“My tentative best guess on how EAs and Rationalists sometimes turn crazy” by Habryka

Epistemic status: This is a pretty detailed hypothesis that I think overall doesn’t add up to more than 50% of my probability mass on explaining datapoints like FTX, Leverage Research, the Zizians etc. I might also be really confused about the whole topic.Since the FTX explosion, I’ve been thinking a lot about what caused FTX and, relatedly, what caused other similarly crazy- or immoral-seeming groups of people in connection with the EA/Rationality/X-risk communities. I think  there is a common thread between a lot of the people behaving in crazy or reckless ways, that it can be explained, and that understanding what is going on there might be of enormous importance in modeling the future impact of the extended LW/EA social network.The central thesis: "People want to fit in"I think the vast majority of the variance in whether people turn crazy (and ironically also whether people end up aggressively “normal”) is dependent on their desire to fit into their social environment. The forces of conformity are enormous and strong, and most people are willing to quite drastically change how they relate to themselves, and what they are willing to do, based on relatively weak social forces, especially in the context of a bunch of social hyperstimulus (lovebombing is one central example of social hyperstimulus, but also twitter-mobs and social-justice cancelling behaviors seem similar to me in that they evoke extraordinarily strong reactions in people). My current model of this kind of motivation in people is quite path-dependent and myopic. Just because someone could leave a social context that seems kind of crazy or abusive to them and find a different social context that is better, with often only a few weeks of effort, they rarely do this (they won't necessarily find a great social context, since social relationships do take quite a while to form, but at least when I've observed abusive dynamics, it wouldn't take them very long to find one that is better than the bad situation in which they are currently in).  Instead people are very attached, much more than I think rational choice theory would generally predict, to the social context that they end up in, with people very rarely even considering the option of leaving and joining another one. This means that I currently think that the vast majority of people (around 90% of the population or so) are totally capable of being pressured into adopting extreme beliefs, being moved to extreme violence, or participating in highly immoral behavior, if you just put them into a social context where the incentives push in the right direction (see also Milgram and the effectiveness of military drafts). In this model, the primary reason for why people are not crazy is because social institutions and groups that drive people to extreme action tend to be short lived. The argument here is an argument from selection, not planning. Cults that drive people to extreme action die out quite quickly since they make enemies, or engage in various types of self-destructive behavior. Moderate religions that [...] --- First published: June 21st, 2023 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MMM24repKAzYxZqjn/my-tentative-best-guess-on-how-eas-and-rationalists --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.