Our old workshop had a hyper/agitated/ungrounded energy running through it: “do X and you can be cool and rational like HPMOR!Harry”; “do X and you can maybe help with whether we’ll all die.”
This also seems like an important factor in making it easier for alumni to get pulled into cults — upvoting an urgency/desperation to Fix Something ⇒ finding more appeal in questionable exotic offers of power. (Not unique to CFAR, of course — that urgency/desperation is a deeper thread in rationalist culture + something that people might come in with from the start — but I would think CFAR / this energy acted as a vector for it.)
Agreed! Although Eliezer has bunches of [something in the vicinity of urgency/desperation] and is better than even [most people without that] at avoiding “finding more appeal in questionable exotic offers of power”. Which I’d like to understand.
This also seems like an important factor in making it easier for alumni to get pulled into cults — upvoting an urgency/desperation to Fix Something ⇒ finding more appeal in questionable exotic offers of power. (Not unique to CFAR, of course — that urgency/desperation is a deeper thread in rationalist culture + something that people might come in with from the start — but I would think CFAR / this energy acted as a vector for it.)
Agreed! Although Eliezer has bunches of [something in the vicinity of urgency/desperation] and is better than even [most people without that] at avoiding “finding more appeal in questionable exotic offers of power”. Which I’d like to understand.