Morpheus’s team in the Matrix could easily have been abusive and toxic, even though they were right about the whole world being fake. Correctness of world-model and interpersonal safety are unrelated axes.
Everyone I know who’s been in ~cults has found it to have significant upsides that the discourse made impossible to discuss in public. If you don’t personally know people who have been in ~cults you are probably underestimating the upside and complexity of the situations.
Some good things cannot be achieved without a high level of illiquid investment. High investment creates dynamics similar to high control. For certain purposes the difference between “the high cost of leaving is in the territory” and “someone has maliciously made leaving costly” is important, and for others its really not.
Vulnerability budgets- know yours and spend it wisely.
If a cult expert doesn’t recognize that academia and[1] Catholic monasteries and the army are obviously cults, using the same techniques with the same harms, they are not trustworthy. I have yet to encounter an expert who recognizes this; usually they explicitly exempt old institutions.
cult is an attractor state you have to actively fight to avoid
Partially because lots of people want to be in a cult and will actively push a leader into culthood against their will (or more likely, they are conflicted about it but would have held the line absent the pressure from followers). I give Eliezer a lot of credit for his refusal of this call.
Please distinguish between harms, harmless weirdnesses, and things that are harmless in and of themselves but create vulnerability to future harm.
Doing a lot of good initially is not totally protective against doing severe harm later on. If Jim Jones had died in Indiana he’d have been a regional civil rights hero, and if he’d died in California he’d be a complicated figure who did a lot of good, partially by providing a refuge for people escaping worse cults.
What? Academia really very obviously doesn’t seem like a cult to me, and I have thought about this topic a lot. This makes me think you are using words very differently from how I would use them (and to be clear, in a way I think is pretty bad for discourse, since it makes it much harder to discuss actual cults).
I would invert this point! If someone speaking about cults actively thinks that academia is a cult, I wouldn’t trust them! (The military in contrast seems indeed very cult-like to me, and I don’t have any objection to using cult concepts to describe that)
I suspect we disagree on defining academia rather than cult, which was still imprecise of me. Let’s take a humanities grad program
The only acceptable success criteria is being at the top of the pyramid within academia. People who quit for the outside world are disparaged and viewed as having wasted years of their life and others’.
You move have to move to a new location every few years and can’t afford to socialize with anyone but other academics.
You are probably paying a lot for the privilege of being there, often via debt.
Even people who start with stipends often find those run out before they finish, leaving them with the choice of abandoning 5 years of work or taking on debt for the last years.
If you’re not already from the right class, going to the program will cause you to change in ways that pull you from your family.
Depression/anxiety rates for grad students are sky high, and improve when they quit.
Your advisor can ruin your life with no consequences.
Members believe themselves to be special and answering a higher calling.
I agree that academia is less of a cult than the military, which can literally imprison you, but it’s on the spectrum.
Ok so to compare to my experience in a STEM PhD in the UK, which may be different:
False. Loads of people leave and everyone things that’s normal and laudable, assuming they go on to do something else they value
Part a is true, part b is just not true, you can socialize with whomever you want.
Nope, you are in fact being paid
Its absolutely possible to write up before your money runs out, and many people do. Some don’t but that’s uhh frankly because they’re lazy.
Yeah maybe, sure
Yeah
Maybe? But not much more than any other job. You can quit if you don’t like it, and if your advisor gets a reputation for being mean, they’ll find it hard to hire new people.
Not really? Maybe? IDK. Maybe if you extend “special” to mean “good at biology” and “higher calling” to mean “important research”.
This seems importantly different from cultish specialness and higher callings in that they’re approximately true
7 is instructive, I think. It actually is important whether or not your group’s beliefs are true, or at least close-to-true, because if the beliefs are true then that’s a strong signal the process generating those beliefs is anchored in reality. This means there’s a limit on how far those beliefs can go, since they’ll (hopefully) stay tied to the set of all possible true belief systems.
For example, if your group “believes the world will end within your lifetime” then it’s pretty important whether that group believes this due to climate change or due to a biblical apocalypse. Lumping those groups together would be quite silly, for the most part, even though both are likely false.
Likewise, it makes sense to distinguish PhD students believing they are special (good at biology) and answering a higher calling (important research) from MAPLE members believing they are special (the only hope for humanity’s spiritual salvation) and answering a higher calling (contacting the techregore through samadi).
#2, #3, #4: Somewhat true IMO, but these are much more true of cults than they are of academia. It’s not that hard to have non-academic friends or family as an academic.
#1, #5: I don’t really associate these things with cults? They’re negatives, but in a way that’s not related to cultishness.
It seems to me like academia is more like a caste or a class, which share many adverse features with cults (high demand, loyalty oriented), but differ by having well defined stereotyped relations with other castes or classes within a society.
Pretty much anyone in academia will tell prospective students “don’t do a phd” or at least “you should only do a phd if narrow criteria are met.” This seems to be quite the opposite of a cult. My PhD is in the social sciences not the humanities (but I’m somewhat humanities adjacent), so my reactions to your points above are: 1. The vibe in my experience is always “doing a phd is pointless unless you want to go into academia; if that’s not your plan, you should do something else” and no one really disparages you for quitting. In fact, there’s generally a pro quitting vibe, and the average advisor will, if anything, push a student who is on the fence about quitting towards it rather than away from it. Advisors are perfectly happy when their students land roles in industry, and the emotion most adjacent to the one you’re describing comes from jealousy. I will admit (and I think most others will) to a jealousy towards the earnings of people I knew who weren’t remotely smart enough to hack it in academia, dropped out to do whatever the hell UX research is for tech companies, and now make 5 times what I do under better working conditions. 2. I’m sure I don’t socialize more with other academics than the average person socializes with people from their industry. In grad school, nearly all of my friends were fellow grad students, yes, but that was just proximity and ease of forming the connections rather than any discouragement. We all thought the people who managed to make outside friends were cooler than us. And, the moving around thing breaks up the cultishness if anything plus once you get a TT job, you don’t move any more. 3. You pay a lot in opportunity cost, but I don’t know anyone who took on substantial debt during their grad school years. 4. Compared to what? You probably moved away physically to do it, but it pulls you away from family less, I think, than going off and becoming a corporate lawyer in a far away city. 5. Is that true of cults? Yes, it’s very true of PhD programs and everyone is super aware of it. 6. More so than anyone else’s boss? And the massive power of the advisor is really found in the lab sciences much more than the humanities/social sciences. It also depends on the exact dynamic. Universities have stronger than average protections around things like sexual harassment. 7. Sure, true. But, in my experience, they’re also a cynicism/self-consciousness around that you don’t find among, say, MDs or cops.
