Not if all rationalists start taking up woo.
ozymandias
Karma: 1,424
This is a tangent, but I feel like this comment is making the mistake of collapsing predictions into a “predicted Trump”/”predicted Clinton” binary. I predicted about a 20% chance of Trump (my strategy was to agree with Nate Silver, Nate Silver is always right when speaking ex cathedra), and I do not consider myself to have made an error. Things with a 20% chance of happening happen one time out of five. Trump lost the popular vote after an October surprise; that definitely looks like the sort of outcome you get in a world where he was genuinely less likely than Clinton to win.
I feel like “don’t circle at people without their consent” is meaningfully different from “do not express your feelings or let other people know what would make communication easier for you.” Very few people have ever circled, but nearly everyone can express feelings and preferences.
That rule might exclude people who only have one script for expressing feelings and preferences, however, which is a particular concern in a community where so many people rely on scripts to communicate.
Leah Libresco gave up jaywalking for Lent and found it was very valuable.
I didn’t invest in Bitcoin because I don’t invest in things that I don’t understand well enough to be confident that the Efficient Market Hypothesis doesn’t apply. I continue to believe this is a rational choice—okay, sure, this one time I might have made a lot of money, but most of the time I would waste a bunch of money/time/other resources. And no one writes blog posts about how they could have lost a lot of money but didn’t, so the availability heuristic is going to overweight successes.
I agree with Raemon. I want to read about lex’s idea of target stress, not about lex’s use of capital letters, and I have no idea how to obtain this goal except, perhaps, writing a defense of not using capital letters and hoping the derailment works backwards.
[downvotes self]
If the demon thread has two to three participants who know each other, I wonder about the effectiveness of making repair attempts. If one participant says something like “I’m sorry, let me try to say that better,” or “I agree with part of what you’re saying,” or (I don’t know) links to a cat picture or something, does it tend to deescalate the situation? I’m not actually sure but I think it’s worth trying.
I’ve found that certain topics predictably degenerate into demon threads (I had an example, but then reconsidered the wisdom of giving it). On my blog, when I’m writing about a topic tangentially related to one of those topics, I will often put up a commenting note like “no discussion of [TOPIC],” which nips that in the bud.
Another reason demon threads sometimes escalate is that there are antisocial persons like myself who really enjoy participating in demon threads. I am not sure what to do about us in the general case. Ideally there’d be some site where we could all argue with each other about extremely unimportant topics.
I strongly agree and have messaged the organizers about personally arranging this.
Don’t deceive yourself even if it seems like a really really good idea.
Don’t falsify data, frame people for bad things they didn’t do, or hide bad things your allies are doing even if it seems like a really really good idea.
Prepare ahead of time for disasters. Learn first aid. Know what to do in the event of nuclear war. Keep essential first aid and disaster preparedness supplies on hand.
Assume every new sex partner is fertile and has HIV, and decide your safer-sex risk tolerance based on that.
Build slack. Have fuck-you money. Build extra time into your schedule in case something goes wrong.
Charge your phone and your laptop before leaving the house. Always take more books (or whatever your preferred form of entertainment is) than you think you’ll need.
When hanging out privately with a stranger, tell a friend when you expect to return and when they should start freaking out.
Always have an exit plan for your job, relationship, and intentional community.
Free Speech as Legal Right vs. Ethical Value
As someone with time that is relatively valueless compared to Elizer’s and Oliver’s, I’d like to second this comment. As much as I’d love to respond to every person who has a criticism of me, it would take up a lot of mental energy that I’d rather use for writing. That doesn’t mean that I don’t read criticisms and take them to heart.
I personally very much enjoyed Expecting Better, Debunking the Bump, the Informed Parent, and the Science of Mom.
There are certainly various sorts of sports and games, which I didn’t talk about because I don’t like sports. I’d imagine both a Baseline Human and a Transhuman league, depending on your preferences. There are also the normal human status games about trying to be the best scientist or artist or writer or whatever; it’s just that if you choose to opt out, you can still do what you love without starving.
