involvement in LW pulls people away from non-LWers. One way this happens is by encouraging contempt for less-rational Normals.
Alternative hypothesis: Once a certain kind of person realizes that something like the LW community is possible and even available, they will gravitate towards it—not because LW is cultish, but because the people, social norms, and ideas appeal to them, and once that kind of interaction is available, it’s a preferred substitute for some previously engaged-in interaction. From the outside, this may look like contempt for Normals. But from personal experience, I can say that form the inside it feels like you’ve been eating gruel all your life, and that’s what you were used to, but then you discovered actual delicious food and don’t need to eat gruel anymore.
Yes, it’s rather odd to call a group of like minded people a cult because they enjoy and prefer each other’s company.
In grad school I used to be in a couple of email lists that I enjoyed because of the quality of the intellectual interaction and the topics discussed, one being Extropians in the 90s. I’d given that stuff up for a long time.
Got back into it a little a few years ago. I had been spending time at a forum or two, but was getting bored with them primarily because of the low quality of discussion. I don’t know how I happened on HPMOR, but I loved it, and so naturally came to the site to take a look. Seeing Jaynes, Pearl, and The Map is not the Territory served as good signaling to me of some intellectual taste around here.
I didn’t come here and get indoctrinated—I saw evidence of good intellectual taste and that gave me the motivation to give LW a serious look.
This is one suggestion I’d have for recruiting. Play up canonical authors more. Jaynes, Kahneman, and Pearl convey so much more information than bayesian analysis, cognitive biases, and causal analysis. None of those guys are the be all and end all of their respective fields, but identifying them plants a flag where we see value that can attract similarly minded people.
Alternative hypothesis: Once a certain kind of person realizes that something like the LW community is possible and even available, they will gravitate towards it—not because LW is cultish, but because the people, social norms, and ideas appeal to them, and once that kind of interaction is available, it’s a preferred substitute for some previously engaged-in interaction. From the outside, this may look like contempt for Normals. But from personal experience, I can say that form the inside it feels like you’ve been eating gruel all your life, and that’s what you were used to, but then you discovered actual delicious food and don’t need to eat gruel anymore.
Yes, it’s rather odd to call a group of like minded people a cult because they enjoy and prefer each other’s company.
In grad school I used to be in a couple of email lists that I enjoyed because of the quality of the intellectual interaction and the topics discussed, one being Extropians in the 90s. I’d given that stuff up for a long time.
Got back into it a little a few years ago. I had been spending time at a forum or two, but was getting bored with them primarily because of the low quality of discussion. I don’t know how I happened on HPMOR, but I loved it, and so naturally came to the site to take a look. Seeing Jaynes, Pearl, and The Map is not the Territory served as good signaling to me of some intellectual taste around here.
I didn’t come here and get indoctrinated—I saw evidence of good intellectual taste and that gave me the motivation to give LW a serious look.
This is one suggestion I’d have for recruiting. Play up canonical authors more. Jaynes, Kahneman, and Pearl convey so much more information than bayesian analysis, cognitive biases, and causal analysis. None of those guys are the be all and end all of their respective fields, but identifying them plants a flag where we see value that can attract similarly minded people.