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.
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.