I wonder what is the cause and what is the effect? If Rationalism promises mind changing, I bet it attracts people obsessed with mind changing. Rationalism promises a chance to touch the eternal Truth, or at least to come closer to it, so naturally people who seeks such a truth will try to become rationalists.
This overall can easily lead to greater then average concentration of people susceptible to cults.
You see, I was engaged in lesswrong.com activites 10+ years ago, and I didn't become more "cultist". Probably even less. If I look at changes in me that happened due to me reading Yudkowski and talking with other people who read him, I'd say that these changes were coming in me in any case, the lesswrong stuff played its role and influenced the outcomes, but even before my lesswrong period I was:
1. Interested in arguments and how they work or do not work 2. All the time tried to dismantle laws, social norms, rules morale to find an answer "why do they exists and how they benefit the society", "how do they work?". Some of them I rejected as stupid and pointless. 3. I was interested in science overall and psychology in particular.
I learned a lot from that time of how arguments work and I was excited to see Yudkowski take on that. His approach doesn't work in reality, only with other rationalists, but I like it nevertheless.
OTOH, I need to say that Yudkowski by himself have a lot of traits of a leader of a cult. His texts are written like they are his own unique ideas. He refers sometimes to Socrates of some other person, but it doesn't help and his texts looks like he is a genius that invented a new philosophical system from ground up. I didn't know the history of philosophy enough to see how far from the truth the picture is. The bells begin to ring in my head when I get to the "Death Spirals" where Yudkowski talked about cults and why lesswrong is not a cult. It is highly suspicious as it is, but his arguments were not good enough to me, maybe because they were worse than usual or maybe because I was more critical than usual. "Death Spirals" failed to convince me that lesswrong is not a cult, on the contrary they made me to wonder "a cult or not a cult" all the time.
And this question led me to a search for information everywhere, not just lesswrong. And then I've found a new "sport": find Yudkoswki's ideas in writings of thinkers from XIX century or earlier. Had he conceived at least one truly original idea? This activity was much more fun for me than lesswrong and after that I had no chance whatsoever to become a part of a cult centered on Rationality.
The point I'm trying to make is Yudkowski's Rationality doesn't deliver its promises, people get not what was promised but what they had already. Rationality changes them somehow, but I believe that it is not the reason, just a trigger for changes that would come in any case.
> And this question led me to a search for information everywhere, not just lesswrong. And then I've found a new "sport": find Yudkoswki's ideas in writings of thinkers from XIX century or earlier. Had he conceived at least one truly original idea? This activity was much more fun for me than lesswrong and after that I had no chance whatsoever to become a part of a cult centered on Rationality.
Do you have any interesting references? :)
I don't remember Yudkowski good enough to point at the missing references. But I can point to my last find.
Didn't you hear about Charles Sanders Pearce[1]? He said basically that the truth is what people are ready to bet on. Not something hand-wavy like "scientific method" or "millions of flies" or anything else, it is what real people are ready to rely on. Yudkowski is in favor of betting, moreover it tends to measure "truthiness" by bets. He is much in favor of the scientific method, but if you look closely it is because you can bet on a scientific knowledge.
BTW, about his belief in a scientific method. All or almost all psychology Yudkowski refers to was debunked, and sometimes very hard. Standford prison experiment for example was staged, it was like a play in a theater with Zimbardo whispering from behind the curtains "more brutality please". It is a separate issue with Yudkowski, he can't distinguish good science from bad science even when bad science was debunked decades ago. He is (like his version of Harry Potter) believes that if he vowed his allegiance to Science and knows what integral is then he is a scientist. He talks a lot of training one's mind, but this training doesn't include reading basic textbooks for a branch of the science that he is interested in.
You see, "Zimbardo experiment" technically speaking is not an experiment. There are no two groups with varying stimuli to compare outcomes. If we tried to classify it, it can probably be classified as "observation", the lowest tier of research approaches (experiment is the highest one, though meta-research is probably even higher, but it is about reading works of others instead of asking questions to Reality directly). It doesn't allow us to reason about causes and effects. It is something that undergraduates in social sciences learn in their first year.