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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
skipping over all the details of how that went down, that second smaller cult blew up in 2018 and for awhile after that i was reading a lot about spiritual cults and it turns out they are depressingly similar to each other and to my cult, it's mostly the same shit over and over
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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
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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David Chapman
@Meaningness
Replying to
@QiaochuYuan
Perhaps one positive way forward would be an alt-rationalism that says “yay rationality! Yay altruism! Also, yay healthy relationships, having fun, diverse forms of meaning, and sane social dynamics!l”
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David Chapman
@Meaningness
I’ve been watching the LW leadership growing up and seemingly getting saner, and hoped that malignant aspects would evaporate altogether... but there are still explosions. I don’t know what to make of that.
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