Sorry, I don’t think I suceeded at speaking with clarity there. The way you use LW is perfectly fine and good.
My view of LW is that it’s a site dedicated to rationality, both epistemic and instrumental. Instrumental rationality is, as Eliezer likes to call it, “the art of winning”. The art of winning often calls for collective action to achieve the best outcomes, so if collective action never comes about, then that would indicate a failure of instrumental rationality, and thereby a failure of the purpose of LW.
LW hasn’t failed. While I have observed some failures of the collective userbase to properly engage in collective action to the fullest extent, I find it does often succeed in creating collective action, often thanks to the deliberate efforts of the LW team.
Fair enough, and I was a bit snarky in my response. I still have to wonder, if it’s not worth the hassle for a representative individual to move somewhere safer, why we’d expect it’s worth a greater hassle (both individually and the coordination cost) to create a new town. Is this the case where rabbits are negative value so stags are the only option (reference: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zp5AEENssb8ZDnoZR/the-schelling-choice-is-rabbit-not-stag)? I’d love to see some cost/benefit estimates to show that it’s even close to reasonable, compared to just isolating as much as possible individually.
Sorry, I don’t think I suceeded at speaking with clarity there. The way you use LW is perfectly fine and good.
My view of LW is that it’s a site dedicated to rationality, both epistemic and instrumental. Instrumental rationality is, as Eliezer likes to call it, “the art of winning”. The art of winning often calls for collective action to achieve the best outcomes, so if collective action never comes about, then that would indicate a failure of instrumental rationality, and thereby a failure of the purpose of LW.
LW hasn’t failed. While I have observed some failures of the collective userbase to properly engage in collective action to the fullest extent, I find it does often succeed in creating collective action, often thanks to the deliberate efforts of the LW team.
Fair enough, and I was a bit snarky in my response. I still have to wonder, if it’s not worth the hassle for a representative individual to move somewhere safer, why we’d expect it’s worth a greater hassle (both individually and the coordination cost) to create a new town. Is this the case where rabbits are negative value so stags are the only option (reference: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zp5AEENssb8ZDnoZR/the-schelling-choice-is-rabbit-not-stag)? I’d love to see some cost/benefit estimates to show that it’s even close to reasonable, compared to just isolating as much as possible individually.