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gwern comments on Notes on Brainwashing & 'Cults' - Less Wrong
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Of course it makes sense. As I've already claimed, cults are not engaged in some sort of predatory 'brainwashing' where they exploit cognitive flaws to just moneypump people with their ultra-advanced psychological techniques: they offer value in return for value received, just like businesses need to offer value to their customers, and nonprofits need to offer some sort of value to their funders. And these cults have plenty of established competition, so it makes sense that they'd usually fail. Just like businesses and nonprofits have huge mortality rates.
I've given counter-examples and criticized your claims. Seems contradictory to me.
The question was, "What do you think makes joining a cult worse than joining a club, getting a job, and so on?" . How is competition from other cults impacting the decision to join a cult - any cult?
Well, I know of one cult that provides value in form of the nice fuzzy feeling of being able - through a very little effort - to see various things that, say, top physicists can not see. Except this feeling is attained entirely through self deception, unbeknown to the individuals, and arguing that it is providing value is akin to arguing that a scam which sells fake gold for the cheap is providing value.
(Then there's of course Janestown, and so on and so forth)
Exactly as I said, pressure from other cults: direct retaliation (like the legal system endorsing your kidnapping), opportunity costs, lack of subsidies, regulatory capture being used against you, the risk of joining a small new organization... Many of the reasons that apply to not joining a startup and instead working at Microsoft can be tweaked to apply to small cults vs big cults.
You know what's even more awesome than self-deception? Sliming people you don't like as cults, when your ideas about what a cult is aren't even right in the first place. Sweet delicious meta-contrarianism.
True, it's not as good a racket as Singer getting paid tons of money to testify about how awful cults are and how powerful their deceptions are - but it's a lot less work and more convenient.
I said, joining a cult. I didn't say, joining a small cult, I didn't say, joining a big cult, I said, joining a cult.
Well, a scam then, if you don't like me to call it a cult. It is my honest opinion that the value arises through the self deception, which goes against the intent of individual, and is of lesser value compared to what the individual is expecting to get.
I'm sorry, I didn't realize I was supposed to interpret that as meaninglessly general as possible, rather than, you know, be about the topic of my post or the topic of the previous comments.
Why do all organizations and religions in particular exist? That's a tough question which I'm afraid I have no quick answer to, but the right answer looks like 'all sorts of reasons'.