5 ms·
It grew out of many different threads: different websites, communities, etc all around the same time. I noticed it contemporaneously in the philosophy world whe
by meroes 1y ago
It grew out of many different threads: different websites, communities, etc all around the same time. I noticed it contemporaneously in the philosophy world where Nick Bostrom’s Simulation argument was boosted more than it deserved (like everyone was just accepting it at the lay-level). Looking back I see it also developed from less wrong and other sites, but I was wondering what was going on with simulations taking over philosophy talk. Now I see how it all coalesced.
All of it has the appearance of sounding so smart, and a few sites were genuine. But it got taken over.
- potatolicious 1y agoYeah, a lot of the comments here are really just addressing cults writ large and opposed to why this one was particularly successful. A significant part of this is the intersection of the cult with money and status - this stuff really took off once prominent SV personalities became associated with it, and got turbocharged when it started intersecting with the angel/incubator/VC scene, when there was implicit money involved. It's unusually successful because -- for a time at least -- there was status (and maybe money) in carrying water for it.
- jacquesm 1y agoPaypal will be traced as the root cause of many of our future troubles.
- varjag 1y agoWish I could upvote this twice. It's like intersectionality for evil.
- wredcoll 1y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barth%C3%A9lemy-Prosper_Enfantin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barth%C3%A9lemy-Prosper_Enfa... Sometimes history really does rhyme. > Enfantin and Amand Bazard were proclaimed Pères Suprêmes ("Supreme Fathers") – a union which was, however, only nominal, as a divergence was already manifest. Bazard, who concentrated on organizing the group, had devoted himself to political reform, while Enfantin, who favoured teaching and preaching, dedicated his time to social and moral change. The antagonism was widened by Enfantin's announcement of his theory of the relation of man and woman, which would substitute for the "tyranny of marriage" a system of "free love".[1]
- 6177c40f 1y agoTo be clear, this article isn't calling rationalism a cult, it's about cults that have some sort of association with rationalism (social connection and/or ideology derived from rationalist concepts), e.g. the Zizians.
- throwanem 1y agoThis article attempts to establish disjoint categories "good rationalist" and "cultist." Its authorship, and its appearance in the cope publication of the "please take us seriously" rationalist faction, speak volumes of how well it is likely to succeed in that project.
- ImaCake 1y agoNot sure why you got down voted for this. The opening paragraph of the article reads as suspicious to the observant outsider: >The rationalist community was drawn together by AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky’s blog post series The Sequences, a set of essays about how to think more rationally. Anyone who had just read a lot about Scientology would read that and have alarm bells ringing.
- meowface 1y agoAsterisk magazine is basically the unofficial magazine for the rationalist community and the author, Ozy Brennan, is a prominent rationalist blogger. Of course the piece is pro-rationalism. It's investigating why rationalism seems to spawn these small cultish offshoots, not trying to criticize rationalism.
- throwanem 1y ago"Unofficial?" Was that a recent change? But my point is that because the author neither can nor will criticize the fundamental axioms or desiderata of the movement, their analysis of how or why it spins off cults is necessarily footless. In practice the result amounts to a collection of excuses mostly from anonymees, whom we are assured have sufficient authority to reassure us this smoke arises from no fire. But of course it's only when Kirstie Alley does something like this we're meant to look askance.