I’m an admin of LessWrong. Here are a few things about me.
I generally feel more hopeful about a situation when I understand it better.
I have signed no contracts nor made any agreements whose existence I cannot mention.
I believe it is good take responsibility for accurately and honestly informing people of what you believe in all conversations; and also good to cultivate an active recklessness for the social consequences of doing so.
It is wrong to directly cause the end of the world. Even if you are fatalistic about what is going to happen.
I haven’t read all of the quotes, but here’s a few thoughts I jotted down while reading through.
Tolkien talks here of how one falls from being a neutral or good character in the story of the world, into being a bad or evil character, which I think is worthwhile to ruminate on.
He seems to be opposed to machines in general, which is too strong, but it helps me understand the Goddess of Cancer (although Scott thinks much more highly of the Goddess of Cancer than Tolkien did, and explicitly calls out Tolkien’s interpretation at the top of that post).
The section on language is interesting to me; I often spend a lot of time trying to speak in ways that feel true and meaningful to me, and avoiding using others’ language that feels crude and warped. This leads me to make peculiar choices of phrasings and responses. I think the culture here on LessWrong has a unique form of communication and use of language, and I think it is a good way of being in touch with reality. I think this is one of the reasons I think that something like this is worthwhile.
I think the Fall is not true historically, but I often struggle to ponder us as a world in the bad timeline, cut off from the world we were supposed to be in. This helps me visualize it; always desiring to be in a better world and struggling towards it in failure. “Exiled” from the good world, longing for it.