One big turn-off of Gnosticism for me is dividing people into three sorts, of which the most numerous (hylics) is the most inferior. So groups with gnosticism-type beliefs will often think of themselves as distinct and superior to regular people.
It seems to me that there’s this sort of division whenever there’s something. For instance, what pneumatic/psychic/hylic are to enlightenment, so farmer/gardening enthusiast/nonfarmer are to food. The question is just whether the judgements about the division match the actual value of the something. So for instance since food is good, wheat farmers are also good, and it is precisely their distinction from nonfarmers that make them good, so nonfarmers are generically inferior.
Now of course individual nonfarmers can be better than individual farmers, but that either requires the nonfarmer to have their own worthwhile characteristic (which then implies another division into three sorts of superior vs inferior), or the farmer to have some unrelated negative characteristic.
The main problem is that because Gnosticism sees material power as a distortion to inner enlightenment, rather than as the proper object that ought to guide one’s enlightenment, Gnostics tend to try to retreat from powerful material factors, which leads to self-destructive tendencies (e.g. starvation). Thus the problem with the Gnostic division is that pneumatics are actually inferior, whereas Gnostics see them as superior.
(In uncivilized circumstances you could probably prove the pneumatics wrong by beating them up until they give up, but violence is often bad so civilized circumstances try to prevent it, and they typically don’t bother leaving an exception for violence towards Gnostics, so one needs to stop them in some other way. My suspicion is that sun worship could work for proving them wrong, but since it is information-based, it really is a Gnostic approach to stopping Gnosticism, which is kind of paradoxical, but YMMV.)
I think most farmers would agree that there are many other jobs as useful as farming. But to a gnostic, the pneumatic/psychic/hylic classification is the most important fact about a person.
good classifications would tend to be ~the most important fact about a person,
the most common types would be inferior to various rare types
However, I agree that pneumatic/psychic/hylic has too few categories (and has categories that focus on the wrong things) for it to be a good system to apply to the world in general.
That said, I’m not sure this is exactly a problem for rationalist Gnostics. Like, the thing that corresponds to “pneumatic” would probably be “rationality guru”, someone like Eliezer Yudkowsky, E. T. Jaynes, or similar, the thing that corresponds to “psychic” would probably be an ordinary/aspiring rationalist, and the thing that corresponds to “hylic” would probably be a non-rationalist person.
But while many rationalists Gnostics see pneumatics as being much more important than hylics (due to pneumatics e.g. developing unfriendly AGI or solving AI safety), rationalist Gnostics are still basically able to deal with hylics when things concern material matters.
I mean, in science people will use Newton’s results and add their own. But they won’t quote Newton’s books at you on every topic under the sun, or consider you a muggle if you haven’t read these books. He doesn’t get the guru treatment that EY does.
Do you have some examples of areas he’s commented on that have been taken too seriously and shouldn’t have been? (Doesn’t have to be links, just stuff you remember is fine.)
Maybe HPMOR? A lot of people treated it like “our guru has written a fiction book that teaches you how to think more correctly, let’s get more people to read it”. And maybe it’s possible to write such a book, but to me the book was charming in the moment but fell off hard when rereading later.
It’s been a long time since I read HPMOR, and I only read it once, so I might not be the best to comment on this. But, my impression is that a lot of the enthusiasm for it is endogenous, with HPMOR being a major factor leading people to rationalism, rather than its popularity being driven by people who were already into rationalism? So doesn’t whether this is problematic again just boil down to the quality of Gnosticism? Like it doesn’t seem to be intrinsically wrong to go “I find this book really insightful, more people should read it” as long as the book actually is really good.
One big turn-off of Gnosticism for me is dividing people into three sorts, of which the most numerous (hylics) is the most inferior. So groups with gnosticism-type beliefs will often think of themselves as distinct and superior to regular people.
