I was chatting with someone, and they said that a particular group of people seemed increasingly like a cult. I thought that was an unhelpful framing, and here’s the rough argument I wrote for why:
There’s lots of group dynamics that lead a group of people to go insane and do unethical things.
The dynamics around Bankman-Fried involve a lot of naivety when interfacing with an sociopath who was scamming people for billions of dollars on a massive scale.
The dynamics around Leverage Research involved lots of people with extremely little savings and income in a group house trying to do ‘science’ to claims of paranormal phenomena.
The dynamics around Jonestown involves total isolation from family, public humiliation and beatings for dissent, and a leader with personal connection to the divine.
These have all produced some amounts of insane and unethical behavior, to different extents, for quite different reasons.
They all deserve to be opposed to some extent. And it is pro-social to share information about their insanity and bad behavior.
Calling them ‘cults’ communicates that these are groups that have gone insane and done terrible things, but it also communicates that these groups are all the same, when in fact there’s not always public beatings or paranormal phenomena or billions of dollars, and the dynamics are very different.
Conflating them confuses outside people, they have a harder time understanding whether the group is actually insane and what the dynamics are.
So, if someone said that both Singapore and the United States were “States” you could also provide a list of ways in which Singapore and the United States differ—consider size, attitude towards physical punishment, system of government, foreign policy, and so on and so forth. However—share enough of a family resemblance that unless we have weird and isolated demands for rigor it’s useful to be able to call them both “States.”
Similarly, although you’ve provided notable ways in which these groups differ, they also have numerous similarities. (I’m just gonna talk about Leverage / Jonestown because the FTX thing is obscure to me)
They all somewhat isolated people, either actually physically (Jonestown) or by limiting people’s deep interaction with outsiders (“Leverage research” by my recollection did a lot of “was that a worthwhile interaction?”)
They both put immense individual pressure on people, in most cases in ways that look deliberately engineered and which were supposed to produce “interior conversion”. Consider leverage’s “Debugging” or what Wikipedia says about the People’s Temple Precursor of Jonestown: “They often involved long “catharsis” sessions in which members would be called “on the floor” for emotional dissections, including why they were wearing nice clothes when others in the world were starving.”
They both had big stories about How the World Works and how narratives in which they hold the Key for Fixing How the World Works.
(4. Fun fact: all of the above—including FTX—actually startedin San Francisco.)
That’s just the most obvious, but that’s… already some significant commonality! If I did more research I expect I would find much much more.
My personal list for Sus about Cult Dynamics is a little more directly about compromised epistemics than the above. I’m extremely wary of groups that (1) bring you into circumstances where most everyone you are friends with is in the group, because this is probably the most effective way in history of getting someone to believe something, (2) have long lists of jargon with little clear predictive ability whose mastery is considered essential for Status with them -- historically this also looks like a good way to produce arbitrary Interior Conviction, albeit not quite as good as the first, (3) have leaders whose Texts you are supposed to Deeply Read and Interiorize, the kind of thing you to Close Readings. And of course (4) stories about the end of the world, because these have been a constant in culty dynamics for actual centuries, from the Munster Rebellion to Jonestown to.… other groups.
This list is a little fuzzy! Note that it includes groups that I like! I still have fond feelings for Communion and Liberation, though I am not a believer, and they pretty obviously have at least 3 / 4 of my personal list (no apocalypse with CL as far as I know, they’re too chill for that). Human epistemics adapted for cladistic categories which are unusually tight; it would be a mistake to think that “cult” is as tight as “sheep” or as “lion,” and if you start reasoning that “Cult includes X, Y is cult, so Y includes X” you might find you are mistaken quickly.
