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.

Long time lurker, I think LW is not capable enough as a social unit to handle it's topic and I currently view that participating in LW is not a good way to efficiently drive it's goals.

In order to reach a (hostile) audience one needs to speak the language. However ambient ways of carrying out discussion are often intermingling status / identity / politics with epistemology. In order to forward a position that biased / faith / economy based thinking are not epistemologically efficient tools one needs to make at least the initial steps in this twisted up "insane troll logic" . The end product is to reject the premise the whole argument stands on but it will never be produced if the thinking doesn't get started. In making it public and praising this kind of transitioning of modes of thinking, a lot of the machinery temporarily required to play the drama out gets reinforced into a kind of bedrock. It complicates matters people are simultaneously in need of completing a particular step while others need to dispel them. Thus there is a tendency to fixate on a "development step" relevant to the majority and becoming hostile to everything else.

I don't see the need to profess stances on things if the relevant anticipations work correctly. Coding the keys of insights on a single namespace and honing them to work against a static context makes applying and discussing them in other contexts needlessly complex. If someone knows a bias / heuristic / concept by some other name and that makes a LW participant not recognize or fail to apply things that they have learnt the password for, LW has managed to isolate insights from their usual and most needed application area.

Things that "hardcore" pursuits find valuable are passed "as is" or "as finalized by AwesomeDude42". This is faith based "cause they say so". Hooked by the "quality of the merchandise" this communal activity is more of a distribution system of those closed packages of tools rather than an epistemic engine in it's own right. I think that even school should be a place of learning rather than a place to receive data about what others have learned.

Because there is a caliber difference not all members can follow or participate in the production of the "good stuff" they wait to be distributed right out of the oven. Doing a passive "level up" handbook in the form of sequences still leaves a big "you must be this tall to participate in this facet of this community". There is no escaping the cognitive work of the individual but LW functions more as a price rather than the workbench.

The activity of LW is limited in a content-independent way by social structure in areas that it wishes to be more. This is not the optimal venue of thinking, but that shouldn't come as a big surprise.