How to notice being mind-hacked

I don't see how you can frame these as exploits or value shifts. If someone had told me I was going to get really into AGI alignment I would have said "uh I don't know about that" (because I didn't know about that), but I would not have said "that would definitely be bad, and it shouldn't be able to happen".

As far as I can tell, most cultural conversion processes are just boundedly rational updates in response to new evidence.

Goths are just people who have realised that they need to be able to operate amid gloom and sadness. It is an extended confrontation of the world's most difficult aspects. They clothe themselves in gloom and sadness so that others recognise that they are serious about their project and stop saying unhelpful things like "cheer up" and "stop being so weird". They have looked around and seen that there are many problems in the world that no one will face, so they have decided to specialise and give voice to these things. There isn't really anything wrong with that. Many societies had witches. They're probably a crucial morph in the proper functioning of a tribal superorganism.

Kinks are just distorted reflections of unmet needs, and exploring them can help a person to work through their problems.

If you are afraid of potential future identity shifts, that might be a problem. You should expect profound shifts in your worldview to occur as you grow, especially if there are (and there probably still are) big holes in your theory of career strategy, metaphysics, or self-knowledge. I know there are still holes in mine.

I didn't address the converting to religion example. It is a correct example, probably... Maybe. I can think of plenty of adaptive reasons an epistemic agnostic might want to be part of a church community. But even if you can get me to agree that it's correct, conversions like that are fairly rare and I have no idea what it would feel like from the inside so it doesn't seem very informative. I'm sure there are books we can read, but.. I must have looked at accounts of naturalist→christian conversions in the past and I couldn't make much sense of them. Maybe that means I should look closer, and try harder to understand. Maybe I should be more terrified by those stories than I am.

This seems to be true, but it changes the nature of truth: truth is just an effective hack in which you start to believe.

Side note: I once had an acid and after it I become hyper-suggestable. A person near me said that he has an allergy to strawberries, and I started to have panic attacks when I ate strawberries, despite the fact that I know that I don't have this allergy.

I'm willing to accept your meaning when you say "mind hack," but each of your examples read as personal epiphanies. From the inside I think that it feels like, "Wow! Yeah!" It's generally preceded by simlier smaller moments.

I have worried about this when I encountered some of the neoreactionary ideas on here and related communities. I could see myself—given that I have seen people who have had such shifts in thought—being swayed by reasonable arguements, and adopting what I currently believe to be repugnant conclusions, and thus spreading darkness in the universe.

Ultimately, I decided that if I change my mind, then it will have been for some very good evidence, and I can only trust that my future-self carefully considered the evidence and was pursuaded. Every idea that can be banished by the truth should be.

I believe it's the optimal state to be open to ideas, but this leads to the question, "Should we be open to the idea that we shouldn't be open to ideas?" Are there some ideas that are so repugnant that no matter the evidence indicating that it's a more optimal state of the universe, it's better to not know it?

I think that there aren't, but there are ideas that one should be cautious with. Evidence can be misleading. It's why I talk to my son about things that I see right and wrong in the world. The Dunning-Kreuger Effect can be nasty. It's sometimes hard to know that you're wrong.

So for me, when I have "Wow! Yeah!" moments about something that I don't like, I have others who can point out flaws that I miss, but I won't guard further against it.

It sounds like you classify all events where somebody else has an effect on yourself that makes you change your identity as mind hacking. Why do you find it useful to make that classification?

Another frequent feature of a mind hack is that suddenly there is an important authority, which wasn't important before (probably because you were not even aware of its existence).

In case of manipulation, the new authority would be your new guru, etc.

But in case of healthy growth, for example if you start studying mathematics or something, it would be the experts in given area.

Identity is supposed to shift. If your identity is fixed, why would that be a good thing? Seems like that's the self delusion bug

What makes "conversion" different from "deconversion"? (Aside from a life of Pi scenario where someone is converted to 3 religions.)

What you do changes who you are.

That includes whatever you do to avoid this happening.