But “cult” does clearly denominate a real dynamic in the world, even if less tight than “sheep”. When people find groups “culty,” they are picking up on actual dynamics in those groups! And you shall not strike works from people’s expressive vocabulary without replacing them with suitable replacement. I think in many cases it is entirely reasonable to say “huh, seems culty” and “that groups seems like a cult” and that trying to avoid this language is trying to prevent an original seeing; that avoiding this language is trying to avoid seeing a causal mechanism that is operative in the world, rather than trying to actually see the world better.
Thanks for the thoughts! I’ve not thought about this topic that much before, so my comment(s) will be longer as I’m figuring it out for myself, and in the process of generating hypotheses.
I’m hearing you say that while I have drawn some distinctions, that overall these groups still have major similarities, so the term accurately tracks reality and is helpful.
On further reflection I’m more sympathetic to this point; but granting it I’m still concerned that the term is net harmful for thinking.
My current sense is that a cult is the name given to a group that has gone off the rails. The group has
some weird beliefs
intends to behave in line with those beliefs
seems unable to change course
the individuals seem unable to change their mind
and the behavior seems to outsiders to be extremely harmful.
My concern is that the following two claims are true:
There are groups with seemingly closed epistemologies and whose behavior has a large effect size, in similar ways to groups widely considered to be ‘cults’, yet the outcomes are overall great and worth supporting.
There are groups with seemingly closed epistemologies and whose behavior has a large effect size, in similar ways to groups widely considered to be ‘cults’, yet are not called cults because they have widespread political support.
I’ll talk through some potential examples.
Startups
Peter Thiel has said that a successful startup feels a bit like a cult. Many startups are led by a charismatic leader who believes in the product, surrounded by people who believe in the leader and the product, where outsiders don’t get it at all and think it’s a waste of time. The people in the company work extreme hours, regularly hitting sleep deprivation, and sometimes invest their savings into the project. The internal dynamics are complicated and political and sometimes cut-throat. Sometimes this pays off greatly, like with Tesla/SpaceX/Apple. Other times it doesn’t, like with WeWork, or FTX, or just most startups where people work really hard and nothing comes of it.
I’d guess there are many people in this world who left a failed startup in a daze, wondering why they dedicated some of the best years of their lives to something and someone that in retrospect clearly wasn’t worth it, not entirely dissimilar to someone leaving a more classical cult. However, it seems likely to me the distribution of startups is well-worth-it for civilization as a whole (with the exception of suicidal AI-companies).
(This is a potential example of number 1 above.)
Religions
Major religions have often done things just as insane and damaging as smaller cults, but aren’t called cults. The standard list of things includes oppression of homosexuality and other sexualities, subjugation of women, genital mutilation, blasphemy laws, opposition to contraception in developing countries (exacerbating the spread of HIV/AIDS), death orders, censorship, and more.
It seems plausible to me that someone would do far more harm and become far more closed in their epistemology via joining the Islamic Republic of Iran or the Holy See in the Vatican than if they joined Scientology or one of the many other things that get called cults (e.g. a quick googling came up with cryptocurrencies, string theory, Donal Trump, and PETA). Yet it seems to me that these aren’t given as examples of cults, only the smaller religions that are easier to oppose and which have little political power get that name. Scientology seems to be the most powerful one where people feel like they can get away with calling it a cult.
(This is a potential example of number 2 above.)
Education
A hypothesis I take seriously is that schooling is a horrible experience for kids, and the systems don’t change because children are often not respected as whole people and can be treated as subhuman.
Kids are forced to sit still for something like more-than-10% of the hours of their childhood, and regularly complain about this and seem to me kind of psychologically numbed by it.
I seem to recall a study that all homework other than mathematics had zero effect on learning success, and also I think I recall a study from Scandinavia where kids who joined school when they were 7 or 8 quickly caught up to their peers (suggesting the previous years had been ~pointless). I suspect Bryan Caplan’s book-length treatment of education will have some reliable info making this point (even though I believe he focuses on higher education).
