Yes Scott’s analysis was more believable than yours. That continues to be the case.
I think high pressure environments such as startups and cults need to avoid having members who cannot handle high pressure, such as people genetically predisposed to psychotic breaks, or people who are taking too many psychedelics.
Cults actually do this. I claim expertise here because I have a master’s degree in psychology of religion and some minor but peer-reviewed published papers on new religious movements. I have found that cults tend to have screening procedures to weed out the psychotic among the applicants, because these always make trouble. (Cults get a lot more of those applicants than the average proportion among the general population.) There are differences, but the commonality is that the person is taught a protective exercise (some of these I actually think might plausibly help) and told to do that exercise in case of distressing events of the particular type. Then if they continue to report such experiences, it is their own fault for having done too little of the exercise, and then that is reason enough to throw them out.
MIRI is not a cult but maybe it should learn from them.
Yes Scott’s analysis was more believable than yours. That continues to be the case.
I think high pressure environments such as startups and cults need to avoid having members who cannot handle high pressure, such as people genetically predisposed to psychotic breaks, or people who are taking too many psychedelics.
Cults actually do this. I claim expertise here because I have a master’s degree in psychology of religion and some minor but peer-reviewed published papers on new religious movements. I have found that cults tend to have screening procedures to weed out the psychotic among the applicants, because these always make trouble. (Cults get a lot more of those applicants than the average proportion among the general population.) There are differences, but the commonality is that the person is taught a protective exercise (some of these I actually think might plausibly help) and told to do that exercise in case of distressing events of the particular type. Then if they continue to report such experiences, it is their own fault for having done too little of the exercise, and then that is reason enough to throw them out.
MIRI is not a cult but maybe it should learn from them.