In addition to what Seth says, there’s the simple fact that academia doesn’t put meaningful organizational effort into preventing people from leaving! While some professors will personally try and guilt their grad students and postdocs to stay, the faculty don’t strategize together about how to set up high-pressure interventions. Retention is barely an afterthought, since there’s always a glut of candidates.
“Dysfunctional thing that leaves people feeling like failures” does not put something in the cult cluster.
My brother and most of my cousins are marines. Obviously the armed forces has cult-like aspects (command hierarchy, motivating ideology, whole-life institutions), but even there I dunno. Most people ~10 years in just treat it like a normal government job with a pension. There’s no stigma (and even a kind of prestige?) for leaving and getting a normal civilian job and writing a book about how everything is terribly mismanaged / your experience was shit. More often I get the vibe that active service members nostalgically resent the bouncy-castling & HRification that’s happened over the last forty years and wish it was more like what they imagined from TV.
This video showed up in my Youtube recommendations today, and IMO is quite good coverage of what early military education looks like, which yes, really strikes me as obviously extremely cult-like:
(The title and thumbnail is more clickbaity than the actual video, which has a lot of really great footage and mostly measured analysis of what’s going on in these bootcamps)
I think there are just two different clusters (or, like a macrocluster and a microcluster) that need names, and we don’t currently have two good names other than maybe “cult” and “cultlike/cult-adjacent/cult-spectrum.” There’s clearly some spectrum of which academia, various flavors of extreme startups and high-commitment-but-basically-good ideologies, etc, are on – various shades of “it’s hard to leave, hard to imagine leaving, there’s pressure to think a certain way, it’s often unhealthy, there are leaders you can’t question, etc.”
And, it’s useful to be able to refer to scientology and various flavors of legit dangerous thing of which maybe the military is an instance (haven’t really thought about that exactly).
For that matter, “weird new intense ideology that absorbs person’s life” (even if totally healthy) is also a cluster that feels like it needs a name, and I also don’t have a great name for that either other than “kinda culty.”
Are you like “yep, that framing seems right, and it’s really important to reserve ‘cult’ for the middle one” or do you disagree with that framing?
Academia seems just really not that similar to anything I would call cult. The standard experience of anyone I know in academia is overwhelming loneliness, almost complete cynicism about the shared mission by almost everyone involved, and an almost complete absence of guidance on how you should structure your life.
Like, academia these days strikes me as mostly similar to working at a very large, very professional, badly paid organization.
And then in addition to that you actually do have one of the strongest cultural anchors of any culture in the world in rewarding genuine disagreement. It’s not perfect, but academia is much higher on contrarianism and status mobility. It’s also very low on controlling your public speech compared to anywhere else.
Like, I have very large disagreements with academia, and am not in love with it, but it strikes me as one of the least cult-like social systems out there. Almost every large corporation seems more cult-like to me, by almost any reasonable definition of the word. Startups are much more cult-like.
Okay, I am sold on “actually academia kinda does the opposite of love-bombing,” and that the disagreement with EVN was indeed about “academia” rather than “cult.”
Same. I was in academia for 23 years and while I recognize some pressures that are cultlike, it lacks certain features that are pretty definitional for me: isolation and use of sleep deprivation to instill beliefs. An academic friend did his PhD on cult psychology and those were his defining features.
I give Eliezer a lot of credit for his refusal of this call.
Eliezer does a bunch of cultlike shit that everyone just ignores as if it’s a joke, like claiming to his followers to be the smartest person in the world, or speaking so literally about a utopian “home planet” that it’s unclear to me whether he thinks of Dath Ilan as a real place, occupying a bunch of Everett branches somewhere trading with future Earth. I don’t think he is a malignant narcissist, or that he does these things on purpose, but he is a narcissist, and it seems to me a large part of the cultishness surrounding Eliezer is downstream of that narcissism.
Here’s an example I remembered immediately; I’m sure if he’s expressed the sentiment here he’s expressed it other places, and just generally I think subordinates pick up on this vibe without you saying it explicitly:
but for insiders clearly a fiction
I have read Planecrash in full (good book btw) and am familiar with the medianworld concept. I think I qualify as an insider and yet:
The way most people would relate to the concept is to imagine a world that has both positive and negative qualities relative to Earth. To take the prompt “what would the world be like if I were the median person” and straightforwardly imagine a world that is the best most productively organized world seems narcissistic on its own.
Is it really? I know, I know. But like, the community takes the whole multiverse and acausal trade thing really seriously, and it even features as a plot device in many of the settings. Is it actually just a plot device or am I supposed to imagine that there’s a non-trivial amount of everrett branches somehow in a way that will affect the future? The way he speaks about it casually and literally and the way people on the Eliezerfic discord talk about it really encourages this.
To take the prompt “what would the world be like if I were the median person” and straightforwardly imagine a world that is the best most productively organized world seems narcissistic on its own.
Doesn’t seem that way to me. The median person in this world has IQ 100. Go 1SD lower, and people are functionally illiterate. Go 2SD higher instead; there you will meet me. Eliezer seems smarter (no, I am not saying the smartest person ever), so maybe add extra 1SD. Now imagine a world where that is the average.