I personally found university a horrible experience. Leaving university I had a strong sense of “I need to get away from this, why on Earth did I do that?” and a sense that everyone there was kind of in on a mass delusion where your status in the academic system was very important and mattered a great deal and you should really care about the system. A few years ago I had a phone call with an old friend from high-school who was still studying in the education system at the age of ~25, and I encouraged them to get out of it and grow up into a whole person.
There’s not a charismatic leader here, but I believe there’s some mass delusion and very harmful outcomes. I don’t think the education system should be destroyed, but I think it probably causes more harm than many things more typically understood to be cults (as most groups with dedicated followings and charismatic leaders have very little effect size either way), and my sense is that many people involved are extremely resistant that they are not doing what’s best for the children or are doing some bad things.
(This is a potential example of both numbers 1 and 2 above.)
———
To repeat: my concern is that the things that are common to cults is more like “what groups with closed epistemologies and unusual behavior is it easy to coordinate on destroying” rather than “what groups have closed epistemologies and behavior with terrible effects”.
If so, while I acknowledge that many of the groups that are widely described as “cults” probably have closed epistemologies and cause a lot of damage, I am concerned that whether a group is called a cult is primarily a political question about whether you can backing for destroying it in this case.
To talk about the education example, while I do think that the education system can have a lot of problems, I’d say a crux here is that easy classes anti-predict learning, and a lot of kid complaints on schooling would probably making kids learn worse, because hardness is correlated to learning:
A possible model is that while good startups have an elevation in the “cult-factor”, they have an even greater elevation in the unique factor related to the product they are building. Like SpaceX has cult-like elements but SpaceX also has Mars and Mars is much bigger than the cult-like elements, so if we define a cult to require that the biggest thing going on for them is cultishness then SpaceX is not a cult.
This is justified by LDSL (I really should write up the post explaining it...).
I’d say that the reason why the SpaceX cult/business can actually make working rockets is because they have rich feedback from reality when they try to design rockets, even at the pre-testing stage, because while it’s not obvious to a layperson if a rocket does work, it is relatively easy to check the physics of whether a new rocket does work for an expert, meaning the checking of claims can be made legible, which is an enemy to cults in general.
More generally, I’d say the difference between a cult and a high-impact startup/business is whether they can get rich and reliable feedback from a source, and secondarily how legible their theory of impact/claims are.
Singapore and the US both have a military, a police, and taxation. This seems much more clear-cut to me than “cults” do.
I think maybe one could treat “cult” more like a pronoun than like a theoretical object. Like when one is in the vicinity of one of the groups Ben Pace mentioned, it makes sense to have a short term to talk about the group, and “the cult” is useful for disambiguating the cult from other groups that might be present.
Some behaviors are red flags, for example “isolating you from unsupervised talking to people outside the group” or “expecting you to report your private thoughts to your superiors”.
I wish we had a convenient handle for this set of red flags, and in a better world perhaps “cult” could be the word, but unfortunately in our world people mostly focus on things like “different from my group” and “seem weird”.
I wonder if you’re objecting to identifying this group as cult-like, or to implying that all cults are bad and should be opposed. Personally, I find a LOT of human behavior, especially in groups, to be partly cult-like in their overfocus on group-identification and othering of outsiders, and often in outsized influence of one or a few leaders. I don’t think ALL of them are bad, but enough are to be a bit suspicious without counter-evidence.
I agree. I’m reminded of Scott’s old post The Cowpox of Doubt, about how a skeptics movement focused on the most obvious pseudoscience is actually harmful to people’s rationality because it reassures them that rationality failures are mostly obvious mistakes that dumb people make instead of hard to notice mistakes that I make.
And then we get people believing allsortsofshoddyresearch – because after all, the world is divided between things like homeopathy that Have Never Been Supported By Any Evidence Ever, and things like conventional medicine that Have Studies In Real Journals And Are Pushed By Real Scientists.
Calling groups cults feels similar, in that it allows one to write them off as “obviously bad” without need for further analysis, reassures one that their own groups (which aren’t cults, of course) are obviously unobjectionable.
