I’m focusing on the aspects specific to rationalism and effective altruism that could lead to people who nominally are part of the rationality community being crazy at a higher rate than one would expect. From your post, I got the following list:
Isolationist
fewer norms
highly ambitious
gender-ratios
X-risk being scary
encourages doing big things
I may be missing some but these are all the aspects that stood out to me. From my perspective, the #1 most important cause of the craziness that sometimes occurs in nominally rationalist communities is that rationalists reject tradition. This kind of falls under the fewer norms category but I don’t think ‘fewer norms’ really captures it.
A lot of people will naturally do crazy things without the strict social rules and guidelines that humans have operated with for hundreds of years. The same rules that have been slowly eroding since 1900. And nominally rationalist communities are kind of at the forefront of eroding those social rules. Rationalists accept as normal ideas like polyamory, group homes (in adulthood as a long term situation), drug use, atheism, mysticism, brain-hacking, transgenderism, sadomasochism, and a whole slew of other historically, socially dis-favored ways to live.
Society previously protected people who are susceptible to manipulation. Society disfavors not only the manipulation and abuse but all unusual behaviors listed above that tended to go along with manipulation and abuse. Not because they necessarily had to go together, but because people who tended to do some really weird things also tended to be manipulative and abusive. Many rationalist communities take the position that in social situations, “as long as there’s consent it’s not bad.” And this just doesn’t account for actual human behavior.
group homes (in adulthood as a long term situation)
People living together in group homes (as extended families) used to be the norm? The weird thing is how isolated and individualist we’ve become. I would argue that group houses where individual adults join up together are preserving some aspect of traditional social arrangement where people live closely, but maybe you would argue that this is not the same as an extended family or the lifelong kinship networks of a village.
I’m focusing on the aspects specific to rationalism and effective altruism that could lead to people who nominally are part of the rationality community being crazy at a higher rate than one would expect. From your post, I got the following list:
Isolationist
fewer norms
highly ambitious
gender-ratios
X-risk being scary
encourages doing big things
I may be missing some but these are all the aspects that stood out to me. From my perspective, the #1 most important cause of the craziness that sometimes occurs in nominally rationalist communities is that rationalists reject tradition. This kind of falls under the fewer norms category but I don’t think ‘fewer norms’ really captures it.
A lot of people will naturally do crazy things without the strict social rules and guidelines that humans have operated with for hundreds of years. The same rules that have been slowly eroding since 1900. And nominally rationalist communities are kind of at the forefront of eroding those social rules. Rationalists accept as normal ideas like polyamory, group homes (in adulthood as a long term situation), drug use, atheism, mysticism, brain-hacking, transgenderism, sadomasochism, and a whole slew of other historically, socially dis-favored ways to live.
Society previously protected people who are susceptible to manipulation. Society disfavors not only the manipulation and abuse but all unusual behaviors listed above that tended to go along with manipulation and abuse. Not because they necessarily had to go together, but because people who tended to do some really weird things also tended to be manipulative and abusive. Many rationalist communities take the position that in social situations, “as long as there’s consent it’s not bad.” And this just doesn’t account for actual human behavior.
People living together in group homes (as extended families) used to be the norm? The weird thing is how isolated and individualist we’ve become. I would argue that group houses where individual adults join up together are preserving some aspect of traditional social arrangement where people live closely, but maybe you would argue that this is not the same as an extended family or the lifelong kinship networks of a village.