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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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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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