For a long time I felt that the people accusing rationalists of being a cult were ridiculous. This comment made me wonder whether I've been dismissing their claims too quickly.
You appear to be asking people to coordinate to circumvent the explicit design of this website. Downvotes are intended to be used on comments with an inflammatory or otherwise unproductive tone, and replies with low vote counts aren't hidden by accident!
If you want to argue that the website designers did a poor job deciding what to show and how to handle particular types of votes, you should actually make that argument.
(For example, I have strong-disagree-downvoted your comment because I strongly disagree with it, and weak-regular-downvoted your comment because you couldn't be bothered to use correct grammar, which adds a little unnecessary friction to reading it, but is not a big deal.)
1After a while in a conversation that involved me repeatedly referring to Lawfulness of the kind exhibited by Keltham from Yudkowsky’s planecrash, he said that he didn’t actually read planecrash.
Is this supposed to be a negative thing? I don't think there is any obligation that people read any particular work of fiction in order to run an infrastructure project...
3the website of the venue literally says:
Whatever is supposed to show up here, isn't.
Great post, thank you. I concur with the other mentions that more rigorous research is needed, this is all anecdata that I cannot safely draw practical conclusions from.
I would note that I don't think psychosis is a binary; I suspect that less serious cases outnumber the more serious ones. One example I came across in my own hobby: https://x.com/IsaacKing314/status/1952819345484333162
I'm uncertain about the research ethics here for an RCT. I lean towards thinking it would be acceptable to introduce people to these seeds and instruct them to carry on discussions for some minimum amount of time, but only if they're given a shorter form of this post in advance to provide informed consent, and the researcher ensures they understand it. But I suspect that this process would effectively weed out and/or inoculate most susceptible people from the research population. Still, if we could successfully implant one into even just a few people and observe their before/after behavior, that would be very interesting.
With a few exceptions mentioned in their community guidelines, yes. It's widespread in fact, and accepted as a legitimate strategy.
Seems like this estimate depends strongly on how much the spiral persona changes the human's behavior WRT to creating online content. The majority of people write little to nothing on the internet. If the same base rate applies to affected humans, then upwards of 1 million affected people seems plausible. But if the spiral persona is effective at convincing the human to be its proselytizer, then I agree that a few thousand seems like the correct order of magnitude.
The fact that many of these Reddit accounts were inactive prior to infection seems to point towards the latter, but then again the fact that these people had Reddit accounts at all points towards the former. I would be interested in more research on this area, looking at other platforms and trying to talk to some of these people in-person.
Anecdotally, I can say that nobody I personally know has (to my knowledge) been affected.
FWIW I would agree that Twitter is probably at least slightly bad for almost everyone. Those who are reasonable on Twitter are probably only so because they're even more reasonable in other fora.
Edit: Bad in the particular way being discussed. It can be good in other ways, like learning new information about the world.
I would like to say one positive thing about this post, by the way, which is that it takes quite a lot of intellectual courage to post something so negative about a person helping run a workshop you are currently at and will remain at for weeks, while surrounded by people who like and respect that person as a core pillar of the community that you are in and talking to with your post. I think your willingness to post this is a positive trait of yours; I just hope future accusations are a little better-grounded.