tbf, they're also strongly incentivised to look surprised and disappointed when a faithful is banished.
And for that matter to latch on to someone else's wild suspicions even if they're daft, because if that person's theory turns out to be wrong (or even if it's right!), you're unlikely to be the person targeted for going along with it. Jury service doesn't come with the expectation that you're likely to be voted out by teammates or "murdered" if you come up with a decent counterargument or spot something tangible that nobody else does.
I think most people has a very low capacity for living with uncertainty. They much rather believe something random, e.g. whatever religion (or conspiracy theory) at hand, than admit that they can't know.
Uncertainty is demanding as it requires you to look at things from multiple angles/reasons and evaluate all options. It is much cheaper to just select a default reason. This is especially true for creating social cohesion in a group.
Out of genuine curiosity, what causes hatred/resentment towards this community?
They also have a huge number of really unusual social norms including using their own ultra nerdy lingo with lots of obscure fiction references in regular life, widespread polyamory - and often vocal disapproval of monogamy, outspoken rejection of sexual norms including group sex parties and raising kids communally in polyamorous group homes, rejection of all political correctness, and willingness to discuss normally taboo topics in casual conversation.
In a lot of ways it reminds me of the beatniks- they're basically throwing out all of the existing culture, and trying to create something entirely new by trial and error, sometimes with quite bad results.
I've learned an awful lot of good ideas from the community that I've applied directly in my career as a scientist, and attended a few events in person, but personally wasn't able to connect with the people, I always felt like an outsider and I also found a lot of their blatant rejection and reinvention of virtually all social norms somewhat disturbing in person. There are also a lot of really kind, open minded, and brilliant people in the community- and I personally think most of their concerns over AI are well founded, but not everyone agrees.
There is a larger international group of people that participate remotely and don't relocate or adopt the full lifestyle, but it would be a mistake to think of that as something that exists entirely separately, or would exist at all without that core community.
The way you're describing it seems similar to looking at the lifestyles of monastic orders within the Catholic church as indicative of the way Catholics live generally.
Nobody would say the Catholics are a group of lay religious people that also happen for some reason to overlap in membership with another unrelated group that enjoys monastic lifestyles. The monastic lifestyle is a central key part of the religion, even if it isn't what every Catholic chooses to do. It doesn't describe the entirety of the religion either. Both the core group that follow the full lifestyle together in person, and more distant or less involved participants are all together the same movement- with both the Catholics and Rationalists.
Importantly- when one criticizes the actions of Catholic monastics, it is considered relevant as criticism of the entire organization and religion, unlike the bowling example you gave. People do rightfully blame the Catholics for things like the Spanish Inquisition, and for protecting child abusers and rapists in their monastic communities, even if the average lay person had no involvement in these beyond supporting the religion financially and socially.
One could be a Mormon and fundamentally disapprove of bowling, even if a lot of other Mormons do it, but you probably aren't going to make it as a Catholic if you think monastic lifestyles are immoral or harmful. You probably won't make it as a rationalist either if you think things like utilitarian ethics, and nonmonogamy are immoral or harmful.
I suppose I'm trying to separate the "rationalist" ideas, interpreted as a methodology of reasoning, from the normative positions that some communities advancing those methods have converged upon, even where the application of that reasoning methodology might have been involved in forming those other positions.
I do think that devotion to AI eschatology, nonmonogamy, and utilitarianism do not necessarily proceed merely from rational inquiry, and require additional normative or empirical precepts as inputs, many of which may have circulated in those communities in parallel to the discourse on reasoning. So that's sort of what the Mormon/bowling analogy was getting at.
From their own philosophy, they claim that "rationality is systematized winning" and everyone I've known that decided to focus their life around any of the 3 things you mentioned above, had consequences that were close to the exact opposite of "systematized winning."
I personally find all those norms refreshing, mind you. I'm just saying this is a place where they're really intractably interwoven. I'd assume if bowling was invented by Mormons, there'd be a lot of people thrown off when the word "Jesus" shows up in the section on evaluating strikes. Similarly, many people are thrown off when reading about statistics and it suddenly concludes God is dead and you should be polyamorous.
Take longtermism, for example. This is a segment of the rationalist community that focuses on doing the most good for humanity in the very long term. The basic idea goes: if humanity is able to get off this planet and go colonize the galaxy, there are untold quintillions of additional lives that would be lived. But that future is uncertain. Something that increases the chances of it happening by 0.1% would have an expected value of saving quadrillions of lives. If you can increase these chances by one in a trillion, that’s worth orders of magnitude more than saving a child’s life right now.
