Am I/Was I a Cultist?
I have been accused repeatedly of being a cultist whenever I wage the rationalist crusade online, and naturally I refute such allegations. However, I cannot deny that I take whatever arguments Yudkowsky (makes whose reasonability I can not ascertain for myself as by default true; an example is the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics whose Science is far above my head, but I nonetheless took it as truth—the probabilistic variety and not the absolute kind as such honour I confer only to Mathematics—and was later enlightened that MWI is not as definitive as Yudkowsky makes it out to be, and is far from a consensus in the Scientific community). I was surprised at my blunder considering that Yudkowsky is far from an authority figure on Physics, and even if he was I was not unaware of Huxley’s maxim:
The improver of natural knowledge cannot accept authority as such; for them scepticism is the highest of virtues—blind faith the one unpardonable sin.
This was the first warning flag. FUrthermore, around the time after I was introduced to RAZ (and the lesswrong website) I started following RAZ with more fervour than I ever did the Bible; I went as far as to—on multiple occasions—proclaim:
Rationality: From AI to Zombies is my Quran, and Eliezer Yudkowsky my Muhammed.
Someone who was on the traditional rationality side of the debate repeatedly described me as “lapping up Yudkowsky’s words like a cultist on koolaid.” I was warned by a genuinely good meaning friend that I should never let a single book influence my entire life so much, and I must admit; I never was sceptical towards Yudkowsky’s words.
Perhaps the biggest alarm bell, was when I completely lost my shit and told the traditional rationalist that I would put him on permanent ignore if he “ever insults the Lesswrong community again. I am in no way affiliated with Eliezer Yudkowsky or the Lesswrong community and would not tolerate insults towards them”. That statement was very significant because of its implications:
1. I was willing to tolerate insults towards myself, but not towards Yudkowsky or Lesswrong.
2. I was defensive about Yudkowsky in a way I’d only ever been about Christianity.
3. I elevated Yudkowsky far above my self and put him on a pedestal; when I was a Christian, I believed that I was the best thing since John the Baptist, and would only ever accord such respect to Christ himself.
That I—as narcissistic as I am—considered the public image of someone I’ve never interacted with to be of greater importance than my own (I wouldn’t die to save my country) should have well and truly shocked me.
I did realise I was according too much respect to Yudkowsky, and have dared to disagree with him (my “Rationality as a Value Decider” for example) since. Yet, I never believed Yudkowsky was infallible in the first place, so it may not be much of an improvement. I thought it possessed a certain dramatic irony, that a follower of the lesswrong blog like myself may have become a cultist. Even in my delusions of grandeur, I accord Eliezer Yudkowsky the utmost respect; such that I often mutter in my head —or proclaim out loud for that matter:
Read Yudkowsky, read Yudkowsky, read Yudkowsky—he’s the greatest of us all.
As if the irony were not enough, I decided to write this thread after reading “Guardians of Ayn Rand” (and the linked article) and could not help but see the similarities between the two scenarios.
Allow me to gently point out that you have written several articles here, and as of now, most of them received 0 karma points (and one of them received 1 karma point). Considering that downvotes are currently disabled, this is practically as bad as possible. Unlike some other places on internet, on LessWrong you won’t get banned or have your content censored by moderators merely because someone disagrees with you. But with the downvotes enabled, I believe your articles would be downvoted.
This is not a big problem per se; I am just trying to point out here that your current style… uhm… seems incompatible with LW in some aspects. Please don’t take this the wrong way; I think you are a nice and smart person; however, there is something about LW philosophy that you don’t get, and I am not sure whether you are even aware of this fact. I might explain in more detail later, but the point I want to make is that...
When you somewhere online associate yourself with LW or Yudkowsky, to a reader unfamiliar with LW you are providing a very misleading picture of what LW is about; and I would say it is quite damaging picture. More bluntly, you writing somewhere about LW is a negative advertising. I would appreciate if you could stop doing this until… I guess, until some of your posts on LW gets at least 10 karma points, which would suggest that you finally understood what this website is about. Also, I don’t think that reposting your older articles here is the way to achieve that; if the former articles didn’t get the community approval, “more of the same” is not a reasonable strategy.
Now about what you wrote here… I think that your feelings about LW at the moment are a bit unhealthy, and you already noticed that yourself—the parallel with “Guardians of Ayn Rand”. I can understand how that can happen, but this is not what we are trying to cultivate here; it’s actually the other way round, we consider this to be a failure, and a dangerous one because it seems to be a natural human way to react to things that seem awesome at the moment. This website is about overcoming our natural biases.
