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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID ๐Ÿ˜ท)
@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 ๐Ÿ˜ท)
@QiaochuYuan
ยท
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 ๐Ÿ˜ท)
@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 ๐Ÿ˜ท)
@QiaochuYuan
there's a lot of totalizing narrative stuff going on with spiritual cults too. "AI safety is the most important thing" and "enlightenment is the most important thing" have a lot in common in terms of psychological effect
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID ๐Ÿ˜ท)
@QiaochuYuan
continue to recommend this book:
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID ๐Ÿ˜ท)
@QiaochuYuan
ยท
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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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID ๐Ÿ˜ท)
@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 ๐Ÿ˜ท)
@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 โ€œyay rationality! Yay altruism! Also, yay healthy relationships, having fun, diverse forms of meaning, and sane social dynamics!lโ€
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