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For those wondering: The Scientology staring routines summarised, from David Touretzky's site. Anyone who's read the first section above really needs to closely read this page. (The whole section is quality, and includes demo videos by ex-Scientologists.)
Do it too much and you end up with the famous Scientology Stare, the thousand-yard "fixed, dedicated glare" that anyone who's dealt much with Scientologists will be familiar with. (This guy, from this demo, was doing his stare up to 12 inches from other people's faces.)
Scientology is based on a bunch of low-level hacks on human perceptual routines and cognitive biases. (The staring one works on others by intimidation, as you look confident in an odd therefore unpredictable manner; the routine itself trains you to uncritically accept what's in the later, sillier material.) Hubbard did rather well for someone with no theory and only an aim (money and fame) in mind. I would, however, caution that there are few arts of mind-hacking that are darker.
I strongly advise any LessWrong reader to stay the hell away from this stuff unless they have a fascination with dissecting the mechanisms of how people abuse other people [1]. Luke, you're recommending actually dangerous activities here.
[1] Which is, of course, interesting and important, particularly for mind-hackers. Approach it like you would analysing sewage.
No, I'm not recommending that Less Wrongers stare people down with an odd kind of staring dominance. I only recommended that people develop the skill of holding eye contact. As with all skills, this skill can be used for good or evil.
These are exercises that I happened to learn in a Scientology class. They are not magic rituals that will turn people into Scientologists.
But they were finely tuned over thirty years to do precisely that second thing. The TRs are the number one way Scientology gets its hooks into people's brains and keeps them there! That's why they always try to sell people a Communications Course!
You are not explicitly recommending LW readers go skinny-dipping in a sewer - but you are functionally recommending it by talking about what a marvellously successful experience it was for you. Personal recommendation (including implicit personal recommendation) is the thing that most effectively convinces people to try something.
You went dancing in live fire and dodged a bullet, and that's excellent. Others may not be so lucky, particularly including those who are sure they could never be fooled (since such certainly has no observed correlation with a detailed working awareness of human cognitive biases).
If you can write an article that makes your point (which is a great one) without the first third of it being a story of your great personal successes with Scientology, I would urge you to do so.
Good point ... now that I think about it, I should probably stop speaking so proudly of how I tried taking up smoking to see if it could hook me and yet it didn't ...
(splutter) That's probably more hazardous than Scientology, yes.
An important thing for the strong to realise when talking about hazards is that other people may not be as strong.
Trying cigarettes is more dangerous than trying Scientology classes?
Surely more people die from it.
I don't think people become addicted by TRYING a cigarette. It takes several if not dozens or more. The physical dependence is acquired and comes by degrees.
People don't typically get trapped in Scientology by trying it out either.
But if you try a cigarette there's some risk you'll want to smoke another and then another.
I'm confident smoking is a bigger danger to me than Scientology.
Agreed. I just sounded like this discussion was trending into hyperbole about the dangers of smoking.
More reliably addictive, I expect. I must admit I don't know of any comparative studies.
Mind you, Scientologists notoriously smoke like chimneys. Because not smoking enough will cause lung cancer. Hey, you could always bum a smoke from Ron.
For a proper comparison, you wouldn't just consider addictiveness, but also the harm resulting from becoming addicted. It's not obvious to me which does more expected lifetime damage to you.
Cigarettes (chain smoker): Spend a lot of your money, become uglier and smellier, get excluded from lots of places, lose health while alive and die earlier, lose some connection to family and friends
Scientology: Spend a lot of your money (probably more than a chain smoker on cigarettes), eviscerate your thinking ability, lose most connection to family and friends outside of Scientology.
Is the health hit worse than the mind hit? I really don't know.
With Scientology, there's a bit more of a lottery effect: if you lose, you can lose big. Cigarettes are more gradually hazardous (with a bit of a lottery effect).
If you had to choose to be one or the other which would it be?
You really think he dodged a bullet? I assume lots of people are in no danger of being brainwashed by Scientology and lukeprog is probably one of them.
lukeprog,
Did you judge you were in danger of being brainwashed into Scientology at any point during this class? Or seriously in danger of being otherwise mind damaged?
I didn't know when I wrote that that Luke had interviewed Russell Miller and had read extensively on Scientology. So I think he would likely have more immunity than most :-) I think his dangerous error is in casually assuming that others are as immune as he is. Perhaps they are, but I wouldn't risk betting that way myself.
I would assume a lot of LWers are pretty immune.
