Yes. So much love for this post, you’re a better writer than me and you’re an actual public defender but otherwise I feel super connected with you haha.
It’s incredibly bizarre being at least a little “early adopter” about massive 2020 memes—’09 tumblr account activation and Brown/Garner/Grey -era BLM gave me a healthy dose of “before it was cool” hipster sneering at the people who only got into it once it was popular. This matters on lesswrong, because Musk’s fox news interview referenced the “isn’t it speciesist to a priori assume human’s are better than paperclips” family of thought experiments—if you’re on lesswrong, you are not safe from becoming an early adopter of something that becomes very salient and popular!
Due to this (helping rats prep for their “go mainstream” moment) as well as other things (one paragraph further down), I meant to write something kinda similar to your piece actually, cuz Ben Pace pointed me at this acx commenter:
I grew up surrounded by people who believed conspiracy theories, although none of those people were my parents. And I have to say that the fact that so few people know other people who believe conspiracy theories kind of bothers me. It’s like their epistemic immune system has never really been at risk of infection. If your mind hasn’t been very sick at least sometimes, how can you be sure you’ve developed decent priors this time?
Certain risks around groupthink, not knowing about how to select for behaviors or memes that are “safe” to tolerate in whatever memetic/status gradient you find yourself in, even just defining terms like blindspot or bias ---- they all seem made a lot worse by young EAs/rats who didn’t previously learn to navigate a niche ideology/subculture.
Super underrated topic of discussion on here! Thanks again for writing!
Certain risks around groupthink, not knowing about how to select for behaviors or memes that are “safe” to tolerate in whatever memetic/status gradient you find yourself in, even just defining terms like blindspot or bias ---- they all seem made a lot worse by young EAs/rats who didn’t previously learn to navigate a niche ideology/subculture.
Why does it have to be niche? Haven’t met many nonrationalists who’s mind doesn’t go haywire once you start on Politics or Religion. Where did these EAs/Rats grow up if they weren’t exposed to that?
Yes. So much love for this post, you’re a better writer than me and you’re an actual public defender but otherwise I feel super connected with you haha.
It’s incredibly bizarre being at least a little “early adopter” about massive 2020 memes—’09 tumblr account activation and Brown/Garner/Grey -era BLM gave me a healthy dose of “before it was cool” hipster sneering at the people who only got into it once it was popular. This matters on lesswrong, because Musk’s fox news interview referenced the “isn’t it speciesist to a priori assume human’s are better than paperclips” family of thought experiments—if you’re on lesswrong, you are not safe from becoming an early adopter of something that becomes very salient and popular!
Due to this (helping rats prep for their “go mainstream” moment) as well as other things (one paragraph further down), I meant to write something kinda similar to your piece actually, cuz Ben Pace pointed me at this acx commenter:
Certain risks around groupthink, not knowing about how to select for behaviors or memes that are “safe” to tolerate in whatever memetic/status gradient you find yourself in, even just defining terms like blindspot or bias ---- they all seem made a lot worse by young EAs/rats who didn’t previously learn to navigate a niche ideology/subculture.
Super underrated topic of discussion on here! Thanks again for writing!
Why does it have to be niche? Haven’t met many nonrationalists who’s mind doesn’t go haywire once you start on Politics or Religion. Where did these EAs/Rats grow up if they weren’t exposed to that?