I’m an admin of LessWrong. Here are a few things about me.
I generally feel more hopeful about a situation when I understand it better.
I have signed no contracts nor made any agreements whose existence I cannot mention.
I believe it is good take responsibility for accurately and honestly informing people of what you believe in all conversations; and also good to cultivate an active recklessness for the social consequences of doing so.
Oops! That was a mistake. I guess we’re re-examining these ones tonight (they are pretty good ones). I have a spreadsheet for tracking this sort of thing, I will make some adjustment there to avoid this mistake again.
Edit: Oh I think I was on vacation that week, which is why I didn’t notice.
Three films got 4 upvotes, and my favorite of them is The Big Short, so that’s what we’re watching tonight!
I could believe it, but my (weak) guess is that in most settings people care about which pronoun they use far less than they care about people not being confused about who is being referred to.
My rough take: the rationalist scene in Berkeley used to be very bad at maintaining boundaries. Basically the boundaries were “who gets invited to parties by friends”. The one Berkeley community space (“REACH”) was basically open-access. In recent years the Lightcone team (of which I am a part) has hosted spaces and events and put in the work to maintain actual boundaries (including getting references on people and checking out suspicion of bad behavior, but mostly just making it normal for people to have events with standards for entry) and this has substantially improved the ability for rationalist spaces to have culture that is distinct from the local Berkeley culture.
Is there literally any scene in the world that has openly transgender people in it and does 3, 4, or 5? Like, a space where a transgender person is friendly with the people there and different people in a conversation are reliably using different pronouns to refer to the same person? My sense is that it’s actively confusing in a conversation for the participants to not be consistent in the choice of someone’s pronouns.
I guess I’ve often seen people default to ‘they’ a lot for people who have preferred pronouns that are he/she, that seems to go by just fine even if some people use he / she for the person, but I can’t recall ever seeing a conversation where one person uses ‘he’ and another person uses ‘she’ when both are referring to the same person.
Thanks for the thoughts! I’ve not thought about this topic that much before, so my comment(s) will be longer as I’m figuring it out for myself, and in the process of generating hypotheses.
I’m hearing you say that while I have drawn some distinctions, that overall these groups still have major similarities, so the term accurately tracks reality and is helpful.
On further reflection I’m more sympathetic to this point; but granting it I’m still concerned that the term is net harmful for thinking.
My current sense is that a cult is the name given to a group that has gone off the rails. The group has
some weird beliefs
intends to behave in line with those beliefs
seems unable to change course
the individuals seem unable to change their mind
and the behavior seems to outsiders to be extremely harmful.
My concern is that the following two claims are true:
There are groups with seemingly closed epistemologies and whose behavior has a large effect size, in similar ways to groups widely considered to be ‘cults’, yet the outcomes are overall great and worth supporting.
There are groups with seemingly closed epistemologies and whose behavior has a large effect size, in similar ways to groups widely considered to be ‘cults’, yet are not called cults because they have widespread political support.
I’ll talk through some potential examples.
Startups
Peter Thiel has said that a successful startup feels a bit like a cult. Many startups are led by a charismatic leader who believes in the product, surrounded by people who believe in the leader and the product, where outsiders don’t get it at all and think it’s a waste of time. The people in the company work extreme hours, regularly hitting sleep deprivation, and sometimes invest their savings into the project. The internal dynamics are complicated and political and sometimes cut-throat. Sometimes this pays off greatly, like with Tesla/SpaceX/Apple. Other times it doesn’t, like with WeWork, or FTX, or just most startups where people work really hard and nothing comes of it.
I’d guess there are many people in this world who left a failed startup in a daze, wondering why they dedicated some of the best years of their lives to something and someone that in retrospect clearly wasn’t worth it, not entirely dissimilar to someone leaving a more classical cult. However, it seems likely to me the distribution of startups is well-worth-it for civilization as a whole (with the exception of suicidal AI-companies).
(This is a potential example of number 1 above.)
Religions
Major religions have often done things just as insane and damaging as smaller cults, but aren’t called cults. The standard list of things includes oppression of homosexuality and other sexualities, subjugation of women, genital mutilation, blasphemy laws, opposition to contraception in developing countries (exacerbating the spread of HIV/AIDS), death orders, censorship, and more.
It seems plausible to me that someone would do far more harm and become far more closed in their epistemology via joining the Islamic Republic of Iran or the Holy See in the Vatican than if they joined Scientology or one of the many other things that get called cults (e.g. a quick googling came up with cryptocurrencies, string theory, Donal Trump, and PETA). Yet it seems to me that these aren’t given as examples of cults, only the smaller religions that are easier to oppose and which have little political power get that name. Scientology seems to be the most powerful one where people feel like they can get away with calling it a cult.
(This is a potential example of number 2 above.)
Education
A hypothesis I take seriously is that schooling is a horrible experience for kids, and the systems don’t change because children are often not respected as whole people and can be treated as subhuman.
Kids are forced to sit still for something like more-than-10% of the hours of their childhood, and regularly complain about this and seem to me kind of psychologically numbed by it.
I seem to recall a study that all homework other than mathematics had zero effect on learning success, and also I think I recall a study from Scandinavia where kids who joined school when they were 7 or 8 quickly caught up to their peers (suggesting the previous years had been ~pointless). I suspect Bryan Caplan’s book-length treatment of education will have some reliable info making this point (even though I believe he focuses on higher education).