I think one is not in much danger of being brainwashed by another if one has a broader perspective on life than the would be manipulator.
I think most people who try heroin or Scientology suffer no lasting ill effects. If it worked on most people Scientology would be a lot more virulent than it is.
I'm not sure about this. The steps of getting someone to take a look at what one is doing is difficult when it has weirdness aspects. Note that even altruistic causes that take minimal effort have a lot of trouble recruiting people. People are disinclined to to search out for new ideas in general. This hurts both the good and the bad memes. Even if a set of memes is very strong, getting people to try it is tough.
Do you think most people subjected to the mind control techniques of Scientology are successfully brainwashed into Scientology or not?
I don't know the data but bet it's a smallish fraction. I believe less than 10% of the people who are subjected to the mind controlling properties of heroin become addicted.
lukeprog has apparently looked into Scientology more than I have, is conceded to be aware of the dangers, and yet there is not even a hint in his piece that he thought the young girl he was partnered with was in danger. Surely people would have reacted differently to this article if he cheerfully recounted shooting heroin with a twelve year old. So clearly he was very confident that what was going on in the room was a lot less dangerous than shooting heroin. But how could that be if Scientology is more persuasive than heroin?
Retention rates for cults and cult-like groups tend to be low. I seem to recall numbers in the 2-4% range for most; this paper corroborates that, giving numbers from 0.5% to 5% for the Unification Church ("Moonies") depending on what your threshold for membership is.
Accurate data for Scientology is difficult to come by, given its infamous propensity for spin, but what I have been able to find seems to give similar numbers. This claims a little over 2% retention based on demographic calculations, but may be biased toward underreporting.
If most people succumbed when exposed to such techniques we'd see a lot more explosive growth.
This caused me to modify my priors:
I expected those at risk to be more easily identifiable. If they are not identifiable than the risk of conversion of most people is much higher than I thought.
On the other hand
Supports the view that the supposed danger of cults is overblown.
And..
...does seem to provide some criteria by which you could assess risk to yourself or another individual.
Both are true. I'm as unlikely to recommend Scientology to people as I am to recommend them heroin, though. (But, kids - fifty million dead junkies aren't wrong. Opiates are great! I'm a big fan of codeine when my back's playing up, and I have no doubt heroin would be even nicer.)
Both what are true?
Both sentences I quoted.
I agree with this. When I was reading the comparison with Islam upthread, I imagined how bad it would be if Scientology took over a government. On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be any current risk of that happening, and I wonder why.
Somehow, I think that this isn't the best question to ask, considering that Luke can't root his own brain to find out. Introspection is a notoriously bad tool for discovering subconscious motivations.
Oh, you mean I should make it clear that Scientology is dangerous and people shouldn't take Scientology classes? I figured that would be obvious, but okay: I added it to the post.
I think your disclaimer looks too much like an implicit challenge: "I dabbled with Scientology classes but didn't get hooked because I'm that rational/self-disciplined/awesome; but you shouldn't try it because you're probably not as awesome, and you might get reeled in."
The real history of the disclaimer, though, is more like, "I dabbled and didn't get hooked because I'm awesome, and I didn't warn you about it at first because I think you're awesome, but David Gerard thinks otherwise and he twisted my arm."
For my part, I appreciated having my awesomeness recognized, however briefly. It's not every day that other people notice that about me. :)
I am in fact just a big meanie about this stuff. "Dad just won't let me get into the really good mind controlling, he's so oppressive. Where are my Sea Org teenage minions? This is sooo bogus."
If in 25 years any of your kids run an international cult I'm blaming you.
The daughter will be the next Dark Lord. The girlfriend will be running the cult.
You're not my real dad!
I work sixteen hours a day keeping the Dutch from invading and this is the thanks I get? That's IT. My ocean, my rules. You are GROUNDED, young colonies!
You are awesome.
I'm not convinced "p.s.: don't do this thing that worked out really well for me and I shall now describe in thrilled detail" entirely makes it no longer functionally a personal recommendation, but it's possibly better than nothing. Thank you.
Yes but LessWrong is a lot like this - witness all the discussions in thrilled detail of drugs that put your brain into a more effective/enjoyable state. It's assumed that the readership is intelligent/responsible enough to handle this sort of thing.
The desire to succeed in unorthodox ways ("cheat" at life) is strong in many members of this community - Luke's Scientology story fits that pattern very well. It certainly makes me want to try a com course and I've read about Scientology in endless detail - including some of your work.
