The tl;dr version of this is that "Applied Rationality" is a New Age cult, whose God is "Rationality" and whose Devil is human nature, rather than watered down Eastern mysticism.
The creepy part is how they expect you to live together and unquestionably repeat the mantras ("techniques"). It reeks of dianetics and other bullshit that claims to be a cure-all for all of your problems.
This is a bit disingenuous but not completely. I think a comparable service would be outdoor wilderness survival training, like BOSS in Boulder. Part of what makes it effective is that you are dislodged from an environment in which you can comfortably cling to the heuristics you already use to get by. In the new environment, you have to adjust all your norms and it provides more of a blank slate, cognitively, on which to imprint the lessons.
The CFAR stuff is like this too, but rather than being an outdoor wilderness survival school, it's just a survival school. It's even weirder than what it would take to survive in the wilderness, because the space of mental tools is so much more vast than the space of physical tools tailored to one type of environment.
I would guess that many CFAR employees would like their service to feel more like a "boot camp" sort of thing -- a transformative experience in which the intensity of learning and the bandwidth demanded are extremely high compared with what that intensity and bandwidth will be back in regular life. But I also think they don't want it to feel like an indoctrination, and would want to preserve and even enhance someone's ability to be skeptical, even about CFAR itself.
In that sense, promoting self skepticism, CFAR is very different than a cult, and just because it shares some superficial aspects of a cult doesn't mean it's fair to make that comparison.
But, but, I still do agree with you that CFAR has work to do to prove that they are not just a marketing engine fleecing bored rich people who fancy themselves seeming like philosopher savants or some shit. Merely having verifiably good, open content, like the LessWrong sequences, is not enough. They further have to show that they are willing to change, and verify that they aren't just a certain kind of boutique fraternity.
I for one would really welcome hearing ideas about alternative ways to teach rationality. For example, I recently read the science fiction book The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle, and I was particularly interested in a part of the book where humans communicate with a far more intelligent being. Hoyle's writing is fun and all, but what I really thought was cool was the idea of a human (Hoyle himself) trying to emulate a being far smarter than him, and how believably he did this. But of course, on closer inspection, we should expect that Hoyle's portrayal would not be good enough, or else such superior intellect would be in our grasp merely by imagining how it should sound.
I think I got more out of reading that fiction book, in terms of thinking about how to think better, than I did out of vast swaths of LessWrong. Maybe that says more about me than anything else, but it is a data point that maybe there are all kinds of ways to elucidate the useful tools of rationalism, and the format of CFAR might not even be close to optimal unless your goal is to vend a status merit badge to a certain set of semi-wealthy people.
The classic cult tell is the fact that if you strip out all the claims to spiritual and moral wisdom, cults exist to service the leadership with money, narcissistic strokes and a sense of authority, sexual opportunities, and free labour. (I have a non-scientific theory that this is how religions propagate. They're such an effective way to provide all of the above that whatever the dogma, the social dynamics are just too attractive for weaker individuals to ignore.)
Aside from money, it's hard to see how that applies here. (If Yudkowsky was running this personally I'd definitely be concerned.)
But while there are obvious culty elements here, there doesn't seem to be a funnel which uses introductory bootcamps/workshops to find the most suggestible converts so it can sell them more and more expensive follow-ons. There also isn't any sense that there's a "reward" scheme where loyal followers are allowed into an inner circle - from which they can publicly purged if they misbehave.
It looks more like there are some interesting brain hacks on offer, packaged into a format that's maybe too intense to be ideal.
By this definition I would argue that most SF start-ups are more similar to cults than CFAR is -- though as I said in my comment above, I do agree that CFAR hasn't conclusively proved yet that this is more than just a sort of Space Camp for bored rich people of a particular variety.
oh my god yes. I'm frequently creeped out by how much my various employers have wanted me to be TOTALLY AND ENTIRELY on board with their mission. like, I like making awesome software, and I like customers enjoying it, but plz no I do not want to devote my life to x thing just because it's both fun and gives me money. If I'm going to devote my life to anything, it's going to be doing something like building computational models of the genome or something.
> maybe there are all kinds of ways to elucidate the useful tools of rationalism, and the format of CFAR might not even be close to optimal unless your goal is to vend a status merit badge to a certain set of semi-wealthy people.
I've been keeping an eye on CFAR for a while and they'd likely agree that there are a bunch of ways to teach this stuff. They're just personnel- and money-constrained and pedagogical-methods R&D takes up enough of their budget.
You're being down-voted but I was about to say the same thing (minus the bullshit part). They do seem like an evolved version of the same old New Age philosophy, which is an evolved version of the age old Eastern mysticism, which is technically all religion in traditional sense. Whatever.
I'm confused. There are a lot of things I might associate things like "behavioral economics" with, but New Age wouldn't have been what I'd have expected. Where do you get that from?
Actually, the proper definition (for the sake of understanding) is to treat this phenomenon as psychological therapy sessions. Based on my reading at the source, this group and the people involved, are engaged in a group therapy sessions. Now, one can bring association to religion, fairy tales, science, etc, but the essence stays the same. It is all about human beings trying to find meaning in their lives.
The creepy part is how they expect you to live together and unquestionably repeat the mantras ("techniques"). It reeks of dianetics and other bullshit that claims to be a cure-all for all of your problems.