
You're calling who a cult leader? - dfranke
http://lesswrong.com/lw/4d/youre_calling_who_a_cult_leader/
======
swombat
There's several points to this article. At first it's about cult followings,
but then it morphs into a self-examination of the consequences of being a
public figure. Finally, Eliezer ends with a question about the impulse to
praise someone highly.

1) There is an enormous difference between "having a cult-like following" and
"having a cult". Anyone who argues that Startup School is some sort of cult
facility for churning out brainwashed followers is just plain dumb.
Fortunately, I've never seen anyone admit such an opinion, so hopefully they
don't exist.

2) When you choose to become a public figure, like both Eliezer and PG have
done, you do give up a certain element of privacy. This applies as much to
intellectual figures (like pg, Einstein or Feynman) as to more common ones
(like Angelina Jolie, Tony Blair or Stephen Fry). That is part of the deal.
Some people can't take it and so they attempt to escape the public life.
Others can. But all make that trade-off between private life and public
recognition.

3) Writing an article or a public comment about how to become a writer is not
the same thing as wandering into the library to pick a book. When pg writes an
article and publishes it, that is a public statement. It is perfectly
reasonable that it gathers public feedback from a large number of people.
Comments are also completely public, and in a format that encourages
interaction. If you don't want to interact with your readers, you don't have
to. But if you choose to, you cannot complain that they will sometimes
disagree with you in bizarre ways.

4) One of the consequences of interacting with a large number of people is
that some of them will disagree with you for the sake of disagreeing. Again,
that's life... Every "mainstream" figure has contrarians who will criticise
them just because they define themselves in that way. If you can't take it,
don't be a public figure. Hopefully, the 90% of ppl who do think you're great
make up for the 10% who want to disagree with everything you say.

~~~
Eliezer
Well, I'd agree that both PG and I have "cult followings" but that's not at
all the same as "cult-like followings".

I should mention that this post is part of a series on things that prevent
nonconformists from cooperating
(<http://lesswrong.com/lw/3h/why_our_kind_cant_cooperate/>). You're right,
this sort of thing is personally uncomfortable for me, and you're right, I did
volunteer for that in the course of allowing myself to become a public figure.
But it also has consequences for the larger community.

~~~
jibiki
Would you feel that people were doing you a disservice if their admiration for
you prevented them from honestly evaluating your arguments?

~~~
Eliezer
Yes.

------
DanielBMarkham
Dude. You're in the library. Just get your stupid book and go read it? Why the
deal with analyzing everything people might say to you? (grin)

I'm at a similar loss here -- your post is about anti-admiration. The
community here is hackers -- people who break the rules in order to advance
society by building something of value. If we were interested in conforming
we'd be "IBM News" or "News for People Who Don't Disagree Much" -- both of
which would be soundly boring. We'd also be some place like reddit, where herd
mentality rules a great bit more than here (but it's still quite prevalent
here as well).

I've seen quite a bit of mindless adoration on here, not especially for pg,
but for a lot of prominent internet writers. We all know them. Famous Joe the
writer could post his grocery list and it'd have 15 points and a dozen
comments by tomorrow morning. I guess it's just something about being a public
figure. Steven King did a nice essay about this a while back but the link
escapes me. Plus, as I've pointed out before, having a hero is a completely
normal thing to do. When you're 16 or 17 its critical to have somebody to
idolize that is worth a damn. Once you get older that need doesn't go away,
but you're able to synthesize the best of multiple people, something that
isn't so easy to do with limited experience.

I think you hit the problem dead on: if you're thinking "gosh! It's PG! Why
would I disagree with him?" (or agree, for that matter) then you've already
lost it. Praise is great, but just react normally and don't worry about who
the person is. It's the value of the idea, not the value of the person.

There was an article on here a while back about the difference between people
who really succeed and those who get stuck. The gist of it was that if you
can't treat everybody, including people who can help you a great deal, as
equals, then they'll never think of you as an equal either.

Good essay! Made me think. And you're spot on about GED. Great book. :)

~~~
khafra
I'm going to speak out in favor of discrimination: I can't treat everybody as
equals. It's an information-rich world out there, and I don't have time to
read or learn even a fraction of a percent of what I'd like to.

One way I filter is by topic. I maintain a reddit account, but I subscribe to
subreddits that interest me. URL acts as another filter--if it starts with
news.ycombinator.com/ or overcomingbias.com/, for example, there's a higher
probability I want to read it.

I apply "author" below these filters. I use reddit's "friend" feature
liberally for users with a history of knowledgeable, insightful comments so I
can pick them out quickly. On other sites, I just get to know usernames and
pay attention to them. PG may have abandoned the "valuable user" highlighting,
but I still do it mentally.

I'm sure I miss some valuable information that way, but there's not much else
I can do but keep donating to SIAI and working on startup ideas until PG and
Yudkowsky get together, write an FAI in Arc, and solve all the world's
problems.

------
ralph
Can people putting up stories please consider those of us that use the site's
RSS feed? All you get for this one is

    
    
        <item>
        <title>You&#39;re calling *who* a cult leader?</title>
        <link>http://lesswrong.com/lw/4d/youre_calling_who_a_cult_leader/</link>
        <comments>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=527064</comments>
        <description>
        <![CDATA[<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=527064">Comments</a>]]>
        </description>
        </item>
    

which makes it a bit hard to judge whether to read it or not. Improving the
title would be good. Especially since any explanatory text given at the same
time as the title doesn't make it through to RSS.