This is sound thinking so far. A fun little thought experiment. The problem is that you can’t rigorously apply it practically. Predicting the future of humanity is hard and probabilities assigned to various events aren’t rigorous. In practice, this mindset either leads to fairly obvious conclusions like that it’s important to fight climate change, or it’s off the wall stuff like being obsessed with AI safety. And the veneer of math produces an attitude that anyone who disagrees is not only wrong, but provably wrong in a mathematical fashion, which doesn’t tend to endear.
I'm not going to walk past a drowning kid in a lake so I can urgently go to a nerd meeting planning to save a quintillion imaginary sci-fi distant future kids - even if some made up math says the expected value of the meeting is a thousand times higher.
Fundamentally, I do have deontological ethics- I think the ancient stoics basically had morality/ethics right, and admire people that take a Socrates like stand on doing what is right on principle even in the face of manipulative people trying to control you by creating bad consequences.
It’s the usual GIGO problem. These arguments almost always start with a bunch of completely made-up numbers. It doesn’t matter how good the math is, the results will be useless.
It can work. When a government regulator decides whether to mandate some new safety equipment and after rigorous technical analysis concludes that it would result in net lives lost and so doesn’t require it, that’s sensible. But thats not what happens here.
I occasionally see this problem acknowledged, but even then, the given error bars are way too small and then it’s just full steam ahead anyway.
It could be dangerous anyway, but this makes it even more so.
I think that a community that engages in brute math with unbounded values for priors to justify action would be worrisome. By choosing the right priors you can conclude almost anything. But I actually think that it is just roughly the same decision making that the rest of the world makes, with an unusual post-facto justification that also feeds one's ego.
(This is about the SF Bay Area subculture dubbed the rationalists, obviously not related to the philosophical moment of the same name, critiqued by Kant in the late 18th century)
[1] https://medium.com/@sefashapiro/a-community-warning-about-zi...
Going Infinite is a clear example of being fooled by this. SBF says he is actings on all of this bayesian probability stuff and Michael Lewis falls for it, concluding that SBF is actually thinking more clearly and rationally than the rest of us when actually SBF is just a flake and goes back on his commitments because he doesn't really care.
I served on a criminal trial jury (U.S.) for 3 weeks and when the trial was over, there was no restriction on who I could talk to or what I could say about the experience.
I tried to give useful feedback to both of the lawyers, since I suspect neither of them were really happy with the mistrial outcome.
You could think somebody is probably guilty but also feel obligated to acquit them. For a famous example I somehow doubt all the OJ Simpson jurors thought he was innocent, but he was acquitted nonetheless.
One would hope, but back in the day it was a powerful tool to do the opposite where juries disagreeing with the law would find minorities guilty when they obviously weren't.
Appellate courts very rarely touch jury decisions. I know someone who was found guilty at trial and a week later a jury member wrote a letter saying she was persuaded to change her "not guilty" verdict by two other jury members who hadn't declared their relationship to each other, were using their cellphones in the jury room and had looked up the criminal history of the defendant in the newspapers (which turned out to be completely wrong). Even with that letter the trial court said it didn't affect the verdict, but in this case the appeals court made the rare decision to overrule. Interestingly they mentioned a racial issue too: "where a juror makes a clear statement that indicates he or she relied on racial stereotypes or animus to convict a criminal defendant, the Sixth Amendment requires that the no-impeachment rule give way in order to permit the trial court to consider the evidence of the juror's statement and any resulting denial of the jury trial guarantee."
Generally, Jurors who want to talk about it in public are few and far between because there is no upside and a lot of downside.
I suspect most of the players are still trying to identify and eliminate traitors though: they do seem genuinely surprised/disappointed when a faithful is banished. It is quite scary how they latch onto tiny things and become convinced. I suspect that as soon as the faithful feel they are being targeted, they feel pressured and act in ways that reinforce everybody's ideas about them. Defensiveness gets interpreted as guilt very easily.
It's really hard to know whether this transfers to the jury system. It's hard for there to be an open discussions about how decisions get made by juries because people obviously can't talk about their experiences. To me juries feel like the 'least worst' way to make such decisions and you do need to be unanimous or extremely close to unanimous if the judge gives permission for that.
I wondered about the order of entry at breakfast too, but I've read that they film the scene in multiple permutations so they can't just figure it out from that. I don't know if that is accurate that film different permutations, but I find it hard to believe that nobody has cottoned on to the idea that the last couple of people in are faithful.