FTX and Alameda sound extremely bad (obviously worse in effect than Leverage!) to me in a way that is not particularly “cult”, although I get that’s a bit vague (and stories of SBF threatening people are closer to that, as opposed to the massive fraud.) As for the other stuff, I haven’t heard the relevant stories, but you may be right, I am not particularly clued into this stuff, and it’s possible it’s just coincidence I have heard about crazy founder worship, and sleep deprivation etc. , vague stuff about cleansing yourself of “metaphorically” demonic forces, at Leverage but not at those other places. I recall bullying accusations against someone high up at Nonlinear, but not the details. Probably I shouldn’t have made the relative comparison between rationalists and non-rationalists, because I haven’t really been following who all the orgs are, and what they’ve been doing. Though on the other hand, I feel like the rationalists have hit a high enough level of cult-y incidents that the default is probably that other orgs are less like that. But maybe I should have just stuck to ‘there are conflicting reports on whether epistemics are actually all that good in the Bay scene, and some reasonable evidence against.’
FTX and Alameda sound extremely bad (obviously worse in effect than Leverage!) to me in a way that is not particularly “cult”, although I get that’s a bit vague (and stories of SBF threatening people are closer to that, as opposed to the massive fraud.) As for the other stuff, I haven’t heard the relevant stories, but you may be right, I am not particularly clued into this stuff, and it’s possible it’s just coincidence I have heard about crazy founder worship, and sleep deprivation etc. , vague stuff about cleansing yourself of “metaphorically” demonic forces, at Leverage but not at those other places. I recall bullying accusations against someone high up at Nonlinear, but not the details. Probably I shouldn’t have made the relative comparison between rationalists and non-rationalists, because I haven’t really been following who all the orgs are, and what they’ve been doing. Though on the other hand, I feel like the rationalists have hit a high enough level of cult-y incidents that the default is probably that other orgs are less like that. But maybe I should have just stuck to ‘there are conflicting reports on whether epistemics are actually all that good in the Bay scene, and some reasonable evidence against.’