Hard to say what exactly such world would look like, but imagine a world where a typical subreddit is like LessWrong, but specialized on something, and with more users. Imagine such world’s political debates; imagine its institutions. Is it so unlikely that things could be much better? Compared to our world, where if you say “the sky is blue”, many people will immediately object that their holy book says that it is red, or that they have read on social networks that sky is fake; and you can only have policies that such people approve, and you need to staff your institutions with such people.
(But of course, the villains would also be smarter, so there is a chance that would invent smart systems that lock everyone else in their service. The villains would also be better at cooperation.)
Also, it is assumed that the world would not be organized by Eliezer alone, but by a billion copies of him.
When I imagine Earth 2020 in a world with humans 40% smarter I mostly expect that it speed ran the tech tree 40% faster and consequently humans have been extinct for hundreds of years.
To avert this you need the humans to be significantly better at coordination, and that is part of the conceipt of dath ilan. I don’t see much evidence for Yudkowsky being significantly above median at coordination, and his dominant streak likely makes him below Earth median at following & corrigibility. He’s also contrarian and arrogant and loves trolling. That probably doesn’t net out at successful world conspiracy and people predictably doing what Exception Control says.
It is quite possible that dath ilan has deep dysfunctions that Eliezer may be unaware of. For example, what about those near-copies of him that happen to be below average, and fail to channel their energy into becoming a benevolent quasi-cult leader? Will they patiently accept their place at the bottom of the food chain and cooperate, or will they try to overthrow the system? Can the system resist so many smart people trying to overthrow it?
Agree on the likely extinction by smart and enthusiastically pro-tech young Eliezers.
Also, how much does the world actually reflect its median inhabitants? For example, Earth seems both much better (more science) and much worse (more wars) that talking to the median Earth human in isolation would suggest, I think. Some things are median-driven, some things are outlier-driven (science, crime).
I aspire to Jaynes’s level. I aspire to become as much the master of Artificial Intelligence / reflectivity, as Jaynes was master of Bayesian probability theory. I can even plead that the art I’m trying to master is more difficult than Jaynes’s, making a mockery of deference. Even so, and embarrassingly, there is no art of which I am as much the master now, as Jaynes was of probability theory.
Conway:
Or...
...or I’m strictly dumber than Conway, dominated by him along all dimensions. Maybe, if I could find a young proto-Conway and tell them the basics, they would blaze right past me, solve the problems that have weighed on me for years, and zip off to places I can’t follow.
Is it damaging to my ego to confess that last possibility? Yes. It would be futile to deny that.
Have I really accepted that awful possibility, or am I only pretending to myself to have accepted it? Here I will say: “No, I think I have accepted it.” Why do I dare give myself so much credit? Because I’ve invested specific effort into that awful possibility. I am blogging here for many reasons, but a major one is the vision of some younger mind reading these words and zipping off past me. It might happen, it might not.
Eliezer is a great writer, and the Eliezer that wrote the sequences is a pretty different person than the one that wrote the tweet I mentioned. But honestly, while this may sound nitpicky, the quotes you have here mostly prove my point. They do not actually describe either John Conway or Jaynes as broadly more intelligent than Eliezer. The post instead just manages to say that it’s plausible, that there might be someone now, someone in the future, who is more intelligent than Eliezer about the things he cares about. In the years since he has largely decided this is no longer true.
I of course don’t want him to pretend otherwise, if that’s the extent of his feelings.
The cited tweet is an extremely arrogant dick move, especially because I think Eliezer does know of people who are smarter than him (though maybe none on twitter?).
It draws attention to how he thinks he’s smarter than everyone, which is rude. He’s also not following the rules of the game, which is also rude.
It’s also an epistemic sin, given that he doesn’t think that he’s literally the smartest person on earth (as far as I know). I agree with the response asking him to at least tag a Jaynes fan account.
The way most people would relate to the concept is to imagine a world that has both positive and negative qualities relative to Earth. To take the prompt “what would the world be like if I were the median person” and straightforwardly imagine a world that is the best most productively organized world seems narcissistic on its own.
Agree on 1. I would also add that correctness about one part of the world does not necessarily imply that the entire model is correct. Sometimes the mainstream society has a taboo, and it is easy for bad actors to be (more) true about this specific part, and then leverage the gained trust to promote their own falsehoods.
Agree on 2. Knowing that you are doing the right thing. The initial love bombing; and the feeling that you have a “tribe” you belong to. When the guru tells you to do something, you don’t procrastinate on it… and you may pleasantly surprise yourself about how productive you suddenly become. In case of conflicting motivations (e.g. I want to get rid of addiction, but I also have cool friends who are addicts), the cult may force you to cut the knot. I wish I could get many of these things without the obvious costs that the cult membership brings.
Details are important in 3, but yeah, some things require high investment that is lost if the plan fails. Though it is still possible to increase those costs maliciously.
4 -- I would definitely love to read that.
On 5 I have a post that could have been much better written, but the point is that Lifton’s scale of mind control evaluates eight different criteria, so instead of a “yes or no” answer, you get a value on a scale, and obviously the army would score much higher than everyday institutions. (You can even make an excuse for established institutions without having to pretend that their score is low.)
Another thing I would add to the list are abusive relations, which sometimes could be modeled as a cult with 1 leader and 1 follower.
There should be some qualifier on 6, because I don’t see any group of people actively fighting to make me their cult leader; I guess I am not impressive enough. (If someone desires to kiss my shoes and send me 10% of their salary, please send me a private message, so that we don’t debate such holy things in front of the heathens.)
I wonder what is a more precise model. Maybe most people desire to have a leader, and if they decide that you fit the role, then you have to defend yourself. But if they put someone else in that role, you are safe. The danger mostly applies to celebrities; although you probably could become a local celebrity easier than you realize.