I was chatting with someone, and they said that a particular group of people seemed increasingly like a cult. I thought that was an unhelpful framing, and here’s the rough argument I wrote for why:
There’s lots of group dynamics that lead a group of people to go insane and do unethical things.
The dynamics around Bankman-Fried involve a lot of naivety when interfacing with an sociopath who was scamming people for billions of dollars on a massive scale.
The dynamics around Leverage Research involved lots of people with extremely little savings and income in a group house trying to do ‘science’ to claims of paranormal phenomena.
The dynamics around Jonestown involves total isolation from family, public humiliation and beatings for dissent, and a leader with personal connection to the divine.
These have all produced some amounts of insane and unethical behavior, to different extents, for quite different reasons.
They all deserve to be opposed to some extent. And it is pro-social to share information about their insanity and bad behavior.
Calling them ‘cults’ communicates that these are groups that have gone insane and done terrible things, but it also communicates that these groups are all the same, when in fact there’s not always public beatings or paranormal phenomena or billions of dollars, and the dynamics are very different.
Conflating them confuses outside people, they have a harder time understanding whether the group is actually insane and what the dynamics are.
So, if someone said that both Singapore and the United States were “States” you could also provide a list of ways in which Singapore and the United States differ—consider size, attitude towards physical punishment, system of government, foreign policy, and so on and so forth. However—share enough of a family resemblance that unless we have weird and isolated demands for rigor it’s useful to be able to call them both “States.”
Similarly, although you’ve provided notable ways in which these groups differ, they also have numerous similarities. (I’m just gonna talk about Leverage / Jonestown because the FTX thing is obscure to me)
They all somewhat isolated people, either actually physically (Jonestown) or by limiting people’s deep interaction with outsiders (“Leverage research” by my recollection did a lot of “was that a worthwhile interaction?”)
They both put immense individual pressure on people, in most cases in ways that look deliberately engineered and which were supposed to produce “interior conversion”. Consider leverage’s “Debugging” or what Wikipedia says about the People’s Temple Precursor of Jonestown: “They often involved long “catharsis” sessions in which members would be called “on the floor” for emotional dissections, including why they were wearing nice clothes when others in the world were starving.”
They both had big stories about How the World Works and how narratives in which they hold the Key for Fixing How the World Works.
(4. Fun fact: all of the above—including FTX—actually started in San Francisco.)
That’s just the most obvious, but that’s… already some significant commonality! If I did more research I expect I would find much much more.
My personal list for Sus about Cult Dynamics is a little more directly about compromised epistemics than the above. I’m extremely wary of groups that (1) bring you into circumstances where most everyone you are friends with is in the group, because this is probably the most effective way in history of getting someone to believe something, (2) have long lists of jargon with little clear predictive ability whose mastery is considered essential for Status with them -- historically this also looks like a good way to produce arbitrary Interior Conviction, albeit not quite as good as the first, (3) have leaders whose Texts you are supposed to Deeply Read and Interiorize, the kind of thing you to Close Readings. And of course (4) stories about the end of the world, because these have been a constant in culty dynamics for actual centuries, from the Munster Rebellion to Jonestown to.… other groups.
This list is a little fuzzy! Note that it includes groups that I like! I still have fond feelings for Communion and Liberation, though I am not a believer, and they pretty obviously have at least 3 / 4 of my personal list (no apocalypse with CL as far as I know, they’re too chill for that). Human epistemics adapted for cladistic categories which are unusually tight; it would be a mistake to think that “cult” is as tight as “sheep” or as “lion,” and if you start reasoning that “Cult includes X, Y is cult, so Y includes X” you might find you are mistaken quickly.