I'd like to think if it's worth posting to news.yc, taking up the time of all
those that consider reading it, it's worth putting some effort into a good
title. If it isn't, perhaps it's not worth posting?

~~~
swombat
That's actually a pretty damn good title, I reckon. It grabs attention and,
hey, you're here, aren't you?

~~~
ralph
It's a crap title. A title shouldn't just grab attention; that's easy. I'm
here today on this thread, but I haven't been on many others with similarly
poor RSS appearance.

------
alanthonyc
omg, i'm not reading that article. I only come here to comment on articles
i've found for myself independently. I don't subjugate my will to that of some
random internet authority figure.

------
divia
I thought this comment:
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/4d/youre_calling_who_a_cult_leader/3...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/4d/youre_calling_who_a_cult_leader/360#comments)
had an interesting analysis of why some people are accused of being cult
leaders and not others.

------
akkartik
Here's why I avoid talking about certain topics: it's embarrassing, and mostly
not useful to the audience.

The article focusses on people determined to agree or disagree with PG.
Interestingness is a far better barometer of value than agreement. My tests
for what I say/write: Is it interesting to the audience? The subsidiary test
for what I write here: Will it make PG uncomfortable to hear? And my test for
_that_ : would it make me squirm in his position?

\---

There's endless ways to talk about how much I admire PG and Eliezer Yudkowsky.
I could describe running into Eliezer's ai_design.temp.html document back in
'98 after searching a new search engine called 'Google' for 'copycat eurisko
sources' after reading Douglas Hofstadter's book about his cool AI projects,
and my obsession with AI for the next 3 years. I could talk about the sense of
epiphany of reading 'Why nerds are unpopular' and 'the age of the essay', and
then PG's essays on startups that gradually opened up to a struggling,
mediocre grad student the third career option besides academia and bigco
research lab, with the grand culmination of 'How to do what you love'. When I
met PG I felt like how I imagine teenagers felt in front of the Beatles ("OMG,
I can't believe it.. it's really PG.. quick say something.. wait don't say
something stupid..")

How I feel about these guys is more than admiration. It's a sense of
identification intertwined with the time in my life I ran into them, and the
influence they had (<http://akkartik.name/blog/2009-03-22-20-03-26-soc>). It's
not about how good they are, or whether there are better writers out there, or
whether they can kick Chuck Norris's butt; it's about the vivid memories of
reading specific essays.

I could say all these things, and even rationalize to myself at the time that
they were interesting, or said in interesting ways. They may even be
interesting to say once. But this is a community, and there's a daily routine,
and the emphasis is on the trajectory rather than on individual comments. It
would be _super_ boring to find endless ways to talk about how much I admire
PG and Eliezer. Or to read everybody else's, I fear, far too similar stories.

\---

I like to praise the people I admire in useful ways. Like if I can focus on
something they said and add more evidence. Or contrast a point with what
somebody else said. Or respond to a commenter who seemed to miss the point. I
admire the content of their writings, and the form. A great form of praise is
by showing I understood, at a deep level, what they were trying to say. An
even better one is to try to write like they do.

(OMG, I really hope I didn't make them squirm. I hope PG didn't think this was
lame. But I can say this once. But I hope I'm not embarrassed next time I meet
PG. Will I meet PG soon?..)

~~~
Eliezer
You did pretty well at avoiding squirm-induction, I think - I'm glad you tried
to put yourself in my/his shoes.

For the record, one of the best ways to avoid inducing squirms and induce a
strong warm fuzzy feeling is to talk about what the one has inspired you to
_do_ \- i.e., "PG, it's as a result of reading your work that I learned Lisp
as my first programming language and started hacking on open source", even if
you never founded your own startup, is probably going to induce a stronger
warm fuzzy feeling than any amount of praise directed at particular essays you
liked.

~~~
akkartik
I find that sort of causality hard to draw, though. My choices are either to
make it a hard correlation with a minor accomplishment (I tried programming in
lisp, and came up with these few programs I found interesting:
<http://akkartik.name/lisp.html>) or to make it a more fuzzy correlation with
something bigger ("Everything I have done and everything I will do, would have
been less good if you hadn't written what you did."
<http://akkartik.name/about>. Or "When I write I try to imagine how you would
react to each sentence." <http://akkartik.name/?f=Me>)

Neither seems satisfactory, especially since other people influenced these
accomplishments as well. Let me attempt a middle ground -- using examples.

Eliezer, I still maintain an interest in blackboard systems to this day. For
example, here's a program I wrote a couple of weeks ago:
<http://github.com/akkartik/brooks-ruby-warrior/tree/master>. Thanks to
reading Hofstadter and you and Brooks, I knew when I approached this problem
that finding the heuristics to solve a particular AI problem is relatively
easy. What is hard is finding an open-ended architecture to integrate lots of
heuristics together. I ended up with a faint likeness of an idea others have
explored in far harder domains.

PG, as I hinted above, inspired me to come to silicon valley 2 years ago. I do
what I love. That was not something I could say a few years ago. Agh, this is
more squirm-inducing. Here's a program that came out of conversations when I
spoke to PG at a YC dinner in Boston last July:
<http://akkartik.name/newsflash>. PG induced me to leave the problem of
generating recommendations behind, at least for some domains.

I don't have more significant contributions. Hopefully that will change.

------
Hexstream
I loved the library analogy!

I agree with this article, however I want to make it very _clear_ that I agree
on the basis of the soundness and truthfulness of the matter, not because of
who the author is.

------
mahmud
Scene gossip. Nothing worth reading.

------
mannicken
Not only that, but he also uses Vi (<http://www.paulgraham.com/pfaq.html>)
when everyone knows that Emacs is the only true way!

