Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote of ideas one can’t see the value of, and teachers who don’t seem to understand their teachings, “Sounds like either a cult or a college.”
I dunno, at least for many technical fields and for some other endeavors too (like learning to communicate effectively in writing) one can see that many of the teachers can do some handy hard-to-fake real-world stuff, and that the students emerging through the pipeline tend to be able to do it too. When I was an undergraduate, the EEs in my residence hall traditionally maintained a little hand-made custom-programmed telephone PBX which ran from the two college official phone jacks in the lobby to a motley collection of old salvaged telephones in most of the other rooms. I, at least, was impressed. If you’re in an organization where the initiates routinely levitate out their windows to go to lunch, and levitate some more whenever they have trouble finding a convenient chair, is it a mystical cult because levitation or funny hats or even confusing explanations are involved, or might it be unusually successful pragmatic applied philosophy?
Once stretched to cover everything from incompetent posers to arrogant weird competent people (like Isaac Newton at the hypercompetent extreme, or various academics in a less extreme way), a concept like “cult” may not be all that valuable. Perhaps there is value in reminding us that part of the reason the posers can gull people with their behavior is that it’s not so uncommon for non-posers to act in some similar way. But there is also value in to reminding people that part of the reason speculative bubbles can happen is that price moves based on fundamentals can look similar enough to gull speculators into mistaking a bubble for one one. That doesn’t mean we should think of every big price move as a “bubble” (or as being bubble-ish, or whatever). We might say “every big price move wants to be a bubble,” but saying a market situation where the fundamentals don’t make sense “sounds like a bubble or an ordinary market” would seem to me to be missing a point.
Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote of ideas one can’t see the value of, and teachers who don’t seem to understand their teachings, “Sounds like either a cult or a college.”
I dunno, at least for many technical fields and for some other endeavors too (like learning to communicate effectively in writing) one can see that many of the teachers can do some handy hard-to-fake real-world stuff, and that the students emerging through the pipeline tend to be able to do it too. When I was an undergraduate, the EEs in my residence hall traditionally maintained a little hand-made custom-programmed telephone PBX which ran from the two college official phone jacks in the lobby to a motley collection of old salvaged telephones in most of the other rooms. I, at least, was impressed. If you’re in an organization where the initiates routinely levitate out their windows to go to lunch, and levitate some more whenever they have trouble finding a convenient chair, is it a mystical cult because levitation or funny hats or even confusing explanations are involved, or might it be unusually successful pragmatic applied philosophy?
Once stretched to cover everything from incompetent posers to arrogant weird competent people (like Isaac Newton at the hypercompetent extreme, or various academics in a less extreme way), a concept like “cult” may not be all that valuable. Perhaps there is value in reminding us that part of the reason the posers can gull people with their behavior is that it’s not so uncommon for non-posers to act in some similar way. But there is also value in to reminding people that part of the reason speculative bubbles can happen is that price moves based on fundamentals can look similar enough to gull speculators into mistaking a bubble for one one. That doesn’t mean we should think of every big price move as a “bubble” (or as being bubble-ish, or whatever). We might say “every big price move wants to be a bubble,” but saying a market situation where the fundamentals don’t make sense “sounds like a bubble or an ordinary market” would seem to me to be missing a point.