Elizabeth

Karma: 23,183

Elizabeth 3 Aug 2026 21:07 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: gbtw’s comment on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
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.

Elizabeth 3 Aug 2026 16:19 UTC
10 points
1
in reply to: Richard_Ngo’s comment on: ricraz’s Shortform
1. 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.

Elizabeth 3 Aug 2026 0:52 UTC
7 points
1
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
Leverage was also much more lonely than love-bomb-ey

Elizabeth 2 Aug 2026 0:40 UTC
8 points
0
in reply to: Eye You’s comment on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
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.

Elizabeth 1 Aug 2026 19:34 UTC
18 points
−12
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
I suspect we disagree on defining academia rather than cult, which was still imprecise of me. Let’s take a humanities grad program
1. 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’.
2. You move have to move to a new location every few years and can’t afford to socialize with anyone but other academics.
3. You are probably paying a lot for the privilege of being there, often via debt.
  1. 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.
4. 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.
5. Depression/anxiety rates for grad students are sky high, and improve when they quit.
6. Your advisor can ruin your life with no consequences.
7. 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.
What links here?
- Viliam's comment on Elizabeth’s Shortform by Elizabeth (2 Aug 2026 13:24 UTC; 12 points)

Elizabeth 1 Aug 2026 17:06 UTC
84 points
25
on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
Posts on cults I keep meaning to write:
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Vulnerability budgets- know yours and spend it wisely.
5. 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.
6. cult is an attractor state you have to actively fight to avoid
  1. 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.
7. Please distinguish between harms, harmless weirdnesses, and things that are harmless in and of themselves but create vulnerability to future harm.
8. 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.
1. ^
  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.

Elizabeth 31 Jul 2026 16:50 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Zoe Curzi’s Experience with Leverage Research
Did anyone end up taking you up on this?

Elizabeth 30 Jul 2026 21:05 UTC
15 points
2
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: The High-Control Dynamics at MAPLE
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.

Elizabeth 30 Jul 2026 16:57 UTC
105 points
84
on: The High-Control Dynamics at MAPLE
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.

Elizabeth 30 Jul 2026 15:15 UTC
4 points
1
in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: Briefly on MAPLE, and the broader community
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.

Elizabeth 29 Jul 2026 18:45 UTC
13 points
4
in reply to: Austin Chen’s comment on: Austin Chen’s Shortform
I believe the legal complexities are “this exact thing is explicitly banned without prohibitive amounts of negotiation”

Elizabeth 19 Jul 2026 19:47 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Rachel Shu’s comment on: ricraz’s Shortform
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.

Elizabeth 18 Jul 2026 23:34 UTC
2 points
0
on: Guess on why rationality is not more popular (there are no pamphlets)
who said mass adoption was a goal?

Elizabeth 17 Jul 2026 19:37 UTC
3 points
0
on: How has publishing your research on LW or X been helpful to you?
what kind of research are you interested in? Just AI?

Elizabeth 6 Jul 2026 19:51 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
Assigned

Elizabeth 5 Jul 2026 20:32 UTC
35 points
4
on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
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

Elizabeth 13 Jun 2026 4:28 UTC
9 points
4
on: Lighthaven East—A Feasibility Study
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.
What links here?
- Lighthaven DC—A Feasibility Study by JohnofCharleston (31 May 2026 22:53 UTC; 227 points)

Elizabeth 29 May 2026 23:00 UTC
7 points
2
on: It takes a village to support a marriage
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.

Elizabeth 23 May 2026 20:59 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Joachim Bartosik’s comment on: You can opt out of allergies
you’re the only other person I know who gets sleepy from allergies. Are you interested in comparing notes?

Elizabeth 21 May 2026 17:55 UTC
28 points
13
on: Women should be able to open things
My goat is gotten by things like seatbelts, headrests, and gym equipment that are actively hostile to people under 5′9″.