But “cult” does clearly denominate a real dynamic in the world, even if less tight than “sheep”. When people find groups “culty,” they are picking up on actual dynamics in those groups! And you shall not strike works from people’s expressive vocabulary without replacing them with suitable replacement. I think in many cases it is entirely reasonable to say “huh, seems culty” and “that groups seems like a cult” and that trying to avoid this language is trying to prevent an original seeing; that avoiding this language is trying to avoid seeing a causal mechanism that is operative in the world, rather than trying to actually see the world better.
Thanks for the thoughts! I’ve not thought about this topic that much before, so my comment(s) will be longer as I’m figuring it out for myself, and in the process of generating hypotheses.
I’m hearing you say that while I have drawn some distinctions, that overall these groups still have major similarities, so the term accurately tracks reality and is helpful.
On further reflection I’m more sympathetic to this point; but granting it I’m still concerned that the term is net harmful for thinking.
My current sense is that a cult is the name given to a group that has gone off the rails. The group has
some weird beliefs
intends to behave in line with those beliefs
seems unable to change course
the individuals seem unable to change their mind
and the behavior seems to outsiders to be extremely harmful.
My concern is that the following two claims are true:
There are groups with seemingly closed epistemologies and whose behavior has a large effect size, in similar ways to groups widely considered to be ‘cults’, yet the outcomes are overall great and worth supporting.
There are groups with seemingly closed epistemologies and whose behavior has a large effect size, in similar ways to groups widely considered to be ‘cults’, yet are not called cults because they have widespread political support.
I’ll talk through some potential examples.
Startups
Peter Thiel has said that a successful startup feels a bit like a cult. Many startups are led by a charismatic leader who believes in the product, surrounded by people who believe in the leader and the product, where outsiders don’t get it at all and think it’s a waste of time. The people in the company work extreme hours, regularly hitting sleep deprivation, and sometimes invest their savings into the project. The internal dynamics are complicated and political and sometimes cut-throat. Sometimes this pays off greatly, like with Tesla/SpaceX/Apple. Other times it doesn’t, like with WeWork, or FTX, or just most startups where people work really hard and nothing comes of it.
I’d guess there are many people in this world who left a failed startup in a daze, wondering why they dedicated some of the best years of their lives to something and someone that in retrospect clearly wasn’t worth it, not entirely dissimilar to someone leaving a more classical cult. However, it seems likely to me the distribution of startups is well-worth-it for civilization as a whole (with the exception of suicidal AI-companies).
(This is a potential example of number 1 above.)
Religions
Major religions have often done things just as insane and damaging as smaller cults, but aren’t called cults. The standard list of things includes oppression of homosexuality and other sexualities, subjugation of women, genital mutilation, blasphemy laws, opposition to contraception in developing countries (exacerbating the spread of HIV/AIDS), death orders, censorship, and more.
It seems plausible to me that someone would do far more harm and become far more closed in their epistemology via joining the Islamic Republic of Iran or the Holy See in the Vatican than if they joined Scientology or one of the many other things that get called cults (e.g. a quick googling came up with cryptocurrencies, string theory, Donal Trump, and PETA). Yet it seems to me that these aren’t given as examples of cults, only the smaller religions that are easier to oppose and which have little political power get that name. Scientology seems to be the most powerful one where people feel like they can get away with calling it a cult.
(This is a potential example of number 2 above.)
Education
A hypothesis I take seriously is that schooling is a horrible experience for kids, and the systems don’t change because children are often not respected as whole people and can be treated as subhuman.
Kids are forced to sit still for something like more-than-10% of the hours of their childhood, and regularly complain about this and seem to me kind of psychologically numbed by it.
I seem to recall a study that all homework other than mathematics had zero effect on learning success, and also I think I recall a study from Scandinavia where kids who joined school when they were 7 or 8 quickly caught up to their peers (suggesting the previous years had been ~pointless). I suspect Bryan Caplan’s book-length treatment of education will have some reliable info making this point (even though I believe he focuses on higher education).