The outside culture has enough warnings about dangers of using drugs that we don't have to repeat them here. Everybody knows that playing with them can fry your brain, and you should take proper precautions. I don't think the outside culture has enough warnings about psychological manipulation techniques in general, nor this particular sect. People routinely think they'll be less influenced than they are.
And there's also the thing that while the people who hang around at LW probably have more ammo than usual against the overt bullshit of cults, they also might have some traits that make them more susceptible to cult recruitment. Namely, sparse social networks, which makes you vulnerable to a bunch of techniques that create the feeling of belonging and acceptance of the new community, and tolerance of practices and ideas outside the social mainstream, which gets cult belief systems that don't immediately trigger bullshit warnings inside your head.
The Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan that did the subway sarin gas thing reportedly recruited lots of science and engineering students. An engineering mindset will also keep you working from the internalized bullshit against social proof, since science and engineering is a lot about about how weird stuff extrapolated beyond conventional norms works and gives results.
tl;dr: You're not as smart as you think, probably have a mild mood disorder from lack of satisfactory social interaction, and have no idea how you'll subconsciously react to direct cult brainwashing techniques. Don't mess with cults.
How about a word on the major religions? The most obvious difference between a cult and a religion is that the religion is many orders of magnitude more successful at recruitment - which is the very thing that we are being warned about with respect to cults.
Parasite species that have been around a long time have mostly evolved not to kill their host very fast. With new species, all bets are off.
Growth/attrition rates are actually the thing to look at here. Scientology is faster-growing than just about any other modern religion, though the attrition rate is also very high. In order to figure out virulency, figure out what population the S-curve of members of that religion will top out at. If growth is slowing, you're almost there. If growth is steady, you're about halfway there. If growth is exponential or approximately so, you're looking at a religion in its infancy.
This has of course been covered here before (with reference to this and this).
Umm. Not all of us. I may be vulnerable to cults for other reasons, namely my conformist personality, but not lack of people to talk to.
"You probably have a minor mood disorder from lack of satisfactory social interaction" seems like a rather harsh description of the members of this community. What data generated that thought?
I agree with the description. Why? Because the joy people describe at going to the meetups seems out of proportion to what goes on in the meetups - unless, as the old saying goes, hunger is the best spice.
I started with the assumption that most people posting here live alone or with a small immediate family and occasional interaction with acquaintances instead of as a part of a tightly knit tribe of some dozens of people who share their values and whom they have constant social interaction with. Then thought what the probable bias for site members to belong into a mainstream society tribe-equivalents like churches, sports fan groups, gangs or political organizations was.
The "mood disorder" thing is hyperbole for "your brain would like to be in a more tribe-like social environment than it is in now", not an attempt at a clinical diagnosis.
Oddly, a "sense of belonging" usually makes me feel alienated and uncomfortable. It's the rare exceptions like LessWrong, where it actually feels like I do fit, and am being challenged and growing and free to express myself, that avoid that.
This sounds very odd. In fact, it sounds oxymoronic. Can you explain?
In other words "don't try to argue with the devil^H^H Scientologist -- he has more experience at it than you".
He might not. But things will be in his favor if you go in thinking knowing physics and science will make you impervious to the dark arts, without knowing a lot about psychology, cult and influence techniques and the messier stuff inside your own head.
(I'm not sure if you want to say something extra here by quoting a thing that was described as the "second most dangerous dark side meme" in the linked comment.)
This is an important point. If you do mess with cults, start with the more innocuous ones before you face the heavy guns. Make sure you can resist the community in an average church before you test yourself against Scientology.
One of the impressive things about Sufism (at least as described by Idris Shah) is that they wouldn't take people as students who didn't already have social lives.
Arguably, Internet culture has a tremendous amount of information on the dangers of Scientology in particular. (And I'm one of the people who put it there personally.) But you are entirely correct: people are convinced they're much less manipulable than they are. I need to write something for LW on the subject (as I've been idly contemplating doing for about 6 months).
Do you know of any techniques to measure your own manipulability somewhat objectively?
I would think the easiest method, albeit not terribly objective, would simply be to get someone who is fairly good at manipulation and play out scenarios with them. I've done this a few times as the manipulator, and it's sort of scary how easily I can manipulate people in specific games, even when they know the rules and have witnessed some of my techniques.
If you do try it, I'll comment that time and social pressure help me a lot in making people more pliable, too. I do these as a group exercise, so there's a lot of peer pressure both to perform well, and not to use exactly the sort of "cheats" you should be using to resist manipulation. It's also helped that I've always known the group and thus known how to tweak myself to hit specific weaknesses.
