(Theoretically I would also get extremely suspicious if the person whose work they were into was not a guy, but in practice the object of intellectual fixation usually seems to be a guy)
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I've been seeing this with David Deutsch a lot recently - a lot of people are super into him and whenever I find a new one I have a very strong "Oh gods not one of you again" reaction.
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Replying to @GeniesLoki
I agree with this re the Critical Rationalist community (with one exception who I hope knows I am subtweeting her) but am too polite to say so :) “How do I avoid starting a cult” is something I occasionally worry about but it doesn’t seem imminent yet
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Replying to @Meaningness @GeniesLoki
I recall Eliezer on one occasion noting that "if you tell your followers not to form a cult, they will go around saying 'We must not form a cult, Great Leader Mundo said so'."
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Cults are naturally emergent phenomena… some are deliberately produced by leaders, but many/most are produced by followers :(
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Mmm, not sure. Follower effect is massive and necessary, but for coercive cults (culty dynamics that hurt people's self-esteem/security), don't they need to have some some kind of authoritarianism somewhere (even if that's just around the guru's own internal conflicts/hangups)?
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Yes; my impression is that the emergent dynamics hook the leader dude into the role (if he wasn’t already wanting it and if he’s not too resistant). Lots of people want to sub.
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Replying to @Meaningness @reasonisfun and
I have suspected for a long time that there's a specific set of endocrine responses that kick off in someone who gets treated as a "leader". Like bees turning into queens when their diet changes. It's hard to know how you'd test it, though.
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As of ~15 years ago testosterone was supposed to behave like this. I don’t know what subsequent research says.
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Replying to @Meaningness @reasonisfun and
To test the thesis we'd need scientists, and those don't exist any more.
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Replying to @St_Rev @reasonisfun and
Maybe some could be fished out of cryonic suspension, like cobol programmers
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