I'm an admin of LessWrong. Here are a few things about me.
- I generally feel more hopeful about a situation when I understand it better.
- I have signed no contracts nor made any agreements whose existence I cannot mention.
- I believe it is good take responsibility for accurately and honestly informing people of what you believe in all conversations; and also good to cultivate an active recklessness for the social consequences of doing so.
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I was chatting with someone, and they said that a particular group of people seemed increasingly like a cult. I thought that was an unhelpful framing, and here's the rough argument I wrote for why:
- There's lots of group dynamics that lead a group of people to go insane and do unethical things.
- The dynamics around Bankman-Fried involve a lot of naivety when interfacing with an sociopath who was scamming people for billions of dollars on a massive scale.
- The dynamics around Leverage Research involved lots of people with extremely little savings and income in a group house trying to do 'science' to claims of paranormal phenomena.
- The dynamics around Jonestown involves total isolation from family, public humiliation and beatings for dissent, and a leader with personal connection to the divine.
- These have all produced some amounts of insane and unethical behavior, to different extents, for quite different reasons.
- They all deserve to be opposed to some extent. And it is pro-social to share information about their insanity and bad behavior.
- Calling them 'cults' communicates that these are groups that have gone insane and done terrible things, but it also communicates that these groups are all the same, when in fact there's not always public beatings or paranormal phenomena or billions of dollars, and the dynamics are very different.
- Conflating them confuses outside people, they have a harder time understanding whether the group is actually insane and what the dynamics are.
I also was kind of surprised when it turned out 'gut feeling' actually meant a feeling in your belly-area.
Added: I wonder if the notion of 'having a hunch' comes from something that causes you to hunch over?
There's also a scene where one of the older traders makes a fermi estimate but doesn't round any numbers to their order of magnitude. That gave me the sense that they're earnestly trying to play autistic nerds but don't quite know autistic nerd culture well enough.
Please can you move the epistemic status and warning to the top? I was excited when I first skimmed this detailed comment, but then I was disappointed :/ (Edit: Thank you!)
1Absolutely, for years YouTube has offered me back to back clips of both, so I've watched parts of it many times (and the whole thing through once).
The Big Short
Rationality Tie-in:
This is a film about the 2008 Financial Market Crash, and tells the stories of...
...the three groups who noticed it would happen, believed it would happen, and successfully bet on their beliefs. It shows people going through the work of noticing an inconvenient hypothesis, being in an environment where people encouraged them to look away from it, empirically gathering data to test the hypothesis, and interacting with large institutions and bureaucracies that are corrupt and covering up this fact.
I think in most films the main characters of these films would be side-characters, contrarian nerds that the protagonist works with to get the job done, and then he takes the glory. In this story the contrarian nerds are the protagonists, and it's very unpleasant work, but ultimately they have accurate beliefs about the world in a highly adversarial environment.
The Big Short is the filmic equivalent of my spirit-animal.
Rationality writings it is connected to:
I thought this would be hard, but actually it ties into so much.
- Lonely Dissent: This film portrays the actual pain and suffering of believing what is true when so much of the world is pressuring you to not believe it, and the truth is itself extremely a lot worse than everyone else believes it to be. Seeing this hopefully helps break your trust in the world to be fine (cf. No Safe Defense, Not Even Science, and Beyond the Reach of God).
- Argument Screens Off Authority: Most of the powerful authorities say everything is fine. In this film some of the characters go and empirically test the hypothesis that they are wrong anyway. (Related: Hug the Query, The Proper Use of Humility).
- Faster Than Science: You need to rely on processes that are faster than waiting for the evidence to become incontrovertible such that everyone is forced to believe it. Yes, you can find out about catastrophes like the housing market crash or FTX by waiting for it all to collapse, but if you want to not face the terrible downfall then you have to notice before it has caused a catastrophe. (Related: Einstein's Arrogance, Einstein's Speed)
- Meditations On Moloch by Scott Alexander. These men find themselves in a war with Moloch. They win their fight, but the war is lost. (Related: Immoral Mazes by Zvi Mowshowitz.)
"The Big Short" by Adam McKay
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2"Asteroid City" by Wes Anderson
21"2001: A Space Odyssey" by Stanley Kubrick
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...when I saw the notification that you'd left an answer, I really thought you were going to say "Fight Club".