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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
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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David Chapman
@Meaningness
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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