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halcyon comments on Cult impressions of Less Wrong/Singularity Institute - Less Wrong Discussion
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AAAAARRRGH! I am sick to death of this damned topic. It has been done to death.
I have become fully convinced that even bringing it up is actively harmful. It reminds me of a discussion on IRC, about how painstakingly and meticulously Eliezer idiot-proofed the sequences, and it didn't work because people still manage to be idiots about it. It's because of the Death Spirals and the Cult Attractor sequence that people bring the stupid "LW is a cult hur hur" meme, which would be great dramatic irony if you were reading a fictional version of the history of Less Wrong, since it's exactly what Eliezer was trying to combat by writing it. Does anyone else see this? Is anyone else bothered by:
&
Really, am I the only one seeing the problem with this?
People thinking about this topic just seem to instantaneously fail basic sanity checks. I find it hard to believe that people even know what they're saying when they parrot out "LW looks kinda culty to me" or whatever. It's like people only want to convey pure connotation. Remember sneaking in connotations, and how you're not supposed to do that? How about, instead of saying "LW is a cult", "LW is bad for its members"? This is an actual message, one that speaks negatively of LW but contains more information than negative affective valence. Speaking of which, one of the primary indicators of culthood is being unresponsive or dismissal of criticism. People regularly accuse LW of this, which is outright batshit. XiXiDu regularly posts SIAI criticism, and it always gets upvoted, no matter how wrong. Not to mention all the other posts (more) disagreeing with claims in what are usually called the Sequences, all highly upvoted by Less Wrong members.
The more people at Less Wrong naively wax speculatively on how the community appears from the outside, throwing around vague negative-affective-valence words and phrases like "cult" and "telling people exactly how they should be", the worse this community will be perceived, and the worse this community will be. I reiterate: I am sick to death of people playing color politics on "whether LW is a cult" without doing any of making the discussion precise and explicit rather than vague and implicit, taking into account that dissent is not only tolerated but encouraged here, remembering that their brains instantly mark "cult" as being associated to wherever it's seen, and any of a million other factors. The "million other factors" is, I admit, a poor excuse, but I am out of breath and emotionally exhausted; forgive the laziness.
Everything that should have needed to be said about this has been said in the Cult Attractor sequence, and, from the Less Wrong wiki FAQ:
Talking about this all the time makes it worse, and worse every time someone talks about it.
What the bleeding fuck.
Actually, I believe the optimal utilitarian attitude would be to make fun of them. If you don't take them at all seriously, they will grow to doubt themselves. If you're persistently humorous enough, some of them, thinking themselves comedians, will take your side in poking fun at the rest. In time, LW will have assembled its own team of Witty Defenders responsible for keeping non-serious accusations at bay. This will ultimately lead to long pages of meaningless back and forth between underlings, allowing serious LWians to ignore these distracting subjects altogether. Also, the resulting dialogue will advertize the LW community, while understandably disgusting self-respecting thinkers of every description, thus getting them interested in evaluating the claims of LW on its own terms.
Personally, I think all social institutions are inevitably a bit cultish, (society = mob - negative connotations) and they all use similarly irrational mechanisms to shield themselves from criticism and maintain prestige. A case could be made that they have to, one reason being that most popular "criticism" is of the form "I've heard it said or implied that quality X is to be regarded as a Bad Thing, and property Y of your organization kind of resembles X under the influence of whatever it is that I'm smoking," or of equally abysmal quality. Heck, the United States government, the most powerful public institution in the world, is way more cultish than average. Frankly, more so than LW has ever been accused of being, to my knowledge. Less Wrong: Less cultish than America!