Is this problem getting worse? I know cults are nothing new. Plenty horror stories from the 70s/80s. Perhaps because it's happening right now it seems more prevalent. 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.
This story in particular is incredible, because when the group shows up in Hawaii, they find yet another likeminded individual willing to accompany them on a (relatively) dangerous trip. While the captain seemed to have slightly more self preservation instincts than the crew, it is amazing he was willing to jeopardize his life for this cause (zigzagging to avoid covid testing, charting courses that would leave them without supplies).
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.
I'd hesitate to categorically lump all of the ancient mystery religions in with the rest of your list. Some of them were pretty strange, even for the ancient world, but e.g. the Eleusinian Mysteries and Mithraism were very mainstream for hundreds of years.
Mithraism, in particular, is arguably very tightly linked to Christianity in early Christian history. By one theory, before Constantine's reforms that merged the two religions, Christianity was popular among the plebians while Mithraism was very popular among the patrician class, and the modern form of Christianity is arguably more similar to the old religion of the patricians.
Transhumanism, various neo-gnostic identity ideologies, and ideologies of envy currently in vogue and receiving the veneer of respectability from vocal segments of academia, the media, and parts of the state.
Man must worship. The trouble is he often ends up worshiping something he shouldn't, something unworthy of worship, like his appetites, like himself. He then degrades and defiles himself and plunges into irrationality, delusion, and ultimately his own destruction.
Transhumanism isn't a cult. We literally lack the technology for it to even become one, and even if we had it it wouldn't be one thing it would be hundreds of specific groups.
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.
To add to that, internet also ensures all the extreme things are amplified because attention economy. So if previously you would read a local newspaper about worst cult in your city, now you read NYT about worst cult in the country.
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.
Bit of a sidenote but I'm an NYT subscriber partly because I really enjoy their web design.
It may be a controversial opinion on HN (where all websites lead to discussions of "no JS"/ HTML only / no custom fonts, etc) but some of the NYT articles to me have very nice atmospheric effects weaved into them. They don't always land or work perfectly, some are overly heavy and don't perform well, but I always enjoy the effort and attempts at pushing some boundaries and making a more interactive or immersive experiences. I get the printed paper which I can always fall back on when I prefer a no-nonsense reading experience, but I like how they use available web technology to progressively enhance certain pieces.
This article has a couple full screen parallax style videos that fade in and out as you scroll to enter and exit the story. They aren't strictly necessary for reading the story, so some might consider them extra fluff, but to my eyes the effect helps set the scene of a wide open and lonely ocean right off the bat which adds to the emotions I feel get reading it.
The performance seems better on the official site than the archive.org link btw.
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:
I definitely like some things with more plain and simple styling when it's a good choice. For example I far prefer HN to Reddit style wise. I love checking baseball scores on plaintextsports over ESPN (partly because baseball serializes so well into text).
But I also think there are plenty of positive styling opportunities for modern websites that can be great when used tastefully, like this NYT article. Nothing here was taking away from the reading experience, only adding to it IMO.
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:
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.
Something similar, though not as grim, happened to my childhood best friend; physics PhD, assistant professorship at a regional university, a wife and a house. Something early in the pandemic fucked him up, and he went off into a long series of paranoid delusions about nanotech, a Zionist conspiracy, vaccines, and 5G. He started sleeping in his basement "grounded" to electrical outlets. He went off on weird racist rants on Twitter. He gave a plandemic-style lecture on a faculty Zoom call, and lost his job. His wife left. He's a short-order cook now.
Like the people in this story, the signs were there before the pandemic. A decade before, I watched him give a eulogy at his father's funeral, which dipped weirdly into a conspiracy in the Chicago Police Department. He was at the time otherwise completely rational-seeming; it seems to have taken the pandemic (and pandemic conspiracy culture) to completely derail him.
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.
Even so, all the comparatively recent meming about secret overlord cabals of blood-drinking child abusers in this or that part of government has effectively turned paranoid schizophrenia into a communicable disease. That's a rather unexpected development.
