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timtyler comments on Cult impressions of Less Wrong/Singularity Institute - Less Wrong
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Eliezer addressed this in part with his "Death Spiral" essay, but there are some features to LW/SI that are strongly correlated with cultishness, other than the ones that Eliezer mentioned such as fanaticism and following the leader:
Sorry if this seems over-the-top. I support SI. These points have been mentioned, but has anyone suggested how to deal with them? Simply ignoring the problem does not seem to be the solution; nor does loudly denying the charges; nor changing one's approach just for appearances.
Perhaps consider adding the high fraction of revenue that ultimately goes to paying staff wages to the list.
Oh yes, and fact that the leader wants to SAVE THE WORLD.
About a third in 2009, the last year for which we have handy data.
Practically all of it goes to them or their "associates" - by my reckoning. In 2009 some was burned on travel expenses and accomodation, some was invested - and some was stolen.
Who was actually helped? Countless billions in the distant future - supposedly.
What else should it go to? (Under the assumption that SI's goals are positive.)
As Larks said above, they are doing thought work: they are not trying to ship vast quantities of food or medical supplies. The product of SI is the output from their researchers, the only way to get more output is to employ more people (modulo improving the output of the current researchers, but that is limited).
So, to recap, this is a proposed part of a list of ways in which the SIAI resembles a cult. It redistribtutes economic resources from the "rank and file" members up the internal heirarchy without much expenditure on outsiders - just like many cults do.
(Eh. Yes, I think I lost track of that a bit.)
Keeping that in mind: SI has a problem because acting to avoid appearing to exist to give money to the upper ranks means that they can't pay their researchers. There are three broad classes of solutions to this (that I can see):
All of those seem suboptimal.
Why was this downvoted instead of responded to? Downvoting people who are simply stating negative impressions of the group doesn't improve impressions of the group.
As I've discussed with several LWers in person, including some staff and visiting fellows, one of the things I disliked about LW/SIAI was that so much of the resources of the organization go to pay the staff. They seemingly wouldn't even consider proposals to spend a few hundred dollars on other things because they claimed it was "too expensive".
Most organizations spend most of their money on staff. What else could you do with it? Paying fellowships for "external staff" is a possibility. But in general, good people are exactly what you need.
Often goods or needy beneficiaries are also involved. Charity actions are sometimes classified into:
This can be used as a heuristic for identifying good charities.
Not enough in category 1 and too much in categories 2 and 3 is often a bad sign.
But they're not buying malaria nets, they're doing thought-work. Do you expect to see an invoice for TDT?
Quite appart from the standard complaint about how awful a metric that is.
And yet there are plenty of things that don't cost much money that they could be doing right now, that I have previously mentioned to SIAI staff and will not repeat (edit: in detail) because it might interfere with my own similar efforts in the near future.
Basically I'm referring to public outreach, bringing in more members of the academic community, making people aware that LW even exists (I wasn't except when I randomly ran into a few LWers in person), etc.
What's the reason for downvoting this? Please comment.