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curiousepic comments on Build Small Skills in the Right Order - Less Wrong
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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.
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.