EDIT: After reading this comment I think I understand your point on academia better. Now I wonder how many cult experts were grad students; whether they are familiar with the things that you criticize.
Agree on 7.
Mostly agree on 8, with the caveat that if the information about “good” comes from the leader or his followers, it may be exaggerated. Investigating a list of actual heroes turning villains could be interesting.
Taboo ‘cult’. I’ve found the book Cultishto be helpful for thinking about, well, cultish groups. Here’s alist of the cultish properties described in the book. A big idea in the book is that some things that make you go “that’s a cult” are mostly harmless, like jargon and rituals and slogans, and some are very harmful, like cutting off relationships with people outside the cult and punishing members for doubt.
Point 5 is quite misleading, because the way in which academia and catholic monasteries and armies are cultish are really importantly different from the way the central examples of cults (like Jim Jones’s cult) are cultish. They lack the most dangerous cultish qualities. (Actually Point 5 is just wrong—academia just isn’t really cultish.)
Re point 2: I’m interested in the “significant upsides that the discourse made impossible to discuss in public.” To be clear, I’m interested in why the discourse made discussion impossible.
cutting off relationships with people outside the cult
This is a terrible sign except for the times it’s extremely helpful because the people being cut off were terrible. Queer culture supports/encourages people to cut off hateful, homophobic family. Recovery programs encourage people to cut off their user friends. Whether this is harmful depends on the quality of the people being cut off.
I’m interested in why the discourse made discussion impossible
The vitriol against the leader made people feel socially unsafe to speak out about the good things they’d gotten from him. Mostly they feared the vitriol would be turned on them for “defending” the designated bad guy (who TBC generally was pretty bad, but if they were all bad people wouldn’t have followed them). Even if they somehow felt safe about that, there was no space for the complexity of their experiences. Listeners who didn’t exaggerate the goodness or badness of an experience still flattened complexity.
This is a terrible sign except for the times it’s extremely helpful because the people being cut off were terrible. Queer culture supports/encourages people to cut off hateful, homophobic family. Recovery programs encourage people to cut off their user friends. Whether this is harmful depends on the quality of the people being cut off.
In neither of these cases are people cut off merely for not being a member of the group.
Even in the cases where cutting off the previous connections is good, it seems likely to have the same control + destabilizing effects. It may be meliorated by the previous connections being even more controlling and destabilizing (and misery-inducing), but it’s still running the risks.
Hell, aren’t the Zizians an example of a cult or cult-like thing that operates in large part by exploiting the effects of leaving previous connections? I don’t know the details, but surely many of them involved had actively shitty family members who they were wise to have left, even if the choice of who to go to was terrible.
Jargon, rituals, and slogans are absolutely harmful. Cults do so much more damage to people’s minds that is hard for an external observer to pick up on. After all, they wouldn’t be an external observer if they internalized the cult messaging.
Jargon is a tool, sometimes inevitable—for example math is full of jargon.
But it can also be abused strategically. Renaming things needlessly, to make it more difficult to communicate with the outsiders. Renaming things needlessly, to make members believe that the idea originated in the cult (as opposed to being taken from outside and renamed), so they can’t research the idea independently. Renaming things needlessly, to get rid of associations: for example many would agree that hurting people is wrong, but they have no strong opinion on whether frobnicating people is wrong, so you just need to tell them that what seems like hurting people is actually frobnicating, and then they will be more okay with that.
“Correctness of world-model and interpersonal safety are unrelated axes.”
I disagree with this. Questioning the world model can lead to threats to personal safety in cults. Tolerance for questioning the world model is related to correctness of the model. If my world model is incorrect, people will be more likely to question it, and I can respond with threats and social pressure. It’s a direct causal link.
I would endorse some weaker claim like “being correct and being tolerant are less related than typical discourse assumes”.
My objection on academia is that they will try to filter you, since there’s a limited number of positions and everyone’s angling for one.
It’s kind of a self-inflicted cult, if that makes any sense. You work single-mindedly in devotion to your specific niche interest because that’s what you’ve wanted to do since you were a teenager, and everything else you do there is a 9-5 that lets you justify access to a taxpayer/industry-funded research lab and a repository of free labor grad students.
When I first saw this post had negative 4 agrees, I wonder if that disagreement could be how one defines ‘cult’ as I find all of this sensible and agreeable. Probably #5 is most contentious for people who feel ‘cult’ means overall-bad, or insults the institution more than they think is deserved, etc.
I define a cult as a professionally managed social environment. Because of the enormous importance of having a good social environment, normal people might very plausibly and rationally want to be part of a cult and be willing to pay someone to lead it. Of course, for the same reason, performing this role badly might to horrific outcomes (just like medical or legal malpractice). The reason the word “cult” has negative connotation is partly due to vividness bias (most cults are just living happily out on a farm somewhere, without bothering anyone, and we never hear about them), and partly due to a circular pattern where society stigmatizes cultishness, so the people who join/create them are predisposed to mental illness.
I would pay good money to be part of a “cult” that emphasized healthy living, non-consumerism, animal ethics, environmentalism, and community life. Yes, it would have rules that would seem weird to outsiders (e.g. no jewelry, no visible brand logos, veganism or strict diet codes, you have to hike 10 miles / day), but that is literally the whole point: I want to be in a community that upholds such values.
I’m going to put in a guess that people who tell you that academia is very obviously not cult-like were not, themselves, ever subject to it. They can be discounted. Speak louder. It’s not definitely a cult but it sure has a few such qualities, especially depending on subject, advisor, and institution.
the inferential gap between this writer/reader for this shortform and descendants is becoming huuuuge due to etymological issues. strongly recommend tabooing “cult”—doing so will increase the effort required from participants (due to loss of very relevant semantic infrastructure), but i suspect that price is table-stakes for content to avoid distortion between sender/receiver.
