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IlyaShpitser comments on Open Thread, Jun. 15 - Jun. 21, 2015 - Less Wrong
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Arrogance is just poor instrumental rationality in interpersonal communication. "Guruhood" is something different, and more dangerous.
I don't know exactly what you mean with "Guruhood" in this context. If you look at a figure like Ayn Rand, someone who would have said what Scott wrote about EY would have been kicked out of Ayn Rand's inner circle. Ayn Rand kicked people out because they had the wrong taste of music.
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
It's not enough to not be Hitler, basically.
My model for a thought leader is someone like Richard Feynman. Feynman didn't write epistles or officiate weddings. This did not prevent him from being enormously influential in physics.
The fact of the matter is, EY wants to be a guru, and the community wants him to be a guru, too.
I don't think a guru being beyond criticism is something unique to a particular group like Ayn Rand's objectivists.
I don't think Ayn Rand was Hitler. She wasn't as bad as cult leaders like Jim Jones,
Do you think that everybody who tries to build a community is a guru?
My point was, it's not a steelman response to pick a deliberately weak foil (and Rand is a quite weak foil as far as movement leaders are concerned). It's not enough to be ?better? than Rand. There isn't even a total ordering on awfulness. That's what the Anna Karenina quote was about.
No?
But I am not talking about everybody, I am talking about EY. And the relevant feature of EY's is not that he tried (and succeeded) to build a community, it's that he writes epistles, officiates weddings, has something called the Sequences (with a capital S!), etc. etc. etc.
He is not trying to build a community of colleagues/equals, as far as I can tell. If he did, he would act a lot more like Feynman.
Do you use "movement leader" synonymous with "guru"? Feymann isn't a movement leader. Do you object to EY wanting to be a movement leader?
I don't think Ayn Rand is a deliberately weak foil. Jim Jones is a deliberately weak foil. I use Ayn Rand because it's the nearest "rational cult" I can think of.
If I would seek for "rational movement" I could also go for New Atheists. Richard Dawkins is a movement leader. On the other hand I wouldn't call him a guru. Would you?
Why are you comparing against a negative example, rather than an example to emulate?
I already described what sorts of features of EY's make him a "guru."
Because you criticise him for being a "guru" and not for not being "XY" (word that describe a positive thing).
That makes it important to understand what you mean with guru and whether you consider someone like Dawkins to be a guru and who you consider to be guru's that aren't "deliberately weak foil".