The Shops at Waterloo Town Square - we will congregate in the indoor seating area next to the Your Independent Grocer with the trees sticking out in the middle of the benches (pic) at 7:00 pm for 20 minutes before walking back to Kaleb’s house.
Activity
This week we’ll be reading a selection of posts from the Sequences: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s massive collection of blog posts on rationality from early in the movement’s history, which generally serves as the foundation of the community.
Some of you may have read the Sequences before, but many of you likely haven’t, and for those of us who have, it has in many cases been quite a while. So, we’re doing a refresher! This week, we’re reading Death Spirals, which is about some of the dangers one encounters when building and interacting with communities—particularly communities like Rationality.
Readings
The sub-sequence can be found here, but if you’d like individual links to the readings, they are:
The readings are relatively short, and it should only take about an hour to read through all of them, so don’t be intimidated by how many there are.
Discussion questions
Where have you seen an affective death spiral in your own life, either in yourself or in a group you were part of? What, if anything, broke it?
Eliezer says that to resist the happy death spiral you should not refuse to admire anything, but refuse to believe your Great Idea is good at everything. Pick something you admire a lot (a person, tool, framework, movement). What is one thing it is bad at?
Our movement itself is an obvious candidate for a cult. What are the warning signs you’d watch for here specifically? Have you seen any of them?
We’ve seen a few cults form out of our community: Where do you think they went wrong, and why do you think our broader community hasn’t made the same mistakes (yet)?
Evaporative cooling means when a skeptic leaves a group, the group gets more extreme. Is there a group you’ve left where you were one of the moderating voices? Is there a group you should be staying in for that reason?
“Lonely Dissent” argues that real dissent is uncomfortable, and that wearing black is not it. Do you hold any beliefs that would actually cost you something socially to say out loud in this room? (Saying it is optional)
The Asch results suggest a single ally makes dissent much easier. Have you ever been that one ally for someone else, or wished someone had been for you?
Is the “Cultish Countercultishness” worry real? Does the effort to not look like a cult ever make groups worse at the things cults are good at (commitment, mutual support, getting things done)?
These posts were written before the replication crisis: How much do you trust the studies cited in the post? Which studies, if you found out they failed to replicate, would make you seriously reconsider the contents of one or more of the readings?
The Shops at Waterloo Town Square - we will congregate in the indoor seating area next to the Your Independent Grocer with the trees sticking out in the middle of the benches (pic) at 7:00 pm for 20 minutes before walking back to Kaleb’s house.
Activity
This week we’ll be reading a selection of posts from the Sequences: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s massive collection of blog posts on rationality from early in the movement’s history, which generally serves as the foundation of the community.
Some of you may have read the Sequences before, but many of you likely haven’t, and for those of us who have, it has in many cases been quite a while. So, we’re doing a refresher!
This week, we’re reading Death Spirals, which is about some of the dangers one encounters when building and interacting with communities—particularly communities like Rationality.
Readings
The sub-sequence can be found here, but if you’d like individual links to the readings, they are:
The readings are relatively short, and it should only take about an hour to read through all of them, so don’t be intimidated by how many there are.
Discussion questions
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