I think that American society makes it very difficult to have friends (television, absence of third places, giant houses with individual yards so you have to drive to see people, stigmatization of men having intimate nonromantic friendships, etc). The vast majority of the change is not doing that. I’d also imagine programs intended to help friendless people meet other friendless people (perhaps a community center with book groups, sports teams, knitting circles, and so on): in many countries there are already such programs aimed at elderly men that are quite successful. You’d probably have friend-matching websites. In the worst case “be a friend to lonely people” is probably a common volunteer opportunity, although of course people who are volunteering to be your friend because they want to help others are not the ideal sort of friend.
“Everyone” is probably not precisely true but I think these policies could easily make the number of friendless people maybe a thousandth of what they currently are, which I would be pretty comfortable calling “everyone has friends”.
Advice for pregnant people is really bad. The advice is so risk-averse that it generally doesn’t clearly distinguish between “this is moderately risky,” “this is a very small risk,” and “we have not conclusively proven that a risk does not exist,” which means that there are far more pieces of advice than anyone can remember and people quite often end up doing moderately risky things. The FDA continues to recommend limiting fish consumption in spite of the epidemiological evidence that eating fish increases IQ. Cleaning litter boxes is actually a very uncommon way of transmitting toxoplasmosis; it is most likely to come from undercooked meat. Even though gaining too much in pregnancy is only twice as common as gaining too little, and gaining too little has far more serious health consequences, the vast majority of the messaging is about the dangers of gaining too much.
An odd example of civilizational adequacy and inadequacy at the same time: food fortification has made folic acid deficiency one of the least common nutritional deficiencies, but pregnant people are still advised to take a folic acid supplement, even though they are almost certainly not deficient. (I suppose the idea is that extra folic acid is harmless.)
Being banned from my blog does not mean I think you are a horrible person, nor are all neoreactionaires horrible people. (Not all members of any group are horrible people, although some can be good people who are sadly misled and cause grave harm for that reason.) However, many of the worst neoreactionaries dislike Scott Alexander greatly, and their disapproval certainly does say good things about his character.
If, for example, a person dislikes me because I am donating money to charity and they think I should use that money to help my perfectly comfortable and well-off family, I do not want that person’s approval. If due to personal weakness I instead spent all my money on baby toys, and the person now approved of me, then I would feel unhappy about this state of affairs.
My personal understanding is that LW 2.0 is encouraging a fairly broad idea of what counts as “rationality-relevant”—for instance, I crosspost stuff about welfare biology here—which means that a lot of the discussions of parenting-while-rationalist that I would personally be interested in would also be LW 2.0-appropriate content. For example, lit reviews about parenting, criticisms of irrational beliefs about parenting, parenting book reviews from a rationalist perspective, trying to figure out why pregnancy advice is so bad, etc.
I want to say something in favor of haphazard archipelagos!
I think that it can often be a case of James Scott-ian local knowledge. Certain norms may naturally evolve because they are suited to the people who evolve them, in a way it’s hard to imitate through conscious norm design (because you can’t predict people’s needs, or you can’t come up with as clever solutions as the hivemind can, or whatever). In general, people can do a lot of really clever social cognition subconsciously that is really hard to explain consciously (this is why social skills classes are so bad).
To be clear, I am absolutely behind deliberate subculture design (with reasonable safeguards to avoid institutionally abusive communities); I am pretty much always in favor of more experimentation and more empiricism. But I also think that “haphazard archipelago” is not the same as “bad archipelago”.
I’ve edited the post in light of these criticisms; if the solution didn’t address people’s concerns, I’m happy to hear about them.
They might be worth the attention of some subset of people. For example, I write rationalist-influenced posts about transness. These are no doubt very uninteresting to the vast majority of the cisgender population, but people who have specifically chosen to subscribe to my blog are probably going to be interested in the subject.