I like how Richard Grannon put it while addressing a former cult member:
What you are describing is a cult-based fantasy that works. . . . It needs to have nothing to do with reality. . . . The terrible risk that you are in is that you’ve deprogrammed from a cult . . . It is not real reality, but it has internal consistency for you. It worked. Now, you shouldn’t have no fantasy. No human should have no fantasy. So, in a way, the collapse of a fantasy is not good. So, if your saying, “God! I was so motivated then, it was great, it was wonderful, but I had grandiose delusional beliefs.” I would come back and whisper in your ear, “you need a little bit of that again—if you want to feel that motivation”. You do need to be a soldier of God. You do need to be operating at a universal level.
Posts on cults I keep meaning to write:
Morpheus’s team in the Matrix could easily have been abusive and toxic, even though they were right about the whole world being fake. Correctness of world-model and interpersonal safety are unrelated axes.
Everyone I know who’s been in ~cults has found it to have significant upsides that the discourse made impossible to discuss in public. If you don’t personally know people who have been in ~cults you are probably underestimating the upside and complexity of the situations.
Some good things cannot be achieved without a high level of illiquid investment. High investment creates dynamics similar to high control. For certain purposes the difference between “the high cost of leaving is in the territory” and “someone has maliciously made leaving costly” is important, and for others its really not.
Vulnerability budgets- know yours and spend it wisely.
If a cult expert doesn’t recognize that
academia and[1] Catholic monasteries and the army are obviously cults, using the same techniques with the same harms, they are not trustworthy. I have yet to encounter an expert who recognizes this; usually they explicitly exempt old institutions.cult is an attractor state you have to actively fight to avoid
Partially because lots of people want to be in a cult and will actively push a leader into culthood against their will (or more likely, they are conflicted about it but would have held the line absent the pressure from followers). I give Eliezer a lot of credit for his refusal of this call.
Please distinguish between harms, harmless weirdnesses, and things that are harmless in and of themselves but create vulnerability to future harm.
Doing a lot of good initially is not totally protective against doing severe harm later on. If Jim Jones had died in Indiana he’d have been a regional civil rights hero, and if he’d died in California he’d be a complicated figure who did a lot of good, partially by providing a refuge for people escaping worse cults.
I crossed out academia 7h after posting because based on the comments this is only obvious to me, but I do still consider it obvious.
What? Academia really very obviously doesn’t seem like a cult to me, and I have thought about this topic a lot. This makes me think you are using words very differently from how I would use them (and to be clear, in a way I think is pretty bad for discourse, since it makes it much harder to discuss actual cults).
I would invert this point! If someone speaking about cults actively thinks that academia is a cult, I wouldn’t trust them! (The military in contrast seems indeed very cult-like to me, and I don’t have any objection to using cult concepts to describe that)
I suspect we disagree on defining academia rather than cult, which was still imprecise of me. Let’s take a humanities grad program
The only acceptable success criteria is being at the top of the pyramid within academia. People who quit for the outside world are disparaged and viewed as having wasted years of their life and others’.
You move have to move to a new location every few years and can’t afford to socialize with anyone but other academics.
You are probably paying a lot for the privilege of being there, often via debt.
Even people who start with stipends often find those run out before they finish, leaving them with the choice of abandoning 5 years of work or taking on debt for the last years.
If you’re not already from the right class, going to the program will cause you to change in ways that pull you from your family.
Depression/anxiety rates for grad students are sky high, and improve when they quit.
Your advisor can ruin your life with no consequences.
Members believe themselves to be special and answering a higher calling.
I agree that academia is less of a cult than the military, which can literally imprison you, but it’s on the spectrum.
Ok so to compare to my experience in a STEM PhD in the UK, which may be different:
False. Loads of people leave and everyone things that’s normal and laudable, assuming they go on to do something else they value
Part a is true, part b is just not true, you can socialize with whomever you want.
Nope, you are in fact being paid
Its absolutely possible to write up before your money runs out, and many people do. Some don’t but that’s uhh frankly because they’re lazy.
Yeah maybe, sure
Yeah
Maybe? But not much more than any other job. You can quit if you don’t like it, and if your advisor gets a reputation for being mean, they’ll find it hard to hire new people.
Not really? Maybe? IDK. Maybe if you extend “special” to mean “good at biology” and “higher calling” to mean “important research”.
This seems importantly different from cultish specialness and higher callings in that they’re approximately true
7 is instructive, I think. It actually is important whether or not your group’s beliefs are true, or at least close-to-true, because if the beliefs are true then that’s a strong signal the process generating those beliefs is anchored in reality. This means there’s a limit on how far those beliefs can go, since they’ll (hopefully) stay tied to the set of all possible true belief systems.
For example, if your group “believes the world will end within your lifetime” then it’s pretty important whether that group believes this due to climate change or due to a biblical apocalypse. Lumping those groups together would be quite silly, for the most part, even though both are likely false.
Likewise, it makes sense to distinguish PhD students believing they are special (good at biology) and answering a higher calling (important research) from MAPLE members believing they are special (the only hope for humanity’s spiritual salvation) and answering a higher calling (contacting the techregore through samadi).
#6, #7: Sure
#2, #3, #4: Somewhat true IMO, but these are much more true of cults than they are of academia. It’s not that hard to have non-academic friends or family as an academic.
#1, #5: I don’t really associate these things with cults? They’re negatives, but in a way that’s not related to cultishness.
It seems to me like academia is more like a caste or a class, which share many adverse features with cults (high demand, loyalty oriented), but differ by having well defined stereotyped relations with other castes or classes within a society.
