I also think you’ve brought in too much risk of “throwing stones in a glass house” here. The LW memespace is, in my estimation, full of ideas (...) that I would also consider “crazy”
That seems to me like an extra reason to keep “throwing stones”. To make clear the line between the kind of “crazy” that rationalists enjoy, and the kind of “crazy” that is the opposite.
As an insurance, just in the (hopefully unlikely) case that tomorrow Unreal goes on a shooting spree, I would like to have it in writing—before it happened—that it happened because of ideas that the rationalist community disapproves of.
Otherwise, the first thing everyone will do is: “see, another rationalist gone crazy”. And whatever objection we make afterwards, it will be like “yeah, now that the person is a bad PR, everyone says ‘comrades, this is not true rationalism, the true rationalism has never been tried’, but previously no one saw a problem with them”.
(I am exaggerating a lot, of course. Also, this is not a comment on Unreal specifically, just on the value of calling out “crazy” memes, despite being perceived as “crazy” ourselves.)
That seems to me like an extra reason to keep “throwing stones”. To make clear the line between the kind of “crazy” that rationalists enjoy, and the kind of “crazy” that is the opposite.
As an insurance, just in the (hopefully unlikely) case that tomorrow Unreal goes on a shooting spree, I would like to have it in writing—before it happened—that it happened because of ideas that the rationalist community disapproves of.
Otherwise, the first thing everyone will do is: “see, another rationalist gone crazy”. And whatever objection we make afterwards, it will be like “yeah, now that the person is a bad PR, everyone says ‘comrades, this is not true rationalism, the true rationalism has never been tried’, but previously no one saw a problem with them”.
(I am exaggerating a lot, of course. Also, this is not a comment on Unreal specifically, just on the value of calling out “crazy” memes, despite being perceived as “crazy” ourselves.)