Set Adrift

Throughout history weird cults have occasionally formed.

The eastern mystery cults of the late B.C. era, the Muenster rebellion, Quakers, Shakers, dozens of cults in the Great Awakening, the Oneida, the pre-scientology UFO cults of the mid-20th century, Scientology, Jonestown, The Family, Unification Church, Rajneeshpuram, Children of God, Heaven's Gate... the juggalos? Who knows.

It happens all the time and each time the cult grows very quickly until it becomes an organism large enough that people hear of and reject it before they can be exposed to the infectious hook. Every cult has a few things to say where any reasonable person will say "huh, you have a point."

The speed of that growth phase is critical. By the mid-70s the American public knew to not listen to the guys in orange robes at the airport and the Hare Krishna plateaued.

We are still in the growth phase on the new internet meta-cult. The population as a whole is not ready to say "oh, I know there are kooks on the internet who will lie to me and I know how to recognize them."

A memetic infection is inevitably going to be worse with an internet to spread it. It's not clear when this one might fizzle because the available set of hosts is billions instead of thousands for the first time ever.

So yes. It's worse. It will probably be the most infectious cult spread since the origins of Christianity and Islam, and unlike those two it has nothing positive to offer. Without the internet it would just be a few hundred people in a compound, but now? We won't know how far it can get until it's over.

And a few decades later we'll have another, and another. It's enough to make you wonder if we've found the Great Filter.

Previously if you had an extreme opinion, you had to moderate it because others around in the real world most likely don't share the same opinion. This causes extreme opinions to stay at the fringes of society.

Now with the internet, you can find any community willing to share your extreme opinion, geographic closeness is no longer needed. Echo chambers then form and you feel like you're part of a community, and so no one moderates your opinions. If anything, opinions get even more extreme.

Getting worse with a zoomed out view of history? Probably not. One of the deadliest conflicts in history was started essentially by a (likely schizophrenic) individual who believed he was the brother of Jesus over 150 years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion). Getting worse than say, 2010 or something? Perhaps.

While cults have always been around I feel like the "infection rate" of them has become higher. Instead of a small group of individuals that separate from society (as in the article) it feels like large portions of the population have all taken on somewhat cultlike behaviors of beliefs.

It's nothing new. Cults, populist demagogues, and other forms of magical thinking spread more during bad times. Unreason, unreasonableness, and substituted realities take hold and waste the lives and time of many people if they can't see any alternate, tangible, positive conclusion from reason, reasonableness, and the status quo.

>But it's incredible to me that people with access to information (even phd candidates like Shukree Abdul-Rashed) can fall so far into these cults.

Mental illness doesn't discriminate. Intelligence before the fact has nothing to do with it (and has often been shown to make someone even more prone to it). People get sick, and are subsequently preyed upon and victimized because of it. Works the same every time, from Jonestown to QAnon.

Worth remembering that there are about 330 million people in the United States. The very fact that this is newsworthy is evidence that it's not that common on a percentage-of-population basis.

The money isn't the problem. I basically use private mode for everything so I don't want to signin and even if that wasn't the case I don't want to register or give out a trackable and resellable payment info to an organization that tracks what I read and how long and what related content I engage with on their site.

I am currently working on a project actually where the client came to us with a similar NYT article and said „I want something like this“. The umbrella term for these is „scrollytelling“, I think, and the NYT does it very tastefully. Another fine effect they have is highlighting details in an image when you scroll, e.g. in this:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/03/11/nyregion/nyc-...

Whether on a peanut butter sandwich or in an NYT article, isn’t it the extra fluff that makes life worth living?

I just can’t understand the attitude of so many people here on HN who seem to wish everything was so plain.

I'm ... notafan.

Case in point, there've been a few Octavia Butler pieces out recently. The one that hit HN was from Vulture, and is ... a pretty conventionally-formatted article:

<https://www.vulture.com/article/octavia-e-butler-profile.htm...>

(HN discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33747547>)

I'd also run across an article at the NYT and ... it's utterly unreadable.

<https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/11/17/arts/octavia-...>

I hadn't actually tried reading it on a desktop until just now, but yeah, it fails there too. And yes, I have things locked down, but I can't even be bothered to try to sort out what I'd need to tweak to get it to work.

It's not just the JS and jazz, but on my principle reading device, an e-ink tablet, the visuals literally get in the way of the text. I've got 16 shades of grey to work with, really high resolution, and a piss-poor refresh rate. (NYT's obsession with animations is also rapidly getting very tiresome.)

Fortunately, my preferred browser on e-ink, EInkBro, has a reader mode. So I invoked that and dropped all the UX gunk and ... frankly, the Vulture's story is simply better written and far more rewarding to read.

"Set Adrift" actually has ... fairly reasonable writing. So it's not the hard fail the Butler piece was. But UI/UX does get in the way.

There's any number of other points on which the Times simply falls down by innovating too hard. Their tables aren't tabular, their data visualisations don't visualise, or provide data. Their long-forms aren't readable.

