This machine resists Moloch
Jarred Filmer
Karma: 712
Mnestics
Looping
Experimenting with microsolidarity crews
Apollo
I agree with the content of your comment but the framing gives me a sense of bad faith, and makes me uncomfortable.
If I put a lot of time into a post-mortem detailing how an 8 year project I put a lot into went wrong, and then the top comment was someone summing up what I’d done in an uncharitable paragraph saying things like “making stuff up” and “no shit sherlock” I’d feel like I’d tried to do a good thing for the discourse at large and was defected against.
Space
Society Library seeking contributions for canonical AI Safety debate map
Response
I see two independent ideas in this post
Insidious Inception
People communicate thoughts into each others minds
This can be direct *”I do not want to date you”*
Or indirect *”Sorry I’m too busy this week” with no effort to find a different time*
Saying A to indirectly communicate B can:
Obscure an intention that would be obvious were B said directly
Make it harder to refute B, because the idea that A → B needs to first be established
Delicately communicate B without indirectly implying something that would have been implied had you said it directly
Core thoughts
You have ideas that are small and do not effect your base perception of reality, we call this trivia/facts/knowledge.
You have other ideas that are big, and construct your reality in the way that’s hard to appreciate without medication/psychedelics/hippie workshops. We call this worldview/identity/schemas.
Mixed to form a very third idea:
The norms of healthy communication can be especially abused by someone doing this “insidious inception” to add or alter someones “core thoughts”. If someone is doing this to you (deliberately or otherwise), using the norms of healthy communication you use normally to get people to stop doing things you don’t like may not work, and instead make you vulnerable.
I empathise with the feeling of slipperyness in the OP, I feel comfortable attributing that to the subject matter rather than malice.
If I had an experience that matched zoe’s to the degree jessicata’s did (superficially or otherwise) I’d feel compelled to post it. I found it helpful in the question of whether “insular rationalist group gets weird and experiences rash of psychotic breaks” is a community problem, or just a problem with stray dude.
Agree or disagree: “There may be a pattern wherein rationalist types form an insular group to create and apply novel theories of cognition to themselves, and it gets really weird and intense leading to a rash of psychological breaks.”
I see landmark as entering into a symbiotic relationship with a parasitic set of memes. It’s a life changing experience for a lot of people, but Landmark wants to grow and it’ll attempt to drain your resources (money, volunteering time, and social capital) to do so.
I had a coworker who was obsessed with landmark, and eventually wore some of us down to attend the intro night. I too was impressed at how psychoactive the environment was, and it seemed to be really helping people! But I felt concerned for many of the same reasons as OP.
There’s a lot of parallels here with psychedelic therapy. One, it’s cheaper and faster than years of CBT. And two you are in essence letting someone really heat up your mind (especially your self conception) to allow you to anneal out of sticky maladaptive local maximas. As OP says, they induce this open state with:
-
Exhaustion from long hours and homework
-
Putting you on stage in front of a crowd and then manipulating the crowd’s response to you. (i.e. manipulating social reality)
-
Installing active memes with good concept handles. Whether or not these memes reflect reality the mind responds to them in powerful and predictable ways if delivered in the right context (as in Christianity)
Unfortunately while you’re in this state landmark also tries to install a powerful evangelical perogative to sign-up everyone you know, and a belief that if you really cared about your continued development you would take the subsequent (also really expensive) courses.
This makes sense, as organisations who find this technology and don’t do this will be out competed by ones that do. But you’re still giving root access to your mind over to an organisation that wants to use your resources to grow.
My coworker is in a lot of tax debt and yet has spent tens of thousands on landmark courses. I took this as a warning and just did therapy and acid instead.
-
The Sun Room
To echo others, thank you for putting your time and effort into this, I found it coherent and valuable. As an international rat/EA who’s only context for Leverage was Zoe’s post, this fleshed out my understanding of what you were trying to do in a helpful way and gave me a lot to chew on regarding my own thoughts on ideological communities.
Regarding: “Why do people seem to hate us?”
After reading Zoe’s post I had a very negative view of Leverage and Geoff, after some introspection here is my best guess as to why.
Growing up religious, I’m very aware that my individuality can be radically subordinated by:
Potent ideas
Potent community
And when those two are mixed in the form of ideological communities it’s powerful and it’s intoxicating. And like most intoxicating and powerful things, there is a great potential for harm. Thus whenever I find myself moving in a group of people high on ideas and connection, there’s a voice in the back of my mind constantly asking.
Is this a cult yet?
Is this a cult yet?
