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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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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continue to recommend this book:
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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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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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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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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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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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this set of experiences btw is why i think "don't accidentally start an unhealthy cult while trying to change the world" is *the* major problem people trying to change the world face
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yep. this is where all my good tweets about the culture war come from