If you find something more useful than this, I'd love to hear it. I've merely learned I'm fairly good at manipulating - I have no clue how good I am at resisting :)
I have occasionally seen quizzes that purport to tell you how biased you are in purportedly relevant ways to cult susceptibility. I can't say I found any of them revelatory, as, since you know what the test is testing, it's way too easy to answer with the right answer rather than the true readout, even when you want the latter. I suppose proper testing would have to be similar to psychological measures of cognitive biases.
Sewer-diving could be fun, and instructive! But a note or few about adequate preparation first strikes me as a really good idea. Particularly when the story turns out to be "and then I swallowed this sample of engineered resistant mycobacterium tuberculosis, and I felt great." Hubris is one of the dangers of a little knowledge.
Sewer-diving is, in fact, fun and safe for humans, and your warnings about the dangers are alarmist and excessive.
Scientology classes are also safe.
How did you come to the conclusion that this was a good comment to post?
How did you come to the conclusion that the parent of the comment containing this sentence was a good comment to post?
Are you attempting to direct me on an endlessly-recurring chain of justification? At some point, reflection must stop and action must be taken, or else you will use up all free energy and entropize just thinking of your next action. Correct reasoning teaches you this very quickly.
Sewer diving is in fact a favourite of urban explorers. And I must admit that trolling Scientology in my dissolute youth was lots of fun :-D
I wish you wouldn't take this tone when agreeing to people's helpful suggestions :-/
Which tone?
"Sure, I'll correct it, even though people are obviously aware of [caricature of your idiotic warning]."
That is, accepting a correction with passive-aggressive jab at the dummy who pointed it out. [Note: edited comment several times, a reply might begin before the latest.]
I think you "hear" the comment in this tone because that's how you would mean it if you wrote it. But to me, the tone seems reasonable, because when I place myself in lukeprog's position I don't imagine myself feeling any kind of aggression.
I don't think I'm imagining the caricaturing, at least, and this is far from the first time I've seen lukeprog blame others anytime anyone mentions anything wrong with a post of his.
Also, this
was not the basis for the evaluation I made.
...as far as you are aware.
I detect that I might need to update. Links?
Hmmm. Well, not the tone I intended. It literally did not occur to me that people would consider taking a Scientology course as a result of my post, but then I updated as a result of David's comment, and that is why I added the disclaimer to the first paragraph. "Figured" in my comment is past tense on purpose.
Our brains can add in these tones when they feel certain ways without it being consciously available. Tough stuff to keep out of discourse, our language is geared toward opinionated conflict in any case.
That's a fair point; conversely, there are entire websites (or so I've heard) dedicated to obvious warnings, and there are already people making fun of how obvious his warning is. So I'm thinking his pre-emption was pretty close to spot on.
Do you think that "Don't take this Scientology course, which I just spent half the article praising with nary a bad word for Scientology?" falls into the class of obvious warnings? Also, lukeprog was caricaturing David's argument.
Wow, so if I say yes, then what? Will we go back and forth for a hundred pages in a good old fashioned internet flame war? No thanks, I have better uses of my time. ;)
We know that scientology is bad, no one here's in any doubt about their legitimacy or thinks they might be some cool people to hang out with; conversely that course is sounding pretty good, which is what he was praising. Complaining until he adds a warning on the end, saying we shouldn't take it is pretty silly considering he obviously intends us to take the course or something similar to it.
And so what? He's entitled to his opinion about scientology too, as well as their courses.
The question would be if knowledge of these techniques' purpose within Scientology is enough of a vaccine against harmful long-term effects. I can't see how it wouldn't be, if these techniques were further dissected, disclaimed, and tuned to general social skill enhancement.
However, I think that lukeprog should probably have spent more time explaining his intentions dealing with actual Scientologists in this manner, being the most mainstream example of extensive Dark Arts.
Knowledge of the individual exploits does help, though it's not infinitely generalisable. There are lots of people who go "hah, that's ridiculous" about many cults before falling for another one. Because these things basically work as security exploits of your basic human cognitive biases.
Possibly if you had a reasonably complete catalogue of cognitive biases not only present as a list in your head, but with personal experience of having been bitten by each and every one, that might help. Better would also be personal experience of defeating each and every one, but that might be asking a lot of most people. Me, I don't even have the list.