There's nothing new about this stuff, and I'd hesitate before declaring it more widespread than it ever was before. The Satanic Panic was worse in this vein by far, and there was no internet.
The scary thing in the current age is the re-mainstreaming of political-party allied all-encompassing conspiracy theories, like Q/Pizzagate and Russiagate. America has become John Birchers vs. Joe McCarthyites while the environment is dying, infrastructure is crumbling, the wealth gap is absurd and constantly widening, and the vendors of arms and services are trying to provoke us into a nuclear war as a flowery garnish on our half-dozen forever wars.
I'm pretty sure reading a week's worth of papers from the 50s would show us a long list of grim things that were not _obviously_ going to be better.
(At least my country was in the middle of decolonization wars that are still leaving their trace today - so I doubt people were assuming "oh, sure, it's going to be fine in X years.")
But it did not really get "better" or "worse" in absolute terms.
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.
From my experience with a friend who went off the conspiracy deep end quite a bit before the pandemic already, I can't see it helping at all. I deeply care about the friend and I tried to engage with him in many ways, assuming that he would somehow be accessible to reason. The reality is, he was not. Every argument/fact I brought to counter a claim was dismissed, because it was mainstream media/science/... At the same time he would happily use the same sources if they supported his point of view.
I also tried the opposite trying to push e.g. the lizard people conspiracies, to show the fallacy of his arguments. He would completely dismiss those, because "everyone knows that is rubbish", while arguing for a conspiracy which has hidden the true laws of physics for financial gain.
Unfortunately I do not have an answer how to talk with people like that, but it needs a much more serious intervention than rational talk.
Yeah, I don't know. In a related vein, I assign a great deal of blame for this situation to two groups of people: first, his employer, which was confronted with crystal-clear signs of severe mental illness (his termination was the culmination of a series of deep-dive student newspaper articles that revealed all sorts of disturbing stuff) and chose to cut him loose, and second --- and much more significantly --- to para-"normie" activists like RFK Jr who know full well they're capitalizing on serious pathology to build their followings.
I'd like to believe that I could help bring my friend out of it, but I'm in no way qualified, and then there's all the guns.
I think you are right to also worry about your safety and would likely need some help and advice if you are trying to help him.
I haven't extensively read Freddie de Boer, but in what I read, he comes across as empathetic, perceptive, highly articulate and probably rather more sane than most people.
He also posted a very personal video a while ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKB6F_VYuZY ), to vent his anger at a recent glamorization of mental illness by a NYT writer. In it he explains how the only thing that prevented him from murdering a former love during a psychotic episode (for supposedly secretly putting glass into his food) was that he didn't even know where she lived. He realized he needed to be on permanent medication.
I was jarred listening to a fine and sensitive mind relating how it's only kept suspended over a chasm of homicidal delusion by a relatively crude and often debilitating pharmacological cocktail.
Put him on a long-term sabbatical and arranged mental health care. If they'd tried and my friend refused, or it didn't take, fair's fair. But I don't believe that's what happened. My friend essentially had a psychotic break while on the job. I'd expect a public university to be especially good at stuff like this, but I've worked in the private sector with people who had severe mental health issues that took them out of the lineup for years at a time and they were still taken care of.
It was a whole big media story at the time, and I thought it was remarkable how the university played it off as a morality story and not a medical crisis.
I’d expect that too. Perhaps paranoid-schizophrenia manifesting itself as racist rants collided with wokism in an unfortunate manner and really bad timing.
There was nothing "woke" about the disciplinary response to what he was saying; it was absolutely unacceptable. Ron DeSantis wouldn't have tolerated it either.
Regardless: most of my enmity is reserved for people like RFK Jr, who are literally building a movement in large part by mobilizing people with untreated mental illness.
Was referring to the part where you said he was dropped without consideration that it was an illness. Could be old-fashioned careless disregard, but we know the climate at Uni in 2020 where even the appearance of racism is a hot potato.
