the esoteric meaning of "postrationalist" is a person who is recovering from the totalizing memes in the rationalist ecosystem. it is a trip. especially because you can't just refute them by saying AGI is impossible
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the refutation has to be shaped more like "i get to live my life anyway. my life and my happiness matters anyway. this does not have to be my thing"
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oh i have written about this but obliquely
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being taken over by an ideology for the first time is a lot like being in love for the first time. you don't know what it's like for it to end. you can't imagine being obsessed by anything else. and you don't have a frame of reference for what abusive behavior looks like
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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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it turns out sincerely believing the world is going to end really fucks people up and it really fucks group dynamics up. there is a reason end-of-the-world narratives are an attractor for unhealthy cults (a phrasing i want to explicitly push over just "cults")
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a lot of stuff you wouldn't do if you were calmer becomes justifiable. it becomes easy to justify exerting force in various ways on other people and there were (and are) people in the ecosystem much better at doing that than other people in the ecosystem could (and can) handle
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the rationalist and EA ecosystems select massively for recruiting people (~nerds with poor social skills) who are confused in specific highly correlated ways about e.g. feelings, the body, etc., and these people are, to put it bluntly, very vulnerable to abuse
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I’ve been concerned about this for many years, but have been distant enough and busy enough to feel it’s not really my problem, but also somehow something I should try to help with. Have nearly written about it a few times. Maybe writing isn’t what’s needed though
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I often hear about explosions from only one intermediate distance.
I wonder whether there’s some best practices known from experience with supporting unhealthy cult refugees generally. Haven’t investigated
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there's probably something about this in "cult, a love story"
and/but i want to emphasize that your writing has already been extremely valuable. it means a lot to see someone writing so sanely and with such insight who is outside of the group
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for further reading about this kind of thing, i got some good stuff out of reading alexandra amor's "cult, a love story" (and as you can tell i find the description of it as a love story very apt), would recommend, h/t @meditationstuff
amazon.com/Cult-Love-Stor
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b/c a big part of the way groups like this work is convincing you that the cult leader has unique insights which are unavailable anywhere else
free publicly-available insight not tied to a group is a *huge* antidote to that
As a corollary to this, citations are an excellent way to dissipate tendencies towards this kind of cultish worship. Not using them strikes me as negligent.
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People keep looking for the secret when it’s in them the whole time.
A question that I always ask is what factors render people so vulnerable to what inevitably turns into abuse? This includes abuse at a local level (abusive relationships) and at a societal level (only THIS candidate can solve all our problems or THIS belief system).
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