Essay:The Cluster

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TL;DR: a lot of people who put themselves forward as rational or skeptical fall into a cluster of woo-ish beliefs based around black box thinking and a transactional model of society.

Have you ever noticed how many of the people stirring shit up in the skeptical community all seem to sound the same? Let's see -- lots of misogyny, of course, and a nasty tendency to refuse to acknowledge it. Many of them are libertarians, and quite a few of them are singularitarians, global warming deniers, Bell Curvers, and/or Jesus Mythers on top of it. They tend not to be homophobic necessarily, but they seem to have an extreme aversion to experts, at least when said experts tell them something they don't like. They frequently look to the seduction community for social training. And a lot of them are Ron Paul supporters.

You've stumbled across believers in The Cluster.

Before getting into all the details of the Cluster, it's important to know that not every Clusterer believes everything on this page, but they all seem to share a common set of logical fallacies. The most important is black box thinking; in math, programming and many aspects of industrial design, everything is explicitly modular, with side effects taken out as much as possible in order to do the right thing. The Clusterer sees everything like this -- social interaction, logic, science, economics, everything. This is not necessarily wrong, but if that's the only lens you look at life through, you can wind up with a nasty case of hammer-and-nail syndrome; ironically for a lot of Clusterers, this is actually anti-scientific, given how much of science is based on trying to control for outside factors. (Considering the common Clusterer fondness for Austrian economics, which ignores outside factors and even basic evidence, the cognitive dissonance probably shouldn't surprise anyone.)

The other significant fallacy derives from black box thinking: a transactional model of society, made most obvious in the seduction community, where men are taught to insert line A into woman B in order to insert tab C into slot D. In a manner rather consistent with Ayn Rand's rather weird, alienated view of society, they make mechanical assumptions and try to nitpick them apart when they don't work, ignoring the fact that humans (women or men) are not really all that simple. This transactional thinking goes hand in hand with a sense of entitlement that only a subculture revolving around sheltered white males from sheltered American suburbs can generate.

Essentially, the Cluster is a specific case of crank magnetism that seems to apply to a lot of people who fancy themselves to be smart and unfoolable.

Yes, but what IS the Cluster?

The number one thing, the one that almost defines the Cluster as a whole, is a semi-unconscious attitude that their background is everyone's background, and a belief that they're smarter than everyone else. This is surprisingly often true, which is part of what makes the belief structure such a colossal pain in the ass to people who have to deal with Clusterers. The result is lots of people who believe their own hype to an unhealthy degree, and have a tendency to be unable or unwilling to scrutinize their own beliefs. As a result, Clusterers are disproportionately Libertarian politically; they aren't necessarily racist per se, but they're very likely to ignore the effects of upbringing and community disadvantages when judging people. Clusterers also frequently fall into a trap of trying to microfocus their way out of a challenge, either eliding important issues in a scenario or dictionary-flaming definitions, using false precision as a cudgel in debates.

The other root belief that leads to Cluster thinking is the fact that Clusterers are almost always nerds, and therefore tend to take an adversarial, outside-looking-in attitude towards the world. Like many nerds and other outcasts from school days, they're very sensitive to bullying, but only to themselves; as a result, nerds in general close ranks and create their own cliques (very big cliques, if you've ever been to a gaming con, but cliques nevertheless); Clusterers take it a step further and ostracize anyone who could be considered an outsider (being too attractive, for example, or being a "suit", although the latter are pretty universally reviled in any counterculture), while accepting people whose presence is frequently toxic because those people were outcasts as well. Clusterers are even harsher on those they consider traitors, especially if they're women (who many seem to associate with the girls who turned them down in high school).

Clusterers are usually male. There are a few women (mostly the ones who play to their prejudices for whatever reason suits them), but it's largely a boy's club.

Since most if not all Clusterers are nerds, they are disproportionately involved in STEM fields, especially technical and engineering. Engineering fields, particularly software development, prize the black box model of design that we saw in the introduction, and as a result Clusterers tend to see all of life in that mode.

Things Clusterers believe

You'll find a common thread of hammer-and-nail syndrome; like I said above, the hallmark of a Clusterer is someone who is unable to believe they can be fooled. Except for the black box thinking, which is pretty much the base from which most beliefs in the Cluster spring, not everyone will have these traits, but many will have at least half.

• Black box thinking, as described above.
• A distinct hostility towards civil rights issues: Although clusterers aren't inherently racist or sexist, quite a lot of them have a very hard line attitude towards civil rights issues, based on the assumption that their experiences are representatives of everyone. See also w:scientific racism; it's not uncommon for Clusterers to latch onto things like The Bell Curve to justify prejudices that they were raised with.
• "Juvenile deviationism": This is a symptom of believing one's own press a bit too much. It's an effective shorthand for describing the mentality that you can't be fooled, and you don't have to listen to people who tell you otherwise. In extreme cases, the result is a battery of revenge fantasies; this is at least understandable, since a lot of Clusterers were the type of kids who were picked on in school, but when they get put down on paper, they can range from a mere Mary Sue all the way up to most of Ayn Rand's written output.
• Libertarianism
• Austrian school economics: A prime example of people trying to one-up experts by making up their own rules that are supposedly unanalyzable by mainstream theory. It ties in very tightly with clusterers' concept of freedom.
• The Singularity: A sign of Clusterers who read too much pulp SF. Some believe we'll merge with machines; some believe we'll be replaced by them. All Singularitarians are unable to admit that we don't know enough to make such predictions either way.
• Transhumanism: The broader school of thought that Singularitarians come from. The thing is, it takes a fair bit of chutzpah to make assertions about the future based on technologies that we don't know how to get to from here, especially when we can look back on the last two decades and realize that even our very language would have been partially incomprehensible to our 1990 selves, never mind our technology.
• "Game": The Clusterer attitude stretches to interpersonal relations, and the seduction gurus of the world make lots of money off these people. In many cases, the mark has been taught that there's an "insert lines, get sex" procedure that can be mechanized. Failed pickup artists are often among the most toxic of nerd misogynists.

Confusion of philosophy and science

As mentioned above, Clusterers lean heavily Libertarian, and treat libertarian politics as axiomatic. As a result, they're particularly susceptible to forms of denialism and pseudoscience that look like they're sticking it to the experts and/or give results that encroach on their (perception of) freedom; global warming denial is a big one, as are evolutionary psychology and some forms of scientific racism.

See also

• Ayn Rand
• LessWrong