Is this a cult yet?This is a voice I know for a fact is speaking in the back of several EAs and rationalists I know personally. And I’d be shocked if anyone who’s had a brush with the failure modes of ideological community and finds themsevles in a reading group for The Precipice isn’t thinking that to themselves.
So when I read of an insular group in the memeplex I call home getting high on ideas and each-other, and then started talking about “magic” and “demons” my strong reaction was of fear. It’s happening, kill it with fire before it spreads and ruins everything.
I’m currently agnostic on whether leveraging the power of potent community and ideas is something that can be channeled safely, but I don’t blame you guys for trying; and I recognise that my initial reactions to the topic of Leverage and Geoff Anders were mixed up in with a non-trivial amount of counter productive fear.
I’m very open to the idea that I’ve seen something that wasn’t there and or wasn’t intended 😄, let me see if I can spesifically find what made me feel that way.
Okay, so I have that reaction to paragraphs like this:
White fragility is a sort of defensiveness that takes the form of a variety of strategies that white people deploy when we are confronted with how we participate in and perpetuate racismS. Whites use these strategies to deflect or avoid such a confrontation and to defend a comfortable, privileged vantage point from which race is “not an issue” (at least to us who benefit from it).
and
So if a white person should not pretend to be racially blank, and yet as DiAngelo reminds us “white identity is inherently racist,” what is a white person to do? DiAngelo’s way to thread the needle is this: “I strive to be ‘less white.’ ”
What I hear when I read this is “you are inherently white, and to be white is inheriently bad” thought it’s possible I’m pattern matching this to ideas of being and judgement that I grew up with in Church i.e “you are inherently a sinner”. Do you think this reading is totally unmerited?
And those first two points I’m on board with, but it’s the flavour of the third point that I react to because if I gave someone a bundle of ideas that I reasonably expected to be painful to process I’d try to deliver that message with as much overt kindness and recognition of their pain as I could.
And I’d expect flat statements like “try to drop your defensiveness” or “don’t take it so personally” to just make it harder to process and cause pain I guess 😅. Expecially when the receipients are disposed to think you already don’t like them.
That tweet on Australia might be a little misleading. The vaccination board’s official statement as far as I read is that an under 40 year old is more likley to die of an AZ vaccine than covid given the current covid prevalance and death rate in Australia, which is virtually non-existant. They released a pdf to this effect weighting the risks and their plan is to have everyone under 40 vaccinated on pfizer by the end of the year.
Betting that there won’t be an outbreak before then is still likley the wrong risk to be taking, but it’s less dumb than just saying AZ is more dangerous than covid full stop 😄. Indeed the Prime Minister has drawn the ire of the vacination board by opening up AZ to all ages rather than just over 40ies (apparently older people have half the risk of blood clots and obviously more risk of dying from covid).
If I was in charge of the country I’d do the same, and if I was being the game theory I wanted to see in the world I’d get the AZ now. But living in a city that has no covid and just does a 3 day lockdown until it’s gone every time there’s community transmission (4 or so times since march 2020 pretty evenly distributed) I’m weighing up whether to wait until either another outbreak or pfizer becomes available in a couple months.
Amazing work, this is really important meta problem
Aw, she did have a friend all along!
Ha, thank you! It slipped my mind, I’ve just added it :)
(edited to tone down a little)
This was quite painful to read, and I see the dynamic of these ideas as problematic.
First, possibly the most painful idea for any human to entertain: “A large part of your core identity is inherently very bad in ways you can’t see”
and then second: “The pain and fear you feel in response to this news is a sign of inherent weakness (fragility) and further proves your guilt”
and lastly: “I’m not *trying* to make you feel bad, suppress that pain and take off your silly sack cloth and ashes”
“You are inherently bad” → “Your pain on hearing that is weakness and proof of guilt” → “This dynamic is not problematic you’re being weird for over-reacting”
That’s very harsh thing to say to someone and then act like they are weird for having an adverse reaction.
I share your frustration at the book because I’m really sympathetic to the ideas that:
systemic racism is an issue
confusing racismF for racismS is a problem worth exploring
it’s encumbant upon me to look for unjust ways society has been set up that benifit me
the inherent pain majority groups face in grappling with these complex issues is a blocker to progress.
But I feel such sorrow at the idea that the solution to this dynamic is to position that pain itself as an insidious and problematic weakness. And to try and crop dust a generation of young people with that memeplex? That will lead to trouble.
If you want people to hold a painful and nuanced set of complex ideas and grapple with them they need to be held, seen, and supported.