Re: Manufacturing Belief Lecture Monday April 11 - [Event] [Free]

[Nisan Stiennon]

I plan to be there! Also, I *heard* there's a piece of street art by Banksy nearby on Commercial St. by Grant Ave., which I'll check out beforehand. If you want to join me, text me at (734)904-6123.

-Nisan

On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 9:00 PM, Ben Isserlis <b...@isserl.is> wrote:

Hey all,

Sorry for posting this so late, I thought I already had, then I realized I posted it to a different group. If you're interested, there's a lecture in San Francisco tomorrow night on cult recruitment tactics, affectionately known to us at LessWrong as The Dark Arts. Here are some promotional paragraphs from the event announcement, hope to see you tomorrow night!



Manufacturing Belief
Cult Recruitment, Retention and Persuasion

The general public assumes that cult members must be either incredibly stupid, or incredibly weak of mind, or both. In fact, cult members are completely normal. The methods that cults use to recruit and retain members are based on exploiting vulnerabilities in normal human psychology. The only thing distinguishing a cult from any other form of True Believerism is the incredible efficiency and ruthlessness with which cults exploit these vulnerabilities. Our speaker will discuss the techniques that cults employ to recruit, retain, and persuade...

About the speaker: Joe Kellett spent 15 years as a Transcendental Meditation (TM) instructor. For ten of those years he was an accomplished "yogic flyer" (practitioner of levitation). He's been out of TM for 20 years and runs the web site Suggestibility.org debunking it.

WHEN: 7:30PM, Monday, April 11, 2011 (Talk starts at 8PM sharp)

WHERE: Downstairs at Kells Irish Pub, 530 Jackson Street, San Francisco, CA 94133 (CLICK FOR MAP)



Full disclosure: I assist organizing R4R activism campaigns.

[Ben Isserlis]

Thanks for coming Nisan! I saw a few other people from LessWrong there too, I hope you enjoyed it!