It seems to me that there’s this sort of division whenever there’s something. For instance, what pneumatic/psychic/hylic are to enlightenment, so farmer/gardening enthusiast/nonfarmer are to food. The question is just whether the judgements about the division match the actual value of the something. So for instance since food is good, wheat farmers are also good, and it is precisely their distinction from nonfarmers that make them good, so nonfarmers are generically inferior.
Now of course individual nonfarmers can be better than individual farmers, but that either requires the nonfarmer to have their own worthwhile characteristic (which then implies another division into three sorts of superior vs inferior), or the farmer to have some unrelated negative characteristic.
The main problem is that because Gnosticism sees material power as a distortion to inner enlightenment, rather than as the proper object that ought to guide one’s enlightenment, Gnostics tend to try to retreat from powerful material factors, which leads to self-destructive tendencies (e.g. starvation). Thus the problem with the Gnostic division is that pneumatics are actually inferior, whereas Gnostics see them as superior.
(In uncivilized circumstances you could probably prove the pneumatics wrong by beating them up until they give up, but violence is often bad so civilized circumstances try to prevent it, and they typically don’t bother leaving an exception for violence towards Gnostics, so one needs to stop them in some other way. My suspicion is that sun worship could work for proving them wrong, but since it is information-based, it really is a Gnostic approach to stopping Gnosticism, which is kind of paradoxical, but YMMV.)
I think most farmers would agree that there are many other jobs as useful as farming. But to a gnostic, the pneumatic/psychic/hylic classification is the most important fact about a person.
Because of long-tailedness:
good classifications would tend to be ~the most important fact about a person,
the most common types would be inferior to various rare types
However, I agree that pneumatic/psychic/hylic has too few categories (and has categories that focus on the wrong things) for it to be a good system to apply to the world in general.
That said, I’m not sure this is exactly a problem for rationalist Gnostics. Like, the thing that corresponds to “pneumatic” would probably be “rationality guru”, someone like Eliezer Yudkowsky, E. T. Jaynes, or similar, the thing that corresponds to “psychic” would probably be an ordinary/aspiring rationalist, and the thing that corresponds to “hylic” would probably be a non-rationalist person.
But while many rationalists Gnostics see pneumatics as being much more important than hylics (due to pneumatics e.g. developing unfriendly AGI or solving AI safety), rationalist Gnostics are still basically able to deal with hylics when things concern material matters.
That sounds a bit like “dealing with muggles”. I think this kind of thing is wrong in general, it’s better to not have gurus and not have muggles.
I find your position a bit ambiguous. The main meanings I can see are:
You wanna pretend that people who have nothing specially important going on actually do have something specially important going on.
You wanna pretend that people who do have something specially important going on actually don’t, at least to the point where they don’t teach it.
You wanna kill everyone/most people so there’s nobody who is failing to be special or especially special.
You do not believe that there is anything specially important, at least not unless everyone is equally involved with it.
All of these interpretations sound very strawmanny but I don’t know what the non-strawmanny version that you are hinting at is.
I mean, in science people will use Newton’s results and add their own. But they won’t quote Newton’s books at you on every topic under the sun, or consider you a muggle if you haven’t read these books. He doesn’t get the guru treatment that EY does.
Do you have some examples of areas he’s commented on that have been taken too seriously and shouldn’t have been? (Doesn’t have to be links, just stuff you remember is fine.)
Maybe HPMOR? A lot of people treated it like “our guru has written a fiction book that teaches you how to think more correctly, let’s get more people to read it”. And maybe it’s possible to write such a book, but to me the book was charming in the moment but fell off hard when rereading later.
It’s been a long time since I read HPMOR, and I only read it once, so I might not be the best to comment on this. But, my impression is that a lot of the enthusiasm for it is endogenous, with HPMOR being a major factor leading people to rationalism, rather than its popularity being driven by people who were already into rationalism? So doesn’t whether this is problematic again just boil down to the quality of Gnosticism? Like it doesn’t seem to be intrinsically wrong to go “I find this book really insightful, more people should read it” as long as the book actually is really good.