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
My undergrad professors heavily encouraged me to reapply to grad school (in biology) because I was so special and good.
In hindsight, given the poor track record of large alignment-branded research organizations, it was a significant mistake for me to accept Resolution’s offer without having thought much more carefully about ways that joining might be bad (such as the points above). There’s a common failure mode whereby rationalists and EAs are averse to thinking about how their cognition is skewed by incentives and power dynamics; though I often talk about this issue abstractly, I still failed to account for it in this case.
I’d be very interested in a 5-whys on this.
Leverage was also much more lonely than love-bomb-ey
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.
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.
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.
Did anyone end up taking you up on this?
It would have been so easy to meet Heaven’s Gate where it was coming from. Heaven’s Gate had a starting set of assumptions that you could crisply question. You could assert that there was no comet behind the spaceship, or that apparent-suicide wouldn’t allow you to board it.
My ideal version of the OP (that I am not owed) either explicitly says “Soryu/MAPLE is wrong about their factual claims that doom is imminent”, or agrees with that premise but gets into the details of how it believes MAPLE handled that fact badly. I don’t think MAPLE would come out any better in that version (I had a terrible experience there and public data says its been downhill from there), but it would feel like it left more room to recognize if a different organization had the same premise and handled implementation better.
As of this writing there are two top level comments on this post, both of which ask for more work. I agree with the requests and have a few of my own, which I’ve been planning to put in short form. But man, it is really annoying to put months of work into something and be met with more homework. I feel that way with science write-ups, and I can only imagine how much worse it feels when you’re talking about a multi-year traumatic experience. I think Kyle did a good job at the post he intended to write, it is valuable despite not fulfilling everyone’s wishlist, and I hope the requests for more don’t continue to dominate the conversation.
My experience was that not only were they not good at filtering, when I tried to filter myself out they told me my concerns wouldn’t be a problem. When I attended a retreat the concerns played out exactly as I initially predicted.
This was in 2018 and they claimed to have improved since then.
I believe the legal complexities are “this exact thing is explicitly banned without prohibitive amounts of negotiation”
That might solve the issue of applicants choosing where to apply, but I don’t think glassdoor-style data would make AWF any happier about Austin bringing up the unfavorable comparison in his marketing copy.
who said mass adoption was a goal?
what kind of research are you interested in? Just AI?
Assigned
Last month I made my print debut in Asterisk Magazine, with a title so good it made me rethink my entire philosophy: We’re all one crisis away from taking unlicensed research peptides.
Then this month I published On the origin of continents at Works in Progress, about the simultaneous, semi-independent dual discoveries of plate tectonics
When I think of this as “Lighthaven East”, I feel a bunch of objections that it’s getting slimey politics all over my beautiful epistemics. When I think of it as “Lighthaven DC”, it sounds potentially good.
People tend to point to the rise of feminism and the fall in religion as an explanation.
I’d put both as less important than women’s decreasing financial dependence on men.
you’re the only other person I know who gets sleepy from allergies. Are you interested in comparing notes?
The big take home from @TurnTrout’s post on his lobbying efforts within google is that they didn’t work, Google signed an “all lawful use” contract with the pentagon. But he did (reportedly) get Jeff Dean to sign an amicus brief in Anthropic’s lawsuit agains the pentagon. Does anyone know what the value of that is? If it gets Anthropic marginally more damages, or more protection from a designation as a supply chain risk, that seems value-creating.