I personally found university a horrible experience. Leaving university I had a strong sense of “I need to get away from this, why on Earth did I do that?” and a sense that everyone there was kind of in on a mass delusion where your status in the academic system was very important and mattered a great deal and you should really care about the system. A few years ago I had a phone call with an old friend from high-school who was still studying in the education system at the age of ~25, and I encouraged them to get out of it and grow up into a whole person.
There’s not a charismatic leader here, but I believe there’s some mass delusion and very harmful outcomes. I don’t think the education system should be destroyed, but I think it probably causes more harm than many things more typically understood to be cults (as most groups with dedicated followings and charismatic leaders have very little effect size either way), and my sense is that many people involved are extremely resistant that they are not doing what’s best for the children or are doing some bad things.
(This is a potential example of both numbers 1 and 2 above.)
———
To repeat: my concern is that the things that are common to cults is more like “what groups with closed epistemologies and unusual behavior is it easy to coordinate on destroying” rather than “what groups have closed epistemologies and behavior with terrible effects”.
If so, while I acknowledge that many of the groups that are widely described as “cults” probably have closed epistemologies and cause a lot of damage, I am concerned that whether a group is called a cult is primarily a political question about whether you can backing for destroying it in this case.
To talk about the education example, while I do think that the education system can have a lot of problems, I’d say a crux here is that easy classes anti-predict learning, and a lot of kid complaints on schooling would probably making kids learn worse, because hardness is correlated to learning:
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/post-apocalyptic-education
https://x.com/emollick/status/1756396139623096695
A possible model is that while good startups have an elevation in the “cult-factor”, they have an even greater elevation in the unique factor related to the product they are building. Like SpaceX has cult-like elements but SpaceX also has Mars and Mars is much bigger than the cult-like elements, so if we define a cult to require that the biggest thing going on for them is cultishness then SpaceX is not a cult.
This is justified by LDSL (I really should write up the post explaining it...).
I’d say that the reason why the SpaceX cult/business can actually make working rockets is because they have rich feedback from reality when they try to design rockets, even at the pre-testing stage, because while it’s not obvious to a layperson if a rocket does work, it is relatively easy to check the physics of whether a new rocket does work for an expert, meaning the checking of claims can be made legible, which is an enemy to cults in general.
More generally, I’d say the difference between a cult and a high-impact startup/business is whether they can get rich and reliable feedback from a source, and secondarily how legible their theory of impact/claims are.
Bigness alone doesn’t cut it.
Singapore and the US both have a military, a police, and taxation. This seems much more clear-cut to me than “cults” do.
I think maybe one could treat “cult” more like a pronoun than like a theoretical object. Like when one is in the vicinity of one of the groups Ben Pace mentioned, it makes sense to have a short term to talk about the group, and “the cult” is useful for disambiguating the cult from other groups that might be present.
Some behaviors are red flags, for example “isolating you from unsupervised talking to people outside the group” or “expecting you to report your private thoughts to your superiors”.
I wish we had a convenient handle for this set of red flags, and in a better world perhaps “cult” could be the word, but unfortunately in our world people mostly focus on things like “different from my group” and “seem weird”.
EDIT: 1a3orn already said it better.
I wonder if you’re objecting to identifying this group as cult-like, or to implying that all cults are bad and should be opposed. Personally, I find a LOT of human behavior, especially in groups, to be partly cult-like in their overfocus on group-identification and othering of outsiders, and often in outsized influence of one or a few leaders. I don’t think ALL of them are bad, but enough are to be a bit suspicious without counter-evidence.
I agree. I’m reminded of Scott’s old post The Cowpox of Doubt, about how a skeptics movement focused on the most obvious pseudoscience is actually harmful to people’s rationality because it reassures them that rationality failures are mostly obvious mistakes that dumb people make instead of hard to notice mistakes that I make.
Calling groups cults feels similar, in that it allows one to write them off as “obviously bad” without need for further analysis, reassures one that their own groups (which aren’t cults, of course) are obviously unobjectionable.