Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished.
I think this is probably partial, given claims in this post, and positive-agreevote concerns here (though clearly all of the agree voters might be wrong).
I think you may have very high standards? By these standards, I don’t think there are any communities at all that would score 0 here.
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I think this is nonzero, I think subsets of the community do display “excessively zealous” commitment to a leader given “What would SBF do” stickers. Outside views of LW (or at least older versions of it would probably worry that this was an EY cult.
I was not aware of “What would SBF do” stickers. Hopefully those people feel really dumb now. I definitely know about EY hero worship but I was going to count that towards a separate rationalist/LW cult count instead of the EA cult count.
I think you may have very high standards? By these standards, I don’t think there are any communities at all that would score 0 here.
I think where we differ is that I’m not making a comparison of whether EA is worse than this compared to other groups, if every group scores in the range of 0.5-1 I’ll still score 0.5 as 0.5, and not scale 0.5 down to 0 and 0.75 down to 0.5. Maybe that’s the wrong way to approach it but I think the least culty organization can still have cult-like tendencies, instead of being 0 by definition.
Also if it’s true that someone working at GPI was facing these pressures from “senior scholars in the field”, then that does seem like reason for others to worry. There also has been a lot of discussion on the forum about the types of critiques that seem like they are acceptable and the ones that aren’t etc. Your colleague also seems to believe this is a concern, for example, so I’m currently inclined to think that 0.2 is pretty reasonable and I don’t think I should update much based on your comment-but happy for more pushback!
I think you may have very high standards? By these standards, I don’t think there are any communities at all that would score 0 here.
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I was not aware of “What would SBF do” stickers. Hopefully those people feel really dumb now. I definitely know about EY hero worship but I was going to count that towards a separate rationalist/LW cult count instead of the EA cult count.
I think where we differ is that I’m not making a comparison of whether EA is worse than this compared to other groups, if every group scores in the range of 0.5-1 I’ll still score 0.5 as 0.5, and not scale 0.5 down to 0 and 0.75 down to 0.5. Maybe that’s the wrong way to approach it but I think the least culty organization can still have cult-like tendencies, instead of being 0 by definition.
Also if it’s true that someone working at GPI was facing these pressures from “senior scholars in the field”, then that does seem like reason for others to worry. There also has been a lot of discussion on the forum about the types of critiques that seem like they are acceptable and the ones that aren’t etc. Your colleague also seems to believe this is a concern, for example, so I’m currently inclined to think that 0.2 is pretty reasonable and I don’t think I should update much based on your comment-but happy for more pushback!