And using the tools for long-term archival --- Pocket, print-to-PDF, print-to-ePub (a feature of EInkBro), Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, etc. --- the Times's formatting again gets in the way of being able to capture a useful snapshot or rendering of the article.

It's actually quite disappointing.

And whilst HN's guidelines are to not discuss UI/UX, that's very clearly key to the Times's presentation here, so I'm declaring it on-topic so far as I'm concerned.

I was surprised this was only 6 episodes. Felt like it could have been an on-going series.

That's classic paranoid schizophrenia. The degree is no insulation against it.

The conspiracy theories are, well, irrelevant. He would have come up with ones on his own, had the world been devoid of them. I think the progression over the centuries has been witches, air looms and influencing machines, then microelectronics.

This sounds similar to a close relative of mine who, over the course of a few months, became more and more manic (as in, actual, diagnosed manic-depressive disorder). Eventually it was blindingly obvious to everyone who knew him that he was not at all in his right mind. Lost his job, wife, house, and came close to being homeless.

As you mention, in hindsight there were definitely signs, just not nearly as obvious.

I've met several people like this who have a scientific background and seem to be good at their job, but also have an insane paranoid worldview. They make me question my own sanity.

This is a sad story. Do you think it would make a difference if you could sit him down with someone who would patiently listen to his claims, provide (counter) evidence, and point out when a claim is too vague or falsifiable to even check? I can imagine this a kind of AI patiently working through big chunks of a huge decision tree with the user, allowing itself to be lead through it as slowly or quickly as needed, a many times as needed. You would either get agreement, or be able to isolate with great precision those assertions of fact and/or assumptions that seem to undermine the user's reason.

> and pandemic conspiracy culture

Not so conspiracy after all. The NYT article mentions "the military coming door to door" as a reason for one of the guys in the article going berserk, which is not exactly what happened in my European capital city, but we did have military guys with their Humvees operate the major city intersections earlier on during the pandemic (I'd say April-May 2020). Of course that it was all security theater, but the military was actually out in the streets, handling civilian assets.

Not to mention that later on during the same pandemic people lost their jobs and their livelihoods because they hadn't taken the vaccine shots (which the people from this article most probably also wouldn't have taken, so they would have been put in the same situation).

Looking backwards, and in the context of the media now totally avoiding Covid discussions (unless is related to China) after the same media had accused each and everyone of us of potentially wanting to kill our grandmothers, things were pretty well damn f.cked up.

This is perhaps scientifically interesting, but doing this to someone without their knowledge and consent is wildly unethical.

People suffering from mental issues like this usually aren't thinking fully rationally. A good friend of mine had a sudden schizophrenic break once. Before it happened he was very much a math/science/computer guy, smart and logical and very anti religious. But after something happened that changed his brain chemistry he wasn't able to keep up the same level of logical thinking; he failed out of classes he was previously doing well in, lost his job, lost his girlfriend, and started behaving strangely. He had begun hearing voices and having strange thoughts and couldn't always form coherent sentences or ideas.

Since I was a close friend he eventually confided in me some of his personal thoughts, like that he thought the world was ending and he was hearing from angels and demons. He would do irrational things like play the same songs over and over on his speakers for me, as though he was trying to use them to communicate some hidden meaning that I couldn't grasp from listening to them (they were very random songs without any obvious intrinsic meaning). On one occasion he suddenly became violent and lashed out towards some people he had previously gotten along with, and when I looked into his eyes in that moment it was like there was zero recognition despite our years of friendship.

It was very sad and a bit frightening to see him go through such a drastic and sudden change in personality and ability.

The only bona fide centuries-old (actually, millennia-old) religious institution I can think of is the Catholic Church. All the others are largely religious traditions, more or less, that are centuries-old, but not continuously operating institutions. There is nothing here that suggests these guys had any love for the Church (certainly, their conspiratorial mode would not sit well with the rational spirit of Catholicism). Just because someone says "Jesus!" or "Satan!" doesn't make him a Catholic, or even a Christian or a Muslim, for that matter. For all we know, these guys thought Pope Francis is a reptilian who drinks the blood of altar boys who've recovered from COVID, or at least the usual array of Protestant conspiracy theories about the papacy.

(I might add that calling the Catholic Church shady/mysterious is giving too much credit to whatever malicious elements exist within it, similar to how conspiracy theories in general assume a scale and degree of coordination, competence, and secrecy that is practically impossible. As the joke goes, if a business were run this way, it would not last two weeks, let alone two millennia.)

You're not wrong, but I doubt very many people who think the Illuminati exist are Catholics. One can be a Christian without being a Catholic - and it only adds to the self-reenforcing narrative: If Christianity was taken over by a shadowy evil cadre, why not any other large organization?

To me the big mystery isn't why some people believe untestable self-reenforcing ideas, but why any of us don't. Being skeptical and careful with your conclusions is the harder option, by far.

What's "LLM" in this context?