I personally found university a horrible experience. Leaving university I had a strong sense of “I need to get away from this, why on Earth did I do that?” and a sense that everyone there was kind of in on a mass delusion where your status in the academic system was very important and mattered a great deal and you should really care about the system. A few years ago I had a phone call with an old friend from high-school who was still studying in the education system at the age of ~25, and I encouraged them to get out of it and grow up into a whole person.
There’s not a charismatic leader here, but I believe there’s some mass delusion and very harmful outcomes. I don’t think the education system should be destroyed, but I think it probably causes more harm than many things more typically understood to be cults (as most groups with dedicated followings and charismatic leaders have very little effect size either way), and my sense is that many people involved are extremely resistant that they are not doing what’s best for the children or are doing some bad things.
(This is a potential example of both numbers 1 and 2 above.)
———
To repeat: my concern is that the things that are common to cults is more like “what groups with closed epistemologies and unusual behavior is it easy to coordinate on destroying” rather than “what groups have closed epistemologies and behavior with terrible effects”.
If so, while I acknowledge that many of the groups that are widely described as “cults” probably have closed epistemologies and cause a lot of damage, I am concerned that whether a group is called a cult is primarily a political question about whether you can backing for destroying it in this case.
...when I saw the notification that you’d left an answer, I really thought you were going to say “Fight Club”.
I was chatting with someone, and they said that a particular group of people seemed increasingly like a cult. I thought that was an unhelpful framing, and here’s the rough argument I wrote for why:
There’s lots of group dynamics that lead a group of people to go insane and do unethical things.
The dynamics around Bankman-Fried involve a lot of naivety when interfacing with an sociopath who was scamming people for billions of dollars on a massive scale.
The dynamics around Leverage Research involved lots of people with extremely little savings and income in a group house trying to do ‘science’ to claims of paranormal phenomena.
The dynamics around Jonestown involves total isolation from family, public humiliation and beatings for dissent, and a leader with personal connection to the divine.
These have all produced some amounts of insane and unethical behavior, to different extents, for quite different reasons.
They all deserve to be opposed to some extent. And it is pro-social to share information about their insanity and bad behavior.
Calling them ‘cults’ communicates that these are groups that have gone insane and done terrible things, but it also communicates that these groups are all the same, when in fact there’s not always public beatings or paranormal phenomena or billions of dollars, and the dynamics are very different.
Conflating them confuses outside people, they have a harder time understanding whether the group is actually insane and what the dynamics are.
I also was kind of surprised when it turned out ‘gut feeling’ actually meant a feeling in your belly-area.
Added: I wonder if the notion of ‘having a hunch’ comes from something that causes you to hunch over?
There’s also a scene where one of the older traders makes a fermi estimate but doesn’t round any numbers to their order of magnitude. That gave me the sense that they’re earnestly trying to play autistic nerds but don’t quite know autistic nerd culture well enough.
Please can you move the epistemic status and warning to the top? I was excited when I first skimmed this detailed comment, but then I was disappointed :/ (Edit: Thank you!)
Absolutely, for years YouTube has offered me back to back clips of both, so I’ve watched parts of it many times (and the whole thing through once).
The Big Short
Rationality Tie-in:
This is a film about the 2008 Financial Market Crash, and tells the stories of...
...the three groups who noticed it would happen, believed it would happen, and successfully bet on their beliefs. It shows people going through the work of noticing an inconvenient hypothesis, being in an environment where people encouraged them to look away from it, empirically gathering data to test the hypothesis, and interacting with large institutions and bureaucracies that are corrupt and covering up this fact.
I think in most films the main characters of these films would be side-characters, contrarian nerds that the protagonist works with to get the job done, and then he takes the glory. In this story the contrarian nerds are the protagonists, and it’s very unpleasant work, but ultimately they have accurate beliefs about the world in a highly adversarial environment.
The Big Short is the filmic equivalent of my spirit-animal.
Rationality writings it is connected to:
I thought this would be hard, but actually it ties into so much.
Lonely Dissent: This film portrays the actual pain and suffering of believing what is true when so much of the world is pressuring you to not believe it, and the truth is itself extremely a lot worse than everyone else believes it to be. Seeing this hopefully helps break your trust in the world to be fine (cf. No Safe Defense, Not Even Science, and Beyond the Reach of God).
Argument Screens Off Authority: Most of the powerful authorities say everything is fine. In this film some of the characters go and empirically test the hypothesis that they are wrong anyway. (Related: Hug the Query, The Proper Use of Humility).
Faster Than Science: You need to rely on processes that are faster than waiting for the evidence to become incontrovertible such that everyone is forced to believe it. Yes, you can find out about catastrophes like the housing market crash or FTX by waiting for it all to collapse, but if you want to not face the terrible downfall then you have to notice before it has caused a catastrophe. (Related: Einstein’s Arrogance, Einstein’s Speed)
Meditations On Moloch by Scott Alexander. These men find themselves in a war with Moloch. They win their fight, but the war is lost. (Related: Immoral Mazes by Zvi Mowshowitz.)
“The Big Short” by Adam McKay
“Asteroid City” by Wes Anderson
“2001: A Space Odyssey” by Stanley Kubrick
Poll For Films to Watch
Use this thread to
Thumbs up films you’d like to watch
Thumbs down films you would not watch
Add new films for people to vote on
Oh interesting, thanks for the feedback. I think I illusion-of-transparency’d that people would feel fine about arriving in the 6:15-6:30 window. In my head the group discussions start at about 6:30. I’ll make a note to update the description hopefully for next time.