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Successful Prophets — On how movements form

• [audio] Mundane Cults — 29 Nov 2025
  We’ve been taught that cults are dark and scary things. But we have been fooled. The cult is a prominent building block of modern community. If you’re not in one, you’re probably doing something wrong. The question is, is the cult you’re in a cult you chose?
• [marginalium] The long history of association between God and unusual smells — 19 Jun 2025
• [marginalium] Politics and spirituality are entangled — 16 Jun 2025
• [marginalium] The mystery of Pope Francis — 24 Apr 2025
• [marginalium] Welcome to the Chaoscene — 18 Apr 2025
• [article] Sacrificing the Self — 4 Apr 2025
  When we want to identify with a group, we <em>bias</em> ourselves to filter out all theother ways we could be. It helps us cut down all our competing priorities to the group. The trade-off is the benefit in diversity of thought.
• [marginalium] A Brief History Of Accelerationism — 21 Mar 2025
• [marginalium] How The Mormons Conquered America — 13 Mar 2025
• [marginalium] Culture trumps evidence — 20 Feb 2025
• [marginalium] Rationalist 'death cult' — 7 Feb 2025
• [marginalium] The populist phantom — 29 Jan 2025
• [marginalium] Charisma as Representation — 27 Jan 2025
• [article] When groups go bad — 3 Jan 2025
  Without more tasteful social behaviours to sample from, we’re liable to attach very strongly to the behaviours of our group. Add a hostile environment, normalised physical and emotional violence, and a lack of mental and physical resources, and you have the ingredients for atrocity.
• [article] Useful groups are biased groups — 27 Dec 2024
  The strength of our attraction to a group is a function of how different a group is from other groups in ways that we feel like we are, or like we want to be. Our participation in the group depends on how we see it benefitting us, and see us benefitting the group. The stronger both are, the stronger our biases to stay engaged.
• [article] Mob mentality is fine — 20 Dec 2024
  You could think of a collection of group dynamics like ‘groupthink’ or ‘deindividuation’ or whatever are bad. Or you could consider that our social identity is formed by making the distinctions between in- and out- groups clear. Then it all makes sense.