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Bongo comments on Designing Rationalist Projects - Less Wrong
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Comments (78)
I think we should be a little careful of using the word "cult" as a mental stop sign, since that does seem to be what's happening here. We need to be a bit more careful about labeling something with all the bad connotations of a cult just because it has some of the properties of a cult -- especially if it only seems to have the good properties. But... that doesn't mean that this good cult property won't lead to the bad cult property or properties that we don't want. You should just be more explicit as to what and how, because I'm wavering back and forth on this article being a really, really good idea (the benefits of this plan are obvious!), and a really, really scary and bad idea (if I do it, it'll make me become part of a groupthinky monster!).
The problem I have is that both sides in my own head seem to be influenced by their own clear cognitive biases -- we have the cult attractor on one hand and the accidental negative connotations and stopsigny nature of the word "cult" on the other. So if you could semi-explicitly show why adopting the idea this article puts forth would lead to some specific serious negative consequences, that would clear up my own indecision and confusion.
I'm afraid my comments were mostly driven by an inarticulate fear of cults and of association with a group as cultish as Mormons. But one specific thing I already said I'm afraid of is that of LW becoming a "rational" community instead of a rational community, differing from other communities only by the flag it rallies around.
You know what... I was missing the "look for a third option" bit. There are more options than the two obvious ones -- doing this, and not doing this.
I've been having trouble making myself do the rationalisty projects that I came up with for myself, and this article suggested a way to use group pressures to make me do these things. Since I really wanted a way to make myself do these projects, the article seemed like a really, really good idea. But instead of making the whole community do this, I can actually just ask some fellow rationalists at my meetup to do this, just to me. That way I can use group pressures to help impose my own rationally determined second order desires on myself. The only thing I think I lose this way is the motivation via a sense of community, where everyone else is doing it too...
Of course, this still doesn't resolve the problem of whether or not the community at large should adopt the ideas put forth in this article. I still can't seem to think rationally about it. But at least this is a way for me to get what I want without having to worry about the negative side effects of the whole community adopting this policy.
If you took a typical community and replaced its flag with one that said "be rational", would you expect the effect to be positive, negative, and neutral?
I don't really know, but I'll note that Scientologists are known to laud "sanity", and Objectivists were all about "reason".
Rationality flags don't seem to help that much.
No, I wouldn't.