Set Adrift

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/11/27/us/set-adrift.html

by Thevet • 4 years ago

135 76 4 years ago

Quite depressing, but well worth the read.

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).

satvikpendem3• 4 years ago

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.

TrainedMonkey• 4 years ago

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.

ramesh31• 4 years ago

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.

StrictDabbler• 4 years ago

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.

violiner• 4 years ago

The eastern mystery cults of the late B.C. era

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.

lo_zamoyski3• 4 years ago

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.

tomcam• 4 years ago

One of the requirements of a cult is a charismatic leader. Who was that person for the Quakers and Shakers?

michaelbuckbee• 4 years ago

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.

bigDinosaur• 4 years ago

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.

ShredKazoo• 4 years ago

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.

sacnoradhq• 4 years ago

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.

satvikpendem3• 4 years ago

Reminds me of this comment I made the other day [0]:

---

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].

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/comments/vb3ddu/rhe...

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/yz7y...

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/QAnonCasualties/comments/sis22t/my_...

---

I wonder if in this case these techniques might have worked as well.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33723987#33725517

throwawaydad126• 4 years ago

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

satvikpendem3• 4 years ago

My response to a similar reply on the linked comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33723987#33725758

juve19962• 4 years ago

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.

aeturnum• 4 years ago

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.

Tangurena2• 4 years ago

archive link: https://archive.ph/7qIGz

tptacek6• 4 years ago

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.

javajosh• 4 years ago

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.

tptacek6• 4 years ago

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.

cycomanic• 4 years ago

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.

thomastjeffery2• 4 years ago

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.

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.

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.

usefulcat• 4 years ago

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.

shimonabi• 4 years ago

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.

at_a_remove• 4 years ago

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.

zozbot234• 4 years ago

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.

paganel2• 4 years ago

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.

renewiltord2• 4 years ago

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!

dredmorbius3• 4 years ago

What's "LLM" in this context?

pfortuny• 4 years ago

I guess it means Logic Learning Machine.

renewiltord2• 4 years ago

Sorry. Large Language Model. Like the GPTs and OPT.

bytehowl• 4 years ago

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?

erulabs• 4 years ago

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.

naet3• 4 years ago

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.

lo_zamoyski3• 4 years ago

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.)

fosefx• 4 years ago

Can not recommend the podcast series "Rabbit Hole" (2020) from the NYT enough.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/podcasts/rabbit-hole-prol...

admn2• 4 years ago

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

neonate• 4 years ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20221129195502/https://www.nytime...

naet3• 4 years ago

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.

paulcole• 4 years ago

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.

naet3• 4 years ago

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.

vlz• 4 years ago

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-...

badrabbit• 4 years ago

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.

dredmorbius3• 4 years ago

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.

hsuduebc2• 4 years ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20221129195502/https://www.nytime...

Set Adrift

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