A nice defensive intro to the dark arts of Scientology, and a cracking good read, is Bare-Faced Messiah by Russell Miller, a biography of Hubbard. (Out of print, freed for the Net by the author - a mainstream journalist, not an ex-Scientologist.) I read it and thought, "Hah, this is easy, I could do that! If I had no ethics and literally couldn't tell true from false."
One problem with Scientology being the best-known cult is that they are actually the Godwin example of dangerous cults. I can't find the reference, but I have read of sociological studies that they are the most damaging cult, based on time to recovery of ex-members. They make other actually quite nasty cults look relatively benign by comparison. It's pretty much as if your only referent for "authoritarian" was "Hitler", so other obnoxious authoritarianism looks relatively benign by being not as bad as Hitler.
For those interested, I interviewed Russell Miller about Hubbard here. A nice intro to Scientology bullying tactics.
Heh, you were much less dodging a bullet than I thought you were :-)
(Ten years after I more or less gave up following the stuff, I still know way too much about it. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised it turns out to be of interest on a philosophy site interested in cognitive biases.)
No transcript?
Listeners paid to produce transcripts of many episodes, but not that one.
I didn't realize Scientology has the same structure as a Spanish prisoner scam.
A little research online will turn up extraordinarily serious accusations against the Church of Scientology, including the specific accusation that the course you took and appear to be advocating is the entry point to a series of courses that takes very dark turns later. While I do believe that the specific exercises you did in the amounts you did them were not harmful and were possibly beneficial, and that you were unaware of these accusations, I have to agree with Gerard's assessment that you were "dancing around in live fire and dodged a bullet". Now that you're aware of these accusations, you ought to edit your post to warn readers that dealing with Scientology is not to be taken lightly, or better, remove the reference entirely. (It seems like an unnecessary distraction from the main point of the post, which is quite good.)
Posted anonymously because the Church of Scientology has a history of harassing, framing and sometimes murdering its critics. Publishing negative information about Scientology under your real name is also not to be taken lightly, especially if you are or expect to become a visible public figure. I will PM you my account name so you'll know I'm not a new account.
Did you see my update to the first paragraph?
I wrote that comment before I saw it. However, that update ("But please, don't take Scientology classes. They are highly Dark Arts. You can learn things on your own without playing with cult fire") is inaccurate. It seems to be saying that Scientology's classes teach those who take them to be manipulative (that is, to use the dark arts), but that is not what the problem is. The real problem is the opposite: they manipulate those who take them. And it doesn't stop at "manipulate", it's an escalating spiral that in some cases goes all the way up to "abduct and traffick".
And, um, I can't help but notice a disturbing connection - the document Gerard linked to says trainers should look for peoples' buttons, focusing on sexual perversion for men, and you were assigned the exercise of staring at a 12-year old girl for 20 minutes. It's eminently plausible that the instructor meant for that to happen and to be creepy. What was she even doing there, how were the pairings assigned, and did the instructor have the option of arranging the pairings in a non-creepy way?
Every time I went in to take a class it was always hard to find people to pair with, because of the odd hours I went to take classes. I would often wait 20 minutes for there to be somebody to do an exercise with. I think they paired me with the girl because nobody else was available until 20 minutes later when the adult became available to do the exercise with me.
Also, kids take these classes, too. They're not adult-only classes. Her parents are Scientologists and they were training their kid in their religion.
I adjusted the wording of my update again to include 'manipulative.'
That's because Scientology has had the crap beaten out of it by the Internet and Scientology "orgs" are largely ghost towns at any hour of the day since the mid-1990s, not just when you went. Even in Los Angeles.
Uh, Luke. That would have been a Sea Org member's kid. They brought her in especially for you. You don't seem to want to accept the designed purpose the TRs were written for: to draw people further in.
I was at one point a 14 year old girl taking a Scientology Communications course, brought there by my father to train me in his religion. While I certainly can't speak for all of the children in all Scientology classes, most of the other children there that I hung out with were also brought there by their parents to be trained in Scientology.
It seems plausible to me that if there happened to be a 12 year old girl in lukeprog's class, they would have paired them together for that part of the class specifically because it would create an uncomfortable, "creepy" situation. Developing the ability to react unflinchingly to that sort of situation is pretty much the point of the exercise. (As an example, they paired me with a grandmotherly older woman for a different exercise: bullbaiting. She was certainly not the sort of person who I was comfortable trying to provoke a reaction from or had an easy time remaining stoic to.)
But it seems unlikely to me that the people at the Org I went to, at least, would have gone to the extent of enlisting their daughters in the class specifically to make one man feel uncomfortable, as you seem to be proposing.