Cult impressions of Less Wrong/Singularity Institute

John_Maxwell

If you type "less wrong c" or "singularity institute c" into Google, you'll find that people are searching for "less wrong cult" and "singularity institute cult" with some frequency. (EDIT: Please avoid testing this out, so Google doesn't autocomplete your search and reinforce their positions. This kind of problem can be hard to get rid of. Click these instead: less wrong cult, singularity institute cult.)

There doesn't seem to be anyone arguing seriously that Less Wrong is a cult, but we do give some newcomers that impression.

I have several questions related to this:

Did anyone reading this initially get the impression that Less Wrong was cultish when they first discovered it?
If so, can you suggest any easy steps we could take?
Is it possible that there are aspects of the atmosphere here that are driving away intelligent, rationally inclined people who might otherwise be interested in Less Wrong?
Do you know anyone who might fall into this category, i.e. someone who was exposed to Less Wrong but failed to become an enthusiast, potentially due to atmosphere issues?
Is it possible that our culture might be different if these folks were hanging around and contributing? Presumably they are disproportionately represented among certain personality types.

If you visit any Less Wrong page for the first time in a cookies-free browsing mode, you'll see this message for new users:

Less Wrong is a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality. Please visit our About page for more information.

Here are the worst violators I see on that about page:

Some people consider the Sequences the most important work they have ever read.

Generally, if your comment or post is on-topic, thoughtful, and shows that you're familiar with the Sequences, your comment or post will be upvoted.

Many of us believe in the importance of developing qualities described in Twelve Virtues of Rationality: [insert mystical sounding description of how to be rational here]

And on the sequences page:

If you don't read the sequences on Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions and Reductionism, little else on Less Wrong will make much sense.

This seems obviously false to me.

These may not seem like cultish statements to you, but keep in mind that you are one of the ones who decided to stick around. The typical mind fallacy may be at work. Clearly there is some population that thinks Less Wrong seems cultish, as evidenced by Google's autocomplete, and these look like good candidates for things that makes them think this.

We can fix this stuff easily, since they're both wiki pages, but I thought they were examples worth discussing.

In general, I think we could stand more community effort being put into improving our about page, which you can do now here. It's not that visible to veteran users, but it is very visible to newcomers. Note that it looks as though you'll have to click the little "Force reload from wiki" button on the about page itself for your changes to be published.

There doesn't seem to be anyone arguing seriously that Less Wrong is a cult, but we do give some newcomers that impression.

I have several questions related to this:

Did anyone reading this initially get the impression that Less Wrong was cultish when they first discovered it?
If so, can you suggest any easy steps we could take?
Is it possible that there are aspects of the atmosphere here that are driving away intelligent, rationally inclined people who might otherwise be interested in Less Wrong?
Do you know anyone who might fall into this category, i.e. someone who was exposed to Less Wrong but failed to become an enthusiast, potentially due to atmosphere issues?
Is it possible that our culture might be different if these folks were hanging around and contributing? Presumably they are disproportionately represented among certain personality types.

If you visit any Less Wrong page for the first time in a cookies-free browsing mode, you'll see this message for new users:

Less Wrong is a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality. Please visit our About page for more information.

Here are the worst violators I see on that about page:

Some people consider the Sequences the most important work they have ever read.

Generally, if your comment or post is on-topic, thoughtful, and shows that you're familiar with the Sequences, your comment or post will be upvoted.

Many of us believe in the importance of developing qualities described in Twelve Virtues of Rationality: [insert mystical sounding description of how to be rational here]

And on the sequences page:

If you don't read the sequences on Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions and Reductionism, little else on Less Wrong will make much sense.

This seems obviously false to me.

We can fix this stuff easily, since they're both wiki pages, but I thought they were examples worth discussing.

The c-word is too strong for what LW actually is. But "rational" is not a complete descriptor either.

It is neither rational nor irrational to embrace cryonics. It may be rational to conclude that someone who wants to live forever and believes body death is the end of his life will embrace cryonics and life extension technologies.

It is neither rational nor irrational to vaunt current human values over any other. It is most likely that current human values are a snapshot in the evolution of humans, and as such are an approximate optimum in a natural selection sense for an environment that existed 10,000 years ago. The idea that "we" lose if we change our values seems more rooted in who "we" decide "we" are. Presumably in the past a human was more likely to have a narrower definition of "we" to include only a few hundred or a few thousand culture-mates. As time has gone on, "we" has grown to cover nationalities, individual races, pan-national, pan-race, for most people. Most Americans don't identify American with a particular race or national background, and many of us don't even require being born within the US or of US parents to be part of "we." Why wouldn't we extend our concept of "we" to include mammals, or all life that evolved on earth, or even all intelligences that evolved or were created on earth? Why would we necessarily identify a non-earth intelligence as "they" and not "we" as in "we intelligences can stick together and do a better job exploting the inanimate universe."

Rationality is a tool, not an answer. Having certain value decisions vaunted over others restricts LessWrong to being a community that uses rationality rather than a community of rationalists or a community serving all who use rationality. It is what Buffett calls "an unforced error."

Let the downvotes begin! To be clear, I don't WANT to be downvoted, but my history on this site suggests to me that I might be.

Dunno bout you, but I value my values.

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Cult impressions of Less Wrong/Singularity Institute

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Cult impressions of Less Wrong/Singularity Institute

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