I personally think people overrate people’s stated reasons for extreme behaviour and underrate the material circumstances of their life. In particular, loneliness
As one counterexample, EA is really rare in humans, but does seem more fueled by principles than situations.
(Otoh, if situations make one more susceptible to adopting some principles, is any really the “true cause”? Like plausibly me being abused as a child made me want to reduce suffering more, like this post describes. But it doesn’t seem coherent to say that means the principles are overstated as an explanation for my behavior.
I dunno why loneliness would be different; first thought is that loneliness means one has less of a community to appeal to, so there’s less conformity biases preventing such a person from developing divergent or (relatively) extreme views; the fact that they can find some community around said views and have conformity pressures towards them is also a factor of course; and that actually would be an ‘unprincipled’ reason to adopt a view so i guess for that case it does make sense to say, “it’s more situation(-activated biases) than genuine (less-biasedly arrived at) principles”.
An implication in my view is that this isn’t particularly about extreme behavior; less biased behavior is just rare across the spectrum. (Also, if we narrow in on people who are trying to be less biased, their behavior might be extreme; e.g., Rationalists trying prevent existential risk from AI seems deeply weird from the outside))
I read this more like the guy was lonely and wanted community so was looking for some kind of secular religion to provide grounding to his life.
I personally think people overrate people’s stated reasons for extreme behaviour and underrate the material circumstances of their life. In particular, loneliness https://time.com/6223229/loneliness-vulnerable-extremist-views/
(would genuinely be interested to hear counter arguments to this! I’m not a researcher so honestly no idea how to go about testing that hypothesis)
As one counterexample, EA is really rare in humans, but does seem more fueled by principles than situations.
(Otoh, if situations make one more susceptible to adopting some principles, is any really the “true cause”? Like plausibly me being abused as a child made me want to reduce suffering more, like this post describes. But it doesn’t seem coherent to say that means the principles are overstated as an explanation for my behavior.
I dunno why loneliness would be different; first thought is that loneliness means one has less of a community to appeal to, so there’s less conformity biases preventing such a person from developing divergent or (relatively) extreme views; the fact that they can find some community around said views and have conformity pressures towards them is also a factor of course; and that actually would be an ‘unprincipled’ reason to adopt a view so i guess for that case it does make sense to say, “it’s more situation(-activated biases) than genuine (less-biasedly arrived at) principles”.
An implication in my view is that this isn’t particularly about extreme behavior; less biased behavior is just rare across the spectrum. (Also, if we narrow in on people who are trying to be less biased, their behavior might be extreme; e.g., Rationalists trying prevent existential risk from AI seems deeply weird from the outside))