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veejarAmrev t1_j2724im wrote

As you said, it's kind of cult in the EA community. Outside of that, no one bothers. They haven't done anything significant to be of any value to the community.

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frenchmap t1_j2ark9g wrote

what does EA stand for?

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Flag_Red t1_j2cql0a wrote

Effective Altruism

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frenchmap t1_j2efp3r wrote

How does a philosophical ideology of "using evidence-based reasoning to help others" result in a machine learning cult?

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Flag_Red t1_j2ek25d wrote

I, personally, don't consider LessWrong a cult (I lurk the blog, and have even been to an ACX meetup). There's definitely a very insular core community, though, which regularly gets caught up in "cults of personality". Yudkowski is the most obvious person to point to here, but Leverage Research is the best example of cult behaviour coming out of LessWrong and the EA community IMO.

With regards to machine learning in particular, there's some very extreme views about the mid/long term prospects of AI. Yudkowski himself explicitly believes humanity is doomed, and AI will takeover the world within our lifetimes.

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ThePerson654321 t1_j2804lq wrote

You should read LessWrong

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KvanteKat t1_j291xw0 wrote

I'm not sure reading LessWrong will necessaryly disuade someone who is already a bit sceptical of the Rationalist EA community from believing that there is something culty going on. One of the things that really rubbed me the wrong way about that blog back in the day (I'll be up front and say that I haven't been keeping up with it for the past 10 years) was exactly how insular a lot of the writing was and how little it seriously engaged with existing literature and research in favor of reinventing the wheel and relying on their own private language which was not used by anyone else working in similar fields (as an example, Yudkovski is far from the first person to promote naive Bayesianism (basically the idea that if you get good enough at applying Bayes' rule, you will have solved the problem of induction), but if you only read his blog back then you could easily come to believe that he was doing groundbreaking stuff with respect to this topic when this was far from the case).

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