The People Who Pray At Prompts are suddenly very worried about cults.
E: haha spoke too soon
from the replies:
Do you really think “cult” is a useful category/descriptor here?
My view: things identified as “cults” have a bunch of good traits. EA should, where possible, adopt the good traits and reject the bad ones, and ignore whether they’re associated with the label “cult” or not.
Wonder what went wrong there, did they just see the word EA and Cult and went 'people are calling Rationalism a cult again, time to deploy the Rationalist answer. A bot? Something else? (More edit, ah prob somethign else as this is prob a reaction to the whole line of tweets and not that specific tweet, a line of tweets which are doing the geek social fallacies there is a little bit more to being a cult than just ostracizing people)
I’ve been appreciating the term “high-control group” as an alternative, with reference to the BITE [1] model of thought control. People trapped in the group housing situation easily check all of those boxes.
[1] https://freedomofmind.com/cult-mind-control/bite-model-pdf-download/ (note: Steven Hassan has done good work, but can be a little too profit-seeking himself imho)
I’ve thought about this angle a lot too. As an apostate Christian and practicing Pastafarian, I keenly feel the difference between high-control and low-control religious groups, and the control bothers me much more than the religiosity. BITE is still my gold standard to this day for understanding whether somebody is being coerced/controlled.
Also, if you think cultists get pissed at their beliefs being called a “cult”, watch how much more they flip out at being called a “high-control group”. It’s a very good disarming technique.
Do you really think “cult” is a useful category/descriptor here?
My view: things identified as “cults” have a bunch of good traits. EA should, where possible, adopt the good traits and reject the bad ones, and ignore whether they’re associated with the label “cult” or not.
“Look, all I’m saying is that Scientology managed to scale massively, both in members and funding! There’s obviously something there that we can learn from!”
it’s about the curse of ___ism
One objection is that “woke ideology hurts EA cause areas”.
There are many counters to that.
First off, are they actually “woke”? There is a ton of disagreement.
“kicking the racists out might mean less rich racists giving me money for Nonlinear”
now it got me wondering: how closely is chief shithead pete thiel involved in EA? that probably wouldn’t be much, unless indirectly via his fellowship and such?
Honestly bonkers to hear “woke” used unironically
also, isn’t that the “nonlinear” thing co-founder?
Which, to recap for everyone, involved underpaying and manipulating employees into working as full time general purpose servants. Which is pretty up there on the scale of cult-like activity out of everything EA has done. So it makes sense she would be trying to pull a switcheroo as to who is responsible for EA being culty…
