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Constant comments on Build Small Skills in the Right Order - Less Wrong
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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.
The Mormons are a good comparison. They were dangerous lunatics in the mid-1800s - and Brigham Young was a murderous nutter on a par with David Miscavige. These days, they're slightly weirdy but very nice (if very, very conservative) people; good neighbours.
You must mean "kill off" metaphorically, since I don't recall any incidents in which Scientology has killed off Scientologitsts. In contrast I can recall many very recent incidents in which one old religion - Islam - has killed off adherents. But if "kill off" is a metaphor, then what is the literal danger from Scientology which is being referred to metaphorically as "kill off the host"?
Ruin their life or mess them up mentally.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Lisa_McPherson - and she was hardly the first.
I would caution against using "I don't recall" to mean "I haven't researched even slightly".
I used "I don't recall" to mean "I don't recall". Go ahead and bash me for failing to research the question but please don't put your words and ideas in my writing.
I think David's point is that when you say "I don't recall X", it matters very much whether you would recall an X to begin with, i.e., whether P("I recall X" | X has happened) is significantly larger than P("I don't recall X" | X has happened). So when you offer up "I don't recall X", people assume you're doing it because the former is larger than the latter.
But if that's not the case, then you are, in effect, using "I don't recall" to mean "I haven't researched", and this is why David was accusing you of blurring the distinction.
No, you're inventing my meaning on the basis of a convoluted reading, and you're neglecting the context. What I said was that I do not recall. And that is true. In context, the issue is whether Scientology kills off its host quickly. I pointed out that Islam, which kills many of its own adherents, is classified (by the preceding comment, implicitly) as not killing off its host quickly. Therefore for Scientology to be classified as killing off its host quickly it must kill more of its own adherents than Islam does. So that is the relevant question.
So: how does David's evidence address this question? Not very well. A woman died from negligence while in the care of co-religionists. This can barely be connected to the religion itself. When I said that Islam kills off many of its own adherents, I did not have in mind adherents dying from negligence while in the care of co-religionists. I had in mind jihad. But if we want to expand the definition of killing one's own host, let us do so: let us take into account the economic backwardness caused by Islam in the Middle East. That should greatly increase the death toll of Islam. Which does not, by assumption, kill of its host.
So, David's evidence is hardly pertinent to the question. If we expand the definition of killing of one's host to accommodate it, then we must do the same for Islam, which makes Islam look very bad indeed.
Now let's turn to my own evidence. I am an imperfect observer, who is not aware of everything that goes on in the world. But it doesn't matter whether I am perfect. What matters is whether I'm biased. David says that I did not specially investigate Scientology. No, I didn't. And also, I didn't specially investigate Islam. So as an instrument, I am balanced in that respect. And my readout says: I am aware of many dead from Islam, none dead from Scientology. David says I missed one. Oh? And so what? I missed many on the Muslim side too.
The probability of being Muslim is a lot higher (about 1000 times more?) than of being Scientologist, so I presume you're talking about how many incidents you'd expect to have heard about per capita.
I wish that you were either a more concise or less interesting writer, so that I wouldn't waste time reading a detailed argument about what's-been-said.
I agree that David's point about Lisa McPherson isn't counterevidence to the claim you made (or rather, were implying based on not recalling). I was replying only to your statement
which was ridiculing the very idea that someone would read your "I don't recall" to mean "I don't recall and that is informative in this case", when people have good reason to do so, as I explained.
If your objection to David's point was that the McPherson case is not evidence of Scientology "killing off its host", then you should have said so in your reply at that point (and I would have agreed) rather than merely flaunt your non-standard usage of "I don't recall" and insult the people who thought you were trying to say something relevant.
Check out Auditing Procedure R2-45. There are also a number of less formal murders attributed to them. Ask Google for "Scientology Murder".
Please do not use value-laden and unsupported terms such as "murder" here. Yes, there are some cases of controversial deaths involving Scienology, but none of these could be described as murder of either the formal or less-formal sort.
The existence of R2-45 is rather unsettling, but apparently this 'auditing procedure' has never been enacted.
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.