Pretty much anyone in academia will tell prospective students “don’t do a phd” or at least “you should only do a phd if narrow criteria are met.” This seems to be quite the opposite of a cult. My PhD is in the social sciences not the humanities (but I’m somewhat humanities adjacent), so my reactions to your points above are:
1. The vibe in my experience is always “doing a phd is pointless unless you want to go into academia; if that’s not your plan, you should do something else” and no one really disparages you for quitting. In fact, there’s generally a pro quitting vibe, and the average advisor will, if anything, push a student who is on the fence about quitting towards it rather than away from it. Advisors are perfectly happy when their students land roles in industry, and the emotion most adjacent to the one you’re describing comes from jealousy. I will admit (and I think most others will) to a jealousy towards the earnings of people I knew who weren’t remotely smart enough to hack it in academia, dropped out to do whatever the hell UX research is for tech companies, and now make 5 times what I do under better working conditions.
2. I’m sure I don’t socialize more with other academics than the average person socializes with people from their industry. In grad school, nearly all of my friends were fellow grad students, yes, but that was just proximity and ease of forming the connections rather than any discouragement. We all thought the people who managed to make outside friends were cooler than us. And, the moving around thing breaks up the cultishness if anything plus once you get a TT job, you don’t move any more.
3. You pay a lot in opportunity cost, but I don’t know anyone who took on substantial debt during their grad school years.
4. Compared to what? You probably moved away physically to do it, but it pulls you away from family less, I think, than going off and becoming a corporate lawyer in a far away city.
5. Is that true of cults? Yes, it’s very true of PhD programs and everyone is super aware of it.
6. More so than anyone else’s boss? And the massive power of the advisor is really found in the lab sciences much more than the humanities/social sciences. It also depends on the exact dynamic. Universities have stronger than average protections around things like sexual harassment.
7. Sure, true. But, in my experience, they’re also a cynicism/self-consciousness around that you don’t find among, say, MDs or cops.
My undergrad professors heavily encouraged me to reapply to grad school (in biology) because I was so special and good.
In addition to what Seth says, there’s the simple fact that academia doesn’t put meaningful organizational effort into preventing people from leaving! While some professors will personally try and guilt their grad students and postdocs to stay, the faculty don’t strategize together about how to set up high-pressure interventions. Retention is barely an afterthought, since there’s always a glut of candidates.
“Dysfunctional thing that leaves people feeling like failures” does not put something in the cult cluster.
My brother and most of my cousins are marines. Obviously the armed forces has cult-like aspects (command hierarchy, motivating ideology, whole-life institutions), but even there I dunno. Most people ~10 years in just treat it like a normal government job with a pension. There’s no stigma (and even a kind of prestige?) for leaving and getting a normal civilian job and writing a book about how everything is terribly mismanaged / your experience was shit. More often I get the vibe that active service members nostalgically resent the bouncy-castling & HRification that’s happened over the last forty years and wish it was more like what they imagined from TV.
Yeah, my sense is long term service is really mostly like working at a large corporation, but early boot camp experiences are very cult like.
Also plausible this changed over the years.
Also, I do have to point out that some cultishness really is necessary in order to do the job of maintaining an effective military.
This video showed up in my Youtube recommendations today, and IMO is quite good coverage of what early military education looks like, which yes, really strikes me as obviously extremely cult-like:
(The title and thumbnail is more clickbaity than the actual video, which has a lot of really great footage and mostly measured analysis of what’s going on in these bootcamps)
We need a video from MAPLE to compare. :D
I think there are just two different clusters (or, like a macrocluster and a microcluster) that need names, and we don’t currently have two good names other than maybe “cult” and “cultlike/cult-adjacent/cult-spectrum.” There’s clearly some spectrum of which academia, various flavors of extreme startups and high-commitment-but-basically-good ideologies, etc, are on – various shades of “it’s hard to leave, hard to imagine leaving, there’s pressure to think a certain way, it’s often unhealthy, there are leaders you can’t question, etc.”
And, it’s useful to be able to refer to scientology and various flavors of legit dangerous thing of which maybe the military is an instance (haven’t really thought about that exactly).
For that matter, “weird new intense ideology that absorbs person’s life” (even if totally healthy) is also a cluster that feels like it needs a name, and I also don’t have a great name for that either other than “kinda culty.”
Are you like “yep, that framing seems right, and it’s really important to reserve ‘cult’ for the middle one” or do you disagree with that framing?
Academia seems just really not that similar to anything I would call cult. The standard experience of anyone I know in academia is overwhelming loneliness, almost complete cynicism about the shared mission by almost everyone involved, and an almost complete absence of guidance on how you should structure your life.
Like, academia these days strikes me as mostly similar to working at a very large, very professional, badly paid organization.
And then in addition to that you actually do have one of the strongest cultural anchors of any culture in the world in rewarding genuine disagreement. It’s not perfect, but academia is much higher on contrarianism and status mobility. It’s also very low on controlling your public speech compared to anywhere else.
Like, I have very large disagreements with academia, and am not in love with it, but it strikes me as one of the least cult-like social systems out there. Almost every large corporation seems more cult-like to me, by almost any reasonable definition of the word. Startups are much more cult-like.
Okay, I am sold on “actually academia kinda does the opposite of love-bombing,” and that the disagreement with EVN was indeed about “academia” rather than “cult.”
Leverage was also much more lonely than love-bomb-ey
Same. I was in academia for 23 years and while I recognize some pressures that are cultlike, it lacks certain features that are pretty definitional for me: isolation and use of sleep deprivation to instill beliefs. An academic friend did his PhD on cult psychology and those were his defining features.
Eliezer does a bunch of cultlike shit that everyone just ignores as if it’s a joke, like claiming to his followers to be the smartest person in the world, or speaking so literally about a utopian “home planet” that it’s unclear to me whether he thinks of Dath Ilan as a real place, occupying a bunch of Everett branches somewhere trading with future Earth. I don’t think he is a malignant narcissist, or that he does these things on purpose, but he is a narcissist, and it seems to me a large part of the cultishness surrounding Eliezer is downstream of that narcissism.