Once again: there was no mistaking what happened in this instance. I don't appreciate having culture war arguments shoehorned into this; I think you could have just taken my word for it.
Sounds like his employer could have handled it better but I had to deal with this recently (someone close experiencing psychosis) and at the end of the day, it's about family members stepping up. The buck stops with them. If they won't take responsibility, there's not a lot you can do.
I think it's probably wrong to blame youtubers or disinformation. Pyschotics are going to find something to latch onto with or without internet access. If it's not covid, it's the Jews, or the government following them, or talking to God, and any of those things is enough to torpedo your career and relationships.
> 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?
Clearly you haven't ever argued with someone about their beliefs. Let me give you a quick run-down:
- You can never provide counter evidence to every claim. Most of them are too vague or detached from reality to be refuted clearly. You predicted this, and you were right to.
- A claim - in the believer's mind - is never too vague. They are just failing to articulate it to you in the moment.
- Not being able to falsify a claim is exactly the point. You and I call that circular reasoning, but they call it faith. Yes, they see the logical fallacy. There is no way to prove for certain one way or the other; so it always comes down to emotion.
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I've been on both sides of this dynamic.
When I was religious (Mormon), I was convinced that - if my religion were false - it would be just as convenient and straightforward to criticize and deconstruct it as you described. And in many ways, it is!
But somehow I, and most of the people I knew, was insulated both from the critical information that might have made me rethink my convictions, and from the very pattern of critical thinking itself. I understood the fallacy of circular reasoning. I was convinced that this was an exception.
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The human mind has a lot of room for faith. Faith in ourselves. Faith in our hopes, our dreams, and our delusions. It's no wonder that we are able to stubbornly believe falsehoods; yet that very ability has us faithfully believing we are the exception - uniquely immune to all the pitfalls of faith.
We can all see the pattern. We can all deconstruct it. We never have to.
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.
Reminds me of this comment I made the other day [0]:
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There are stories of adult children deprogramming their parents / in-laws by blocking these sites via their routers [0], and within a few weeks they're able to see their parents' views and demeanor visibly change for the positive [1].
The post from BestOfRedditorUpdates [1] for example shows the progression, basically the same as the 5 stages of grief, or withdrawal from a drug habit. First they get angry, then they try to find ways around it, then they accept that they can't and start doing something else.
The truth is most people don't really go to these sites out of choice, they do it out of habit. If you can alter the habit, you can stop them from consuming such content. It's no different than stopping any other habit, like (if you're a smoker or alcoholic) not going to places where people smoke for example.
You can also replace the habit with something else; like smokers chewing nicotine gum instead of smoking, or like those trying to lose weight going for a walk instead of sitting at home and cracking open a cold one after a long day of work, this person's aunt replaced it with BTS [2].
The media/bad actors online/scam artists aren't concerned about being ethical with their megaphone on full blast instilling fear and panic amongst Americans.
The fact is if I have the choice between being unethical and saving my parents from a life filled with panic and fear, I know what I'm choosing.
Those media entities were calling people out in the West as wanting to kill their grandmothers when some of those people in the West weren't following very, very strict Covid restrictions, while nowadays the same media calls people in China as heroes and freedom fighters when those people in China are doing the same thing that the anti-Covid restrictions people in the West were doing about two years ago. No-one in here cheers for blocking the likes of the BBC and the NYTimes.
First, I think it's a little bit different to compare these two. One is 3 years after COVID, with vaccines, some level of herd immunity, and better treatment options. The other was immediate when little was understood. China's position is extreme, the west never reached that level of lockdown.
But in any case, I agree. A news diet is important. My parents watch CNN, and I can tell it has negative effects. I tell them to not watch the local news every night and don't put on CNN. This isn't a political thing.
But it must be said - there are much stronger calls to violence on one side, than the other, at this point in time.
I doubt there's consensus on which "side" has stronger calls for violence. But it's not needed. We can just agree that calls to violence are virtually always wrong and deal with them uniformly without respect to ideology.
