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Viliam comments on Open Thread Feb 29 - March 6, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (285)
I don't want LW to be a recruitment place for a political cult.
If the political cult is unable to find a better recruitment place, well, sucks to be them.
What do you mean by "cult"? Many people would consider the founding purpose of LW to be a recruitment place for a cult. Or do you mean you don't want anything that might convert people to a political position different from yours?
We are not a phyg! We are not a phyg! We are not a phyg!
Because nothing says "we are not a phyg!" quite like having to rot13 the Unholy Word.
Perhaps that's one reason why (to a very good approximation) no one actually does that any more.
Banish the Heretics!
You're unable to see the difference between "banish heretics" and "banish cult recruiters"? Or, more to the point, between "banish heretics" and "forbid cult recruitment"?
(I am not sure how good a metaphor either of these is for neoreactionaries on Less Wrong, but the two are quite different things and it's in no way ambiguous which Viliam is arguing for.)
First, calling them a cult when they exhibited none of the means of indoctrination and control associated with cults seems inaccurate and a boo light.
Those who successfully banned discussion of NR ideas from LW seem more accurately called cult members, using the usual cult tactic of driving out ideas that challenged their cherished beliefs, thereby refusing to engage with critiques of their ideas.
On the flip side, the supposed NR "cult" was doing the rather uncultish thing of choosing to stay in the midst of ideas predominantly hostile to their own, until forced to take their discussion elsewhere.
As for "recruitment", what do you mean? How is that different from wanting to discuss and share ideas that they found valuable?
To me, it sounds like Viliam disliked the ideas, disliked that others exposed to them found them attractive, and approved of having what power could be mustered to prevent those ideas from spreading at LW.
It's two ways to spin what he was proposing - shutting down ideas he disapproved of. A common sarcastic definitions of a cult is "religion I disapprove of".
I agree. "Cult" is not a great description.
No one has successfully (or for that matter unsuccessfully) banned discussion of NR ideas on Less Wrong. Eugine has been banned again and again because he misbehaves again and again. advancedatheist was banned for allegedly suggesting that women should be forced to have sex with men they don't want to have sex with[1]. I can't offhand think of anyone else who has been banned lately, nor do I recall ever hearing any moderator say anything at all like "no discussion of NRx on LW".
[1] It's less than clear that that was his actual intent, but that's the reason that was given. The fact that he had a narrow range of topics that he kept going on and on and on about (and kept being downvoted heavily for it, so it's not like these were topics LW was crying out for opportunities to talk about more) presumably didn't help.
There is, and has been for some time, more discussion of NRx ideas on LW than anywhere else I know of that isn't explicitly a right-wing site.
It doesn't look to me as if NRx advocates on LW are actually getting much traction. So maybe "disliked the idea that others exposed to them might find them attractive" would be better. But actually I think what Viliam wants to avoid is having LW used for that purpose, whether or not the "cult recruiters" have any success -- the point being that being proselytized at is annoying, regardless of whether the proselytism is ever successful.
Yeah, that's a common complaint. But it doesn't actually match how most people use the word "cult". Very few people would call Christianity or Islam a cult, for instance, even among those who strongly disapprove of Christianity or Islam. (I don't mean that that never happens. But it very seldom does.)
So, is Viliam using "cult" to mean "movement I disapprove of" here? I don't think so. I think he's using it to mean something more like "very small movement with extreme views that most here find unpleasant and/or highly implausible". If you replace "movement" with "religion" and delete "here", that's a pretty good approximation to how "cult" is actually used.
Cryonics? EA? Occasional animal welfare?
There is a traditional definition out of The Devil's Dictionary:
Religion -- a large successful cult
Cult -- a small unsuccessful religion
:-)
I think it was just a pretty clear fnord.
I see little proselytizing for cryonics here; back in the OB days there was more of it, much of it coming from Eliezer, and yes I did find it a little annoying. (Only a little, because there wasn't very much even then.) I'm a fan of EA myself, so am not in the right target audience to be annoyed by it. My impression is that most LWers are too. There's maybe one bit of animal welfare advocacy a year.
None of this much resembles the situation with NRx, where it seems like any time anyone says anything about race or gender you can rely on someone coming along to point out the inferiority of black people and women. I expect it isn't actually that bad, of course; these things usually feel worse than they are. But the proselytism to pre-existing support ratio is, I'm pretty certain, much higher for NRx than for those other things.
Yes, I already acknowledged that it's a common complaint that people use the word "cult" that way. I am suggesting that that isn't actually how people use it. (You are well aware that TDD is a big mass of snark and doesn't in any useful sense purport to give actual definitions, I assume.)
Not a fnord but an overt criticism. (Possibly an unfair criticism, but that's not the same thing as a fnord.)
First, I don't think that's true. Second, you're conflating NRx and HBD/race-realism/etc. and these are quite different things. And I haven't seen anyone pointing out the general inferiority of women in a long while. Inferiority in specific areas (like upper body strength), certainly, but I don't see why this is a problem.
No, I'm observing that they seem to overlap a lot.
No, it's usually just a claim that women are less intelligent, or (in the more nuanced cases) not so good at the kinds of thinking required for, say, science or mathematics.
No, I think that's usually the point of the snarky definition of a cult as a "religion I disapprove of", i.e. Christianity and Islam have the same characteristics as organizations called cults, but are not called cults because they're popular.
Note that "unpopular movement" and "movement I disapprove of" are very (and relevantly) different things.
So let's take the Cult of Cryonics. What do you think "banish cult recruiters" might look like? I would bet that it would look like prohibiting discussions of cryonics and be indistinguishable from "banish the heretics" in practice.
And of course NRx isn't a cult, Yvain's offhand comment notwithstanding.