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Stephen Saperstein Frug's avatar

This is fascinating, although for me (not being a member of the rationalist community) much of what is fascinating is the entire notion of the cultic milieu (which I'd never come across before) as much as its application to the rationalists.

I assume there has been work drawing structural parallels between the vast web of the cultic milieu and other cultural webs: for instance, the culture of fandom (from SF to anime to all sorts of things) strikes me as parallel in interesting ways: overlapping, people tend to move from one to the other, intense, scholarly in an out-of-academia sort of way, interested in forgotten/ignored/rejected things (in this case, aesthetic rather than knowledge per se), etc. I wonder whether this might be a more generalizable model of how culture works on a vast scale and different type of platform (mass media and internet) than the localized village/tribe model that we often think of when we think of culture.

Anyway, lots of food for thought. Thanks.

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Sniffnoy's avatar

It looks to me like one obvious difference between rationalists and the more generic cultic milieu is the idea of "suppressed knowledge". The inference that "someone is covering it up" relies on a belief in the general competence of most people that rationalists, it would seem to me, do not share. I think we'd generally say that if we're doing better it's due to ignored or rejected knowledge, not suppressed knowledge; there doesn't need to be any suppressive conspiracy to explain why these ideas aren't more popular, because it turns out that the propagation of good ideas is actually hard and not automatic! Even in the few cases where one might reasonably claim suppression, this is generally due to compartmentalization and doublethink, not active lying. You don't need to claim people are lying when you can simply say they're irrational instead.

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