Conversation

QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
this is a really long story btw. after i'd been in the bay area rationalist ecosystem for awhile i was then sucked into a *second, smaller cult* inside it consisting of people who were dissatisfied with the rationalist ecosystem, who wanted to explore feelings and magic
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
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so, less obliquely: i was involved with lesswrong / CFAR / the rationalists from ~2012 to ~2018, briefly worked for both MIRI and CFAR, got to talk to a lot of the higher-ups in the ecosystem, learned a lot from the experience, and have a lot of dirt on unhealthy dynamics
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
one of the big things i had to deal with when orienting towards all of this nonsense is that i could not take the easy and tempting path of switching from believing that these things (rationality, my lil cult) were all good to believing that they were all bad
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
the way any half-decent cult works is by providing a huge amount of value to the people in it (social belonging, new ideas, new practices, etc.), it is exactly the mixing of that value with all the bad stuff that makes it hard to leave
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
the same issue plays out in unhealthy relationships. you can have a relationship with someone who has genuinely improved your life in a million ways and who is *also* still hurting you a lot, *and vice versa*; cults are like this but even more so
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
i'm trying to push the term "unhealthy cults" by analogy with "unhealthy relationship" because we at least have a recognition in the discourse on relationships that they can be more or less healthy. there is a healthy thing that cults want to be and that's worth honoring
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
theranos was like, as far as i can tell from second- and third-hand descriptions, mostly a bunch of people who genuinely thought they were working on some good shit, helmed by an irresponsible but charismatic narcissist i think it's mostly gonna look like that
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
with the caveat that "irresponsible charismatic narcissist" is not like some separate category of human that we can point at and laugh at together. narcissism is a spectrum and we're on it. cult-leadering is a systems phenomenon that emerges under specific social conditions
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
i don't think the narcissism is even all that necessary as such. you just need to be really convinced that your way of doing things is the right way, convinced enough to impose it on other people by (social, emotional) force under duress that describes me sometimes! it's wack
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