Hey, I’m also pretty impressed with LW / RAZ / Yudkowsky, and a few times I shared an article or two on my Facebook page, etc. But my goal was simply to show the articles to potential readers who were unknowingly looking for the same thing, just like I was when I found this website. Turned out, no one in my social circle was actually interested. And that’s okay. Actually, no, that’s not okay, but… it’s not something I could improve by proclaiming my devotion or whatever. That would look silly, and probably further repel the potentially right kind of people, and perhaps attract the wrong kind of people.
Rationality is practiced by thinking and acting rationally. Or, in the LW lingo, by “winning”. Not by public displays (well, unless doing that would be the optimal way to achieve our goals, but is it? looking at the outcomes, I don’t think so), nor by participating in the special olympics of the online debates. (Speaking about myself, my greatest benefit from reading LW was that I started participating less in the online debates, because I understood better the futility and the opportunity costs of doing so. Actually, Facebook reminds me that it is an anniversary of me posting “the victories of rationality are not the online battles that you won, but the online battles that you avoided”. I still think so.)
Just calm down. Yudkowsky is awesome. Yeah. So are many other people. So can be you. Stop looking for a god outside you; try to become (the best possible approximation of) a god yourself. Or, in the LW lingo, “become stronger”. What can you do better today than you did yesterday? What kind of mistake or a personal flaw can you improve? How can you achieve your goals better? Go ahead and win, or at least learn while failing, and then try again smarter. To give you some inspiration: are you healthy? fit? rich? emotionally balanced and happy? satisfied with your sexual life? are you helping your neighbors? making this world a better place? Choose an area, do some short background research and start working on it. Then enjoy the outcomes! Much better than having frustrating debates, whether online or not. Quoting Twelve Virtues of Rationality:
I’d say it even more easily collapses into fruitless online debates about the Art, but the point is: unless you have a goal, rationality is not only useless, but actually impossible to practice. Returning to the original point, one of the signs of a cultist is that his goals only consist of bullshit and promoting the cult itself. Stop doing that, find a better goal, and practice rationality as a tool to achieve that goal.
I bless you in the name of Eliezer, go and sin no more! Also, read three non-Yudkowsky books recommended on LW as a penance. :D
Thank you! I wanted to write something similar, but couldn’t put it as gently as you did.
I think many LW ideas are fun to explore, but that doesn’t require believing them, anymore than studying hyperbolic geometry requires believing that the earth is a hyperbole. If you want to do interesting intellectual work (which is my main reason for being here), questions like “where does this idea lead to?” are more fruitful than “is this idea deeply true?”
I don’t think it’s reasonable to call yourself a LessWrong cultist if you don’t participate in LessWrong and your only contact with it is reading LessWrong writing and arguing for the truth of that writing outside of LessWrong.
If you are uncomfortable with LessWrong getting criticized, you will necessarily get very uncomfortable if you participate on LessWrong in a significant manner as LessWrong is constantly criticized on LessWrong.
To engage more directly with what you wrote, it’s typical that religious deconversion leaves the person with a God-sized hole in their belief system that they then try to fill with something God-sized. This dynamic made you fit the LW thought into that format. It takes time to learn to think differently.
This is the non-central fallacy at its best.
Not as a defence, but seriously: who cares if you define yourself as a cultist or not? The important thing about a belief is the usual: how much reality does this belief allows you to grasp and manipulate?
If he finds he doesn’t want to be some things, and cultists are those things and also others, then it’s fine epistemology to also try not to be those other things in case they’re correlated.
Well, they should be correlated in such a way that only excluding them allows to exclude the others, and I deem that situation improbable.
It may be worth observing that that last proclamation probably sounds more cultish than it is, since I take it it’s a deliberate echo of Laplace’s words about Euler and it’s pretty clear that Laplace regarded Euler as an exceptional mathematician rather than a prophet or demigod.
I think this post would be more interesting if it clarified how the author’s attitude has changed since the kinda-cult-follower-like things he describes. The question “was I a cultist?” is largely a question of definitions; the question “am I a cultist?” may be (or at least be a useful proxy for) something more important, namely “am I, now, behaving in ways that are liable to confuse me, lose me friends, screw up my life, etc.?”.
So this was serious? or a joke?
When I was in Berkeley I did meet some people who seemed to assume that if Yudkowsky said it, it must be true, even apart from arguments, and who would respond a bit angrily to the suggestion that he might have been mistaken about something.
People like that exist. They just don’t exist officially.
It was serious. The post is factual.
This is an old article I created on Reddit. I’ve decided to port all my Rationality reddit threads here. I’m also interested in the LW reply to this particular thread.