Citation needed.
There is a risk that this may be confusing to outsiders, but for insiders clearly a fiction.
Here’s an example I remembered immediately; I’m sure if he’s expressed the sentiment here he’s expressed it other places, and just generally I think subordinates pick up on this vibe without you saying it explicitly:
I have read Planecrash in full (good book btw) and am familiar with the medianworld concept. I think I qualify as an insider and yet:
The way most people would relate to the concept is to imagine a world that has both positive and negative qualities relative to Earth. To take the prompt “what would the world be like if I were the median person” and straightforwardly imagine a world that is the best most productively organized world seems narcissistic on its own.
Is it really? I know, I know. But like, the community takes the whole multiverse and acausal trade thing really seriously, and it even features as a plot device in many of the settings. Is it actually just a plot device or am I supposed to imagine that there’s a non-trivial amount of everrett branches somehow in a way that will affect the future? The way he speaks about it casually and literally and the way people on the Eliezerfic discord talk about it really encourages this.
Doesn’t seem that way to me. The median person in this world has IQ 100. Go 1SD lower, and people are functionally illiterate. Go 2SD higher instead; there you will meet me. Eliezer seems smarter (no, I am not saying the smartest person ever), so maybe add extra 1SD. Now imagine a world where that is the average.
Hard to say what exactly such world would look like, but imagine a world where a typical subreddit is like LessWrong, but specialized on something, and with more users. Imagine such world’s political debates; imagine its institutions. Is it so unlikely that things could be much better? Compared to our world, where if you say “the sky is blue”, many people will immediately object that their holy book says that it is red, or that they have read on social networks that sky is fake; and you can only have policies that such people approve, and you need to staff your institutions with such people.
(But of course, the villains would also be smarter, so there is a chance that would invent smart systems that lock everyone else in their service. The villains would also be better at cooperation.)
Also, it is assumed that the world would not be organized by Eliezer alone, but by a billion copies of him.
When I imagine Earth 2020 in a world with humans 40% smarter I mostly expect that it speed ran the tech tree 40% faster and consequently humans have been extinct for hundreds of years.
To avert this you need the humans to be significantly better at coordination, and that is part of the conceipt of dath ilan. I don’t see much evidence for Yudkowsky being significantly above median at coordination, and his dominant streak likely makes him below Earth median at following & corrigibility. He’s also contrarian and arrogant and loves trolling. That probably doesn’t net out at successful world conspiracy and people predictably doing what Exception Control says.
It is quite possible that dath ilan has deep dysfunctions that Eliezer may be unaware of. For example, what about those near-copies of him that happen to be below average, and fail to channel their energy into becoming a benevolent quasi-cult leader? Will they patiently accept their place at the bottom of the food chain and cooperate, or will they try to overthrow the system? Can the system resist so many smart people trying to overthrow it?
Agree on the likely extinction by smart and enthusiastically pro-tech young Eliezers.
Also, how much does the world actually reflect its median inhabitants? For example, Earth seems both much better (more science) and much worse (more wars) that talking to the median Earth human in isolation would suggest, I think. Some things are median-driven, some things are outlier-driven (science, crime).
Here’s Eliezer in the sequences naming two people above his level, one he says is probably smarter than him.
Jaynes:
Conway:
Eliezer is a great writer, and the Eliezer that wrote the sequences is a pretty different person than the one that wrote the tweet I mentioned. But honestly, while this may sound nitpicky, the quotes you have here mostly prove my point. They do not actually describe either John Conway or Jaynes as broadly more intelligent than Eliezer. The post instead just manages to say that it’s plausible, that there might be someone now, someone in the future, who is more intelligent than Eliezer about the things he cares about. In the years since he has largely decided this is no longer true.
I of course don’t want him to pretend otherwise, if that’s the extent of his feelings.
Neither do I, but I’d like to have a more explicit confirmation than a tweet that could be interpreted as a joke.
The cited tweet is an extremely arrogant dick move, especially because I think Eliezer does know of people who are smarter than him (though maybe none on twitter?).
Am I missing something—his response seems just like the funniest possible reply to the already silly exercise?
It draws attention to how he thinks he’s smarter than everyone, which is rude. He’s also not following the rules of the game, which is also rude.
It’s also an epistemic sin, given that he doesn’t think that he’s literally the smartest person on earth (as far as I know). I agree with the response asking him to at least tag a Jaynes fan account.
I think I agree
Agree on 1. I would also add that correctness about one part of the world does not necessarily imply that the entire model is correct. Sometimes the mainstream society has a taboo, and it is easy for bad actors to be (more) true about this specific part, and then leverage the gained trust to promote their own falsehoods.
Agree on 2. Knowing that you are doing the right thing. The initial love bombing; and the feeling that you have a “tribe” you belong to. When the guru tells you to do something, you don’t procrastinate on it… and you may pleasantly surprise yourself about how productive you suddenly become. In case of conflicting motivations (e.g. I want to get rid of addiction, but I also have cool friends who are addicts), the cult may force you to cut the knot. I wish I could get many of these things without the obvious costs that the cult membership brings.
Details are important in 3, but yeah, some things require high investment that is lost if the plan fails. Though it is still possible to increase those costs maliciously.
4 -- I would definitely love to read that.
On 5 I have a post that could have been much better written, but the point is that Lifton’s scale of mind control evaluates eight different criteria, so instead of a “yes or no” answer, you get a value on a scale, and obviously the army would score much higher than everyday institutions. (You can even make an excuse for established institutions without having to pretend that their score is low.)
Another thing I would add to the list are abusive relations, which sometimes could be modeled as a cult with 1 leader and 1 follower.
There should be some qualifier on 6, because I don’t see any group of people actively fighting to make me their cult leader; I guess I am not impressive enough. (If someone desires to kiss my shoes and send me 10% of their salary, please send me a private message, so that we don’t debate such holy things in front of the heathens.)
