[huberway]

Can we talk about how the Rationalists seem to attract mentally unstable people to their trainings in mental technology, while also targeting the young with so-called rationality camps?

If at the apex of an organization you have a person who has organized his life in such a way as to have sex with several other people, and if many people involved in the movement pay a tithe to the organization or charities it designates, and if many of the members of this organization go crazy thinking about the impending hell (of AGI), how is this different from a cult?

[bhaney]

Am I missing something? The only mention of "rationalists" in this article is a note about how this cult leader considers rationalists to be her enemies. What's the relevance of your hostility towards them?

[Viliam1234]

About ten years ago, Ziz participated in a workshop (multiple workshops? not sure) organized by the so-called rationalist community in the Bay Area. Later she was banned from the community, organized a protest against it, got briefly arrested, faked her suicide and disappeared... now appeared again...

She also recruited some of her cult members from the community (not sure which ones).

So, if you want, you can frame it as the rationalist community being a dangerous place that attracts sick people. Or you could frame is as anarchists being violent, vegans being intolerant, or trans women being crazy... because the Zizans are all of that. Everyone is free to chose their own story about them.

It may or may not be important that most rationalists / anarchists / vegans / trans women are not crazy murderers, so maybe the story is mostly about Ziz being Ziz and succeeding to get a few (less than ten) followers.

[nl]

They are apparently a "a radical offshoot of the rationalist community"[1].

I suspect that as with many off-shots they hate the original community.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/vermont-border-agent-death-expo... is a better, longer form of this article

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_David_Maland

[throw16180339]

It's a cult whose members think they're too smart for cults.

[mmooss]

That unfortunately describes many people in a political grouping that focuses on disinformation and disruption.

[rtkwe]

It has a lot in common with cults and religions, "we've found a way of thinking that can let you make perfect decisions and figure out things in new fields quickly sometime even figuring out things that elude 'experts' in that field". It's not inherently cultish but that idea can attract the same kinds of people who might get sucked into other cults but don't because they're atheist or agnostic.

[palisade]

That cult is kind of the opposite tho, they were looking forward to the impending hell of AGI and thought they were doing things that would get on the good side of the evil overseer AI of the future. If anything they weren't going crazy over it they felt comforted.

[plagiarist]

They are too rational for religion but desperately need meaning (or whatever) so they convinced themselves they could literally talk directly to god (after he exists he will simulate their exact personalities at this exact moment in time).

[lmm]

Pick your favourite cult checklist and see how much applies. Rationalists certainly have some cult-like characteristics, but e.g. practically any environmentalist group has all the ones you list and more (especially the targeting the young part). In particular the Rationalists I know don't discourage questioning and dissent (quite the opposite), don't focus much on bringing in money or members, don't give their leaders any exalted status or obey them unquestioningly (quite the opposite), don't encourage people to break the law or disobey the proper authorities, and don't try to isolate people from their outside friends or family.

[nl]

I suggest you read the section starting "The Zizians, believe it or not, are not the only cult-like groupuscule to have emerged from the heady stew of the Rationalist community" from [1]

Some quotes:

> (Alignment Group) would attempt to articulate a ‘demon’ which had infiltrated our psyches from one of the rival groups, its nature and effects, and get it out of our systems using debugging tools

> there were also psychotic breaks involving demonic subprocess narratives,” and where people in positions of power would “debug” underlings. “I experienced myself and others being distanced from old family and friends, who didn't understand how high-impact the work we were doing was,”

> Scott Alexander, maybe the most prominent Rationalist besides Yudkowsky, suggested that the problem was not really M.I.R.I. or C.F.A.R. so much as that Taylor was in a cult-like group centered around a former M.I.R.I. head

> I don’t know that I have the patience or energy to really get to the bottom of it all except to say: It all kinda sounds pretty culty to me! And I haven’t even gotten into the Burning Man camp Black Lotus or the Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth

etc

[1] https://maxread.substack.com/p/the-zizians-and-the-rationali...

[Manuel_D]

From what I can glean, the Zizians were largely rejected by rationalists and ultimately had a falling out.

[throwme0827349]

I think this is about as reasonable as conflating all hippies with Manson, or all Christians with the Waco people.

I have met a few "rationalist" types, and I went to a "rationalist" meetup in San Francisco, although they called it something else and didn't care for that label, but couldn't really get other people to stop calling them that.

The overall vibe was like a tech meetup crossed with a church picnic. There were a lot of programmers and grad students there to do a little professional networking, talk about books they like, whether they should be donating to charity a little, which charities worked best, and how to avoid throwing away the leftover cookies.

The subject of AI millennialism was not broached in my presence, all though I did meet some people who were working on AI. If there were any psychos or cult leaders there (or trans people for that matter), I didn't notice, and no one tried to recruit me to anything. It was a totally normal and pleasant experience.

[dehugger]

What do trans people have to do with psychos and cult leaders? That seems like a bit of a non sequitur.

[fortran77]

> Can we talk about how the Rationalists seem to attract mentally unstable people to their trainings in mental technology, while also targeting the young with so-called rationality camps?

Probably not, at least not here.

[sva_]

> seem to attract mentally unstable people

This AGI doomerism, which is now also popularized on YouTube etc, is very closely related to the kind of existential questions that mentally unstable people probably ask themselves.

The bar of entry is pretty low, as you need no skills really. You can bootstrap ideas that sound convincing to yourself from nothing pretty quick. That's my hot take anyways.

[prododev]

AI doomerism I've seen largely boils down to pretty standard critiques of capitalism -- who controls the means of production (the capital class), who will benefit most from increases in productivity (capital class), who is going to end up poorer (working class).

Unless you mean the folks who believe AI will become AGI and start hurting people directly. Those folks are pretty fringe.

[hollerith]

Is there any AI-doomer group or individual that in your opinion is neither "mentally unstable", cult-like, "crazy" nor duped by a cult leader?

By "AI-doomer", I mean any person or group that believes that AI research is a threat to human survival.