On the contrary, I assign a higher prior probability to movements based on sensible ideas rising to prominence, versus movements based on total nonsense.
(How many failed/successful flying saucer cults? How many failed/successful nonprofits and charities? I don’t have real data, but my gut feeling says saucer cults are worse off on average.)
This means that success of a movement based on total nonsense requires a higher burden of proof in the quality of its organisation. For example good leadership, consistent message, effort in PR etc.
The factors you mention might make it easier in some respects to run a cult, but I think they do not on average outweigh the costs. If they do, we should see this reflected in the amount of functioning cults versus charities.
Quite the opposite view from the sentence you quoted!
I think the discussion is getting too nuanced to procede only from raw hypotheticals. I’ll just add that if you consider religions as ‘crazy cults’ I would say they’re much more successful than charities (when the charity is real, of course, not some legal way to evade taxes), but also that flying saucers cults are less successful than religion because weirdness is almost by definition low status. That said, I feel that we’ve arrived to a point where if we want to further the discussion we would really need to start writing equations and assigning probabilities...
On the contrary, I assign a higher prior probability to movements based on sensible ideas rising to prominence, versus movements based on total nonsense.
(How many failed/successful flying saucer cults? How many failed/successful nonprofits and charities? I don’t have real data, but my gut feeling says saucer cults are worse off on average.)
This means that success of a movement based on total nonsense requires a higher burden of proof in the quality of its organisation. For example good leadership, consistent message, effort in PR etc.
The factors you mention might make it easier in some respects to run a cult, but I think they do not on average outweigh the costs. If they do, we should see this reflected in the amount of functioning cults versus charities.
Quite the opposite view from the sentence you quoted!
I think the discussion is getting too nuanced to procede only from raw hypotheticals.
I’ll just add that if you consider religions as ‘crazy cults’ I would say they’re much more successful than charities (when the charity is real, of course, not some legal way to evade taxes), but also that flying saucers cults are less successful than religion because weirdness is almost by definition low status.
That said, I feel that we’ve arrived to a point where if we want to further the discussion we would really need to start writing equations and assigning probabilities...
When talking about success rates, we have to consider base rates. Are more or fewer nonsense movements founded than sensible ones?
Thank you very much for pointing out the base rate fallacy.
Even though I was not saying anything concrete because of not enough data, I want to have had that reflex in place.