
All of it has the appearance of sounding so smart, and a few sites were genuine. But it got taken over.
Clearly all of these groups that believe in demons or realities dictated by tabletop games are not what third parties would call Rationalist. They might call themselves that.
There are some pretty simple tests that can out these groups as not rational. None of these people have ever seen a demon, so world models including demons have never predicted any of their sense data. I doubt these people would be willing to make any bets about when or if a demon will show up. Many of us would be glad to make a market concerning predictions made by tabletop games about physical phenomenon.
Once you see them listed (social pressure, sleep deprivation, control of drinking/bathroom, control of language/terminology, long exhausting activities, financial buy in, etc) and see where they've been used in cults and other cult adjacent things it's a little bit of a warning signal when you run across them IRL.
A much simpler theory is that rationalists are mostly normal people, and normal people tend to form cults.