While normal from a normal perspective, this post is strange from a rationalist perspective, since the lesson you describe is X is bad, but the evidence given is that you had a good experience with X aside from mundane interpersonal drama that everyone experiences and that doesnt sound particularly exacerbated by X. Aside from that you say it contributed to psychosis years down the line, but its not very clear to me there is a strong causal relationship or any.
(of course, your friend’s bad experience with cults is a good reason to update against cults being safe to participate in)
I am not really a cult advocate. But it is okay (and certainly bayesian) to just have a good personal experience with something and conclude that can be safer or nicer than people generally think. Just because you’re crazy doesnt mean everything you did was bad.
Edit: This is still on my mind so I will write some more. I feel like the attitude in your post, especially your addendum, is that its fundamentally obviously wrong to feel like your experience was okay or an okay thing to do. And that the fact you feel/felt okay about it is strong evidence that you need to master rationality more, in order to be actually okay. And that once you do master rationality, you will no longer feel it was ok.
But “some bad things happened and also some good things, I guess it was sort of okay” is in fact a reasonable way to feel. It does sound like some bad things happened, some good things, and that it was just sort of okay (if not better). There is outside view evidence about cults being bad. Far be it from me to say that you should not avoid cults. We should certainly incorporate the outside view into our choices. But successfully squashing your inside view because it contradicts the outside view is not really an exercise in rationality, and is often the direct opposite. Also, it makes me sad.
While normal from a normal perspective, this post is strange from a rationalist perspective, since the lesson you describe is X is bad, but the evidence given is that you had a good experience with X aside from mundane interpersonal drama that everyone experiences and that doesnt sound particularly exacerbated by X. Aside from that you say it contributed to psychosis years down the line, but its not very clear to me there is a strong causal relationship or any.
(of course, your friend’s bad experience with cults is a good reason to update against cults being safe to participate in)
I am not really a cult advocate. But it is okay (and certainly bayesian) to just have a good personal experience with something and conclude that can be safer or nicer than people generally think. Just because you’re crazy doesnt mean everything you did was bad.
Edit: This is still on my mind so I will write some more. I feel like the attitude in your post, especially your addendum, is that its fundamentally obviously wrong to feel like your experience was okay or an okay thing to do. And that the fact you feel/felt okay about it is strong evidence that you need to master rationality more, in order to be actually okay. And that once you do master rationality, you will no longer feel it was ok.
But “some bad things happened and also some good things, I guess it was sort of okay” is in fact a reasonable way to feel. It does sound like some bad things happened, some good things, and that it was just sort of okay (if not better). There is outside view evidence about cults being bad. Far be it from me to say that you should not avoid cults. We should certainly incorporate the outside view into our choices. But successfully squashing your inside view because it contradicts the outside view is not really an exercise in rationality, and is often the direct opposite. Also, it makes me sad.