Even if true, your first part is irrelevant to the question.
As for the second part, there's a reason why we don't take on these responsibilities ourselves, for competent adults. If you _truly_ believe your parents are mentally incompetent, the right thing to do is to present this before a court, with your parents present and allowed to respond. That's how civil society works.
That's too binary for the real world. Somewhere between padded rooms and someone being left to engage in destructive behavior by themselvesbis "intervention", which is a common-enough concept exclusively applied to competent adults.
In this case, we're talking about secret sabotage of someone else's Internet access. This falls outside of the common concept of intervention. In general, if you have to act secretly, you're almost certainly in the wrong.
Doing something to someone "for their own good" rightly has a terrible reputation. It happens most often in traditional parent / child relationships where the parent makes a change that is in the child's best interest in a way they cannot yet see. It can also happen in other situations.
I think that there are rare situations where people will be better off if their preferences are ignored. Those situations are tricky to identify and destructive to personal relationships to act on. The best-case scenario is that someone eventually recognizes that you did something good for them - but you should make peace with a long interregnum where they consider you a villain. You would also need to be prepared to carry the weight of being wrong. Acting against the desires of someone you love because you think you know better than them is only ok if they eventually share your view of what is right. It's a situation where you are choosing for your foresight to be judged in hindsight.
Thanks for the link. I think you should seriously contemplate this. If my kids did this to me, I'd ban them from my house, at a minimum.
More abstractly, suppose your thinking is correct, and now they're "de-programmed". If you were right, you could now tell your parents what you did, and they'd thank you. Does that sound like how it would play out?
a couple of years ago, my best friend had a major pyschotic episode. among many other unfortunate incidents, she drove her car into the yard of a stranger in the middle of the night, and knocked on that person's front door.
in response, i took her car away from her. drove it to a spot she didn't know about. she was, of course, furious with me. and my actions were no doubt illegal.
despite that, it was the right thing to do. if a similar situation were to arise, i would do it again in a fraction of a second. and now that my friend is in her right mind again, she agrees that i did the right thing.
would i have reprogrammed a router, if that had been a factor in distracting her? absolutely i would, without a second thought.
My mom had a psychotic break a few years back. My whole family let it go on for weeks, with the attitude “she’s an adult” etc.
As you reference in your threat about your kids, I knew the consequences of going against her will.
However, when I was finally able to visit home I realized she has lost weight and was a danger to herself, even trying to “take a walk” at 2am on a cold winter night.
I lied to her, convinced her to get in the car and drove her to a mental facility where she received treatment and has recovered mostly.
To this day she resents me and doesn’t fully trust me.
Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems in my family I’m the only person willing to trash our relationship to keep her safe.
This could have been avoided if she was self reflective and open to feedback, but her ego cannot take it, she’s simply too fragile.
These are hard cases, and you have my sympathy. (Same for sibling post.) Quite possibly I'd have done the same.
This sounds very different than the case under discussion, which seems to be that an adult child decided that he didn't like the information that his competent parents were listening to, and that it was making them unhappy, so he secretly sabotaged the parents' router.
That's more-or-less the plot of the movie "The Brainwashing of My Dad". The Dad in question is interviewed in the film. He is generally aware of what happened and happy about the situation.
Is that a guaranteed result? No. But it's more likely than you might expect.
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The problem in these scenarios turns out to be that people aren't "brainwashed" or delusional or psychotic; but that they spend enough of their attention on bullshit that the bullshit feels like their identity.
One thing I don't understand is why people like these embrace religion instead of rejecting it - aren't most tied to centuries-old, powerful and somewhat shady/mysterious organizations?
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 would be absolutely wild would be to hook up an LLM to a Messiah site. You could then tarpit cult-candidates. This guy googled "Does a small group of people control the world?". Dude, you could have them talking to an LLM for like years probably.
Voice is the last hard part for this for AI, but once we have that, we could overlay on video!
