this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
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SneerClub

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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.

AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)

This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.

[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]

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EA is becoming a cult? It must be wokeism fault (x.com)
submitted 6 months ago by shinigami3@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems
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[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 17 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

The People Who Pray At Prompts are suddenly very worried about cults.

E: haha spoke too soon

from the replies:

Do you really think "cult" is a useful category/descriptor here?

My view: things identified as "cults" have a bunch of good traits. EA should, where possible, adopt the good traits and reject the bad ones, and ignore whether they're associated with the label "cult" or not.

Wonder what went wrong there, did they just see the word EA and Cult and went 'people are calling Rationalism a cult again, time to deploy the Rationalist answer. A bot? Something else? (More edit, ah prob somethign else as this is prob a reaction to the whole line of tweets and not that specific tweet, a line of tweets which are doing the geek social fallacies there is a little bit more to being a cult than just ostracizing people)

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 13 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

I've been appreciating the term "high-control group" as an alternative, with reference to the BITE [1] model of thought control. People trapped in the group housing situation easily check all of those boxes.

[1] https://freedomofmind.com/cult-mind-control/bite-model-pdf-download/ (note: Steven Hassan has done good work, but can be a little too profit-seeking himself imho)

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 10 points 6 months ago

good thing Nonlinear has never operated as high-control,

[–] corbin@awful.systems 9 points 6 months ago

I've thought about this angle a lot too. As an apostate Christian and practicing Pastafarian, I keenly feel the difference between high-control and low-control religious groups, and the control bothers me much more than the religiosity. BITE is still my gold standard to this day for understanding whether somebody is being coerced/controlled.

Also, if you think cultists get pissed at their beliefs being called a "cult", watch how much more they flip out at being called a "high-control group". It's a very good disarming technique.