in retrospect maybe a memetic advantage i don't talk or think much about having is that i was AGI-pilled for long enough that i know what having a totalizing narrative about the most important thing feels like from the inside and i know what it feels like to step out of it
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Do you have a good argument for why being agi-pilled is wrong? I don't feel emotionally agi-pilled, but rationally they seem to have a point.
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being AGI-pilled is not about the epistemic content of the ideas it's about letting the ideas take over your life. there are depressingly general mechanisms by which cults work and the rationalists did not understand this well enough to avoid it
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I don't think rationalists are standardized enough to make that point - there's definitely some cult-vulnerable people, but also some unusually cult-resistant people (although there is a selection bias to the first being louder, I think).
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I mostly agree about "letting AGI take over your life" being bad, although I'd put it more as "approaching Big Ideas with too much reverence is bad" rather than "AGI isn't potentially Big). Which I think is your original point, if I'm reading you right?
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I knew it! If they'd been doing cult intentionally they would have noticed this problem, but NOOOO. Cults are bad, and we don't wanna be bad, therefore we just won't think about the ways in which we already are a cult and what effects that has.
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funny thing, I was at the intro meeting of the Russian LessWrong and they kind of jokingly but seriously admitted they were a cult straight away, just to get over this question. don’t know if it affected things later though.
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