I mean this entirely legitimately and with no hostility: have you “Read The Sequences”? People are taking a similar view here because this community is founded in part on some ideas that tend to lead towards that view. Think of it like how you’d expect a lot of people at a Christian summer camp to agree that god exists: there is a sampling bias here (I’m not claiming that it’s wrong, only that it should be expected).
I have, though I don’t take every line as gospel. It seems the large majority of folks posting on LW share this sentiment since there seems to be a reasonable amount of skepticism and debate on ideas presented in the “Sequences” and interchange of thoughts in comment sections, etc., that have led to further refinements. This happens nearly every month from what I can tell, and a lot of it is upvoted to near the top of even controversial posts.
It’s just peculiar all that activity and reasonable doubt seems to have been forgotten like a distant dream. Perhaps there is some emotional threshold, when crossed, leads even intelligent folks to prefer writing doom and gloom instead of assessing the potentialities of the future from a more rational position.
I mean this entirely legitimately and with no hostility: have you “Read The Sequences”? People are taking a similar view here because this community is founded in part on some ideas that tend to lead towards that view. Think of it like how you’d expect a lot of people at a Christian summer camp to agree that god exists: there is a sampling bias here (I’m not claiming that it’s wrong, only that it should be expected).
I have, though I don’t take every line as gospel. It seems the large majority of folks posting on LW share this sentiment since there seems to be a reasonable amount of skepticism and debate on ideas presented in the “Sequences” and interchange of thoughts in comment sections, etc., that have led to further refinements. This happens nearly every month from what I can tell, and a lot of it is upvoted to near the top of even controversial posts.
It’s just peculiar all that activity and reasonable doubt seems to have been forgotten like a distant dream. Perhaps there is some emotional threshold, when crossed, leads even intelligent folks to prefer writing doom and gloom instead of assessing the potentialities of the future from a more rational position.