I wonder what is a more precise model. Maybe most people desire to have a leader, and if they decide that you fit the role, then you have to defend yourself. But if they put someone else in that role, you are safe. The danger mostly applies to celebrities; although you probably could become a local celebrity easier than you realize.
EDIT: After reading this comment I think I understand your point on academia better. Now I wonder how many cult experts were grad students; whether they are familiar with the things that you criticize.
Agree on 7.
Mostly agree on 8, with the caveat that if the information about “good” comes from the leader or his followers, it may be exaggerated. Investigating a list of actual heroes turning villains could be interesting.
Taboo ‘cult’. I’ve found the book Cultish to be helpful for thinking about, well, cultish groups. Here’s a list of the cultish properties described in the book. A big idea in the book is that some things that make you go “that’s a cult” are mostly harmless, like jargon and rituals and slogans, and some are very harmful, like cutting off relationships with people outside the cult and punishing members for doubt.
Point 5 is quite misleading, because the way in which academia and catholic monasteries and armies are cultish are really importantly different from the way the central examples of cults (like Jim Jones’s cult) are cultish. They lack the most dangerous cultish qualities. (Actually Point 5 is just wrong—academia just isn’t really cultish.)
Re point 2: I’m interested in the “significant upsides that the discourse made impossible to discuss in public.” To be clear, I’m interested in why the discourse made discussion impossible.
This is a terrible sign except for the times it’s extremely helpful because the people being cut off were terrible. Queer culture supports/encourages people to cut off hateful, homophobic family. Recovery programs encourage people to cut off their user friends. Whether this is harmful depends on the quality of the people being cut off.
The vitriol against the leader made people feel socially unsafe to speak out about the good things they’d gotten from him. Mostly they feared the vitriol would be turned on them for “defending” the designated bad guy (who TBC generally was pretty bad, but if they were all bad people wouldn’t have followed them). Even if they somehow felt safe about that, there was no space for the complexity of their experiences. Listeners who didn’t exaggerate the goodness or badness of an experience still flattened complexity.
In neither of these cases are people cut off merely for not being a member of the group.
Even in the cases where cutting off the previous connections is good, it seems likely to have the same control + destabilizing effects. It may be meliorated by the previous connections being even more controlling and destabilizing (and misery-inducing), but it’s still running the risks.
Hell, aren’t the Zizians an example of a cult or cult-like thing that operates in large part by exploiting the effects of leaving previous connections? I don’t know the details, but surely many of them involved had actively shitty family members who they were wise to have left, even if the choice of who to go to was terrible.
Jargon, rituals, and slogans are absolutely harmful. Cults do so much more damage to people’s minds that is hard for an external observer to pick up on. After all, they wouldn’t be an external observer if they internalized the cult messaging.
You have a point but this requires more nuance.
Jargon is a tool, sometimes inevitable—for example math is full of jargon.
But it can also be abused strategically. Renaming things needlessly, to make it more difficult to communicate with the outsiders. Renaming things needlessly, to make members believe that the idea originated in the cult (as opposed to being taken from outside and renamed), so they can’t research the idea independently. Renaming things needlessly, to get rid of associations: for example many would agree that hurting people is wrong, but they have no strong opinion on whether frobnicating people is wrong, so you just need to tell them that what seems like hurting people is actually frobnicating, and then they will be more okay with that.
“Correctness of world-model and interpersonal safety are unrelated axes.”
I disagree with this. Questioning the world model can lead to threats to personal safety in cults. Tolerance for questioning the world model is related to correctness of the model. If my world model is incorrect, people will be more likely to question it, and I can respond with threats and social pressure. It’s a direct causal link.
I would endorse some weaker claim like “being correct and being tolerant are less related than typical discourse assumes”.
My objection on academia is that they will try to filter you, since there’s a limited number of positions and everyone’s angling for one.
It’s kind of a self-inflicted cult, if that makes any sense. You work single-mindedly in devotion to your specific niche interest because that’s what you’ve wanted to do since you were a teenager, and everything else you do there is a 9-5 that lets you justify access to a taxpayer/industry-funded research lab and a repository of
free laborgrad students.When I first saw this post had negative 4 agrees, I wonder if that disagreement could be how one defines ‘cult’ as I find all of this sensible and agreeable. Probably #5 is most contentious for people who feel ‘cult’ means overall-bad, or insults the institution more than they think is deserved, etc.
I define a cult as a professionally managed social environment. Because of the enormous importance of having a good social environment, normal people might very plausibly and rationally want to be part of a cult and be willing to pay someone to lead it. Of course, for the same reason, performing this role badly might to horrific outcomes (just like medical or legal malpractice). The reason the word “cult” has negative connotation is partly due to vividness bias (most cults are just living happily out on a farm somewhere, without bothering anyone, and we never hear about them), and partly due to a circular pattern where society stigmatizes cultishness, so the people who join/create them are predisposed to mental illness.
I would pay good money to be part of a “cult” that emphasized healthy living, non-consumerism, animal ethics, environmentalism, and community life. Yes, it would have rules that would seem weird to outsiders (e.g. no jewelry, no visible brand logos, veganism or strict diet codes, you have to hike 10 miles / day), but that is literally the whole point: I want to be in a community that upholds such values.
I’m going to put in a guess that people who tell you that academia is very obviously not cult-like were not, themselves, ever subject to it. They can be discounted. Speak louder. It’s not definitely a cult but it sure has a few such qualities, especially depending on subject, advisor, and institution.
the inferential gap between this writer/reader for this shortform and descendants is becoming huuuuge due to etymological issues. strongly recommend tabooing “cult”—doing so will increase the effort required from participants (due to loss of very relevant semantic infrastructure), but i suspect that price is table-stakes for content to avoid distortion between sender/receiver.
I like how Richard Grannon put it while addressing a former cult member: