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AnnaSalamon comments on You're Calling *Who* A Cult Leader? - Less Wrong
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I read recently an article on charitable giving which mentioned how people split up their money among many different charities to, as they put it, "maximize the effect", even though someone with this goal should donate everything to the single highest-utility charity. And this seems a bit like the example you cited where, if blue cards came up randomly 75% of the time and red cards came up 25% of the time, people would bet on blue 75% of the time even though the optimal strategy is blue 100%. All this seems to come from concepts like "Don't put all your eggs in one basket", which is a good general rule for things like investing but can easily break down.
I find myself having to fight this rule for a lot of things, and one of them is beliefs. If all of my opinions are Eliezer-ish, I feel like I'm "putting all my eggs in one basket", and I need to "diversify".You use book recommendations as a reductio, but I remember reading about half the books on your recommended reading list, thinking "Does reading everything off of one guy's reading list make me a follower?" and then thinking "Eh, as soon as he stops recommending such good books, I'll stop reading them."
The other thing is the Outside View summed up by the proverb "If two people think alike, one of them isn't thinking." In the majority of cases I observe where a person conforms to all of the beliefs held by a charismatic leader of a cohesive in-group, and keeps praising that leader's incredible insight, that person is a sheeple and that leader has a cult (see: religion, Objectivism, various political movements). I respect the Outside View enough that I have trouble replacing it with the Inside View that although I agree with Eliezer about nearly everything and am willing to say arbitrarily good things about him, I'm certainly not a cultist because I'm coming to my opinions based on Independent Logic and Reason. I don't know any way of solving this problem except the hard way.
I tried to start a Hofstadter cult once. The first commandment was "Thou shalt follow the first commandment." The second commandment was "Thou shalt follow only those even-numbered commandments that do not exhort thee to follow themselves." I forget the other eight. Needless to say it didn't catch on.
Do you have a mechanistic unpacking (even a guess would be helpful) of what it is to be a "sheeple" or a "cult", and of what harms come from being a "sheeple"? Given Aumann, I'm more inclined to say that if two people have different beliefs, at least one of them isn't thinking.
That said, your point about respecting outside views is reasonable. Are you trying to avoid replacing the outside-presumed "badness" of cults/sheeple with understood mechanisms, so as to retain any usefulness that might be in the received heuristics and that you might not understand the mechanisms behind?
By sheeple and cult, I mean people whose good judgment is clouded by the mechanisms described in the Affective Death Spiral sequence.