I strongly downvoted this post because I want to discourage this type of post on LW (at least for now), as it's currently impossible to discuss these issues honestly in public (from certain perspectives) without incurring unacceptable levels of political and PR risk, both for individual commenters and LW / the rationality community as a whole. (I strongly upvoted one of your other posts to even out your karma.) I wish the LW team would prioritize thinking about how to enable such discussions to happen more safely on LW, but until that's possible, I'd rather not see LW host discussions where only some perspectives can be represented.

(If you disagree with this, perhaps one compromise could be to post this kind of content on another forum or your personal blog, link to it from LW, and encourage people to only comment on the original post, to put more distance between the two and reduce risks.)

This comes across as a salad of harsh accusations with only a smidgen of supporting evidence.

What racism and sexism did "redacted" experience in the rationalist community? What "uniformed things" do we say about "non-white non-Western ciswomen"?

I'm pretty sure most of us here are aware that racism exists. In particular, I personally experienced it and my parents and further ancestors experienced a lot of it. This has little to do with "keep your identity small". The latter is about avoiding having particular maps entangled with your sense of self-worth so that you don't distort your beliefs out of emotional self-preservation. It is not about pretending as if your membership in particular groups has no consequences whatsoever. Personally I have some qualms with "keep your identity small" but this is not it.

Btw what did you mean by "your identity is trivial and superficial"? White people have a "superficial" identity and POC have "deep" identities? It makes no sense to me except invoking the meme that "privileged = bad" and riding its associated affect heuristic. And, we like (some thing about) Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon can be connected to [bad thing] in some roundabout way which doesn't say much given the time and place in which he lived, therefore we are complicit in [bad thing]?? Taint percolates through any number of degrees of separation?

How do we "unthoughtfully disrespect" tradition? The only example given is meditation with which I have little experience. Although, I do think it is strange and to-be-discouraged when people here starting talking about "Buddhism" while referring solely to meditation techniques. Btw I have "mystical" experiences even without meditation, and I don't need tradition for that (nor do I consider having such experiences an important goal).

As a queer person I can attest that tradition has done much to make my life miserable, and when I disrespect it I believe I do so quite thoughtfully. I don't owe courtesy to the Chesterton fence which is the wall of my prison. And, consider that it might be a "harmful, insensitive" thing to tell me otherwise (but also I think that whether something is true is more important than whether it is sensitive.)

I don't know about the majority, but I can say for at least a few, when they say "I don't see people in terms of race", they're being literal, not metaphoric. I was like this until my late teen years, when it changed, in a bad way -- which I can detail if there's interest. But the point is, until that moment I really couldn't see race, at all. I evidently noticed people had different skin colors, hair types, and eye shapes, but this didn't register with me as significant in any way, shape or form, concrete or abstract.

And one comment about the AMAB and AFAB acronyms. A study I read years ago showed that about 1 in 20,000 newborns are transgendered. This means that 99.995% of the time the gender assigned at birth is indeed the gender the person will have. Now, the usual, in contexts in which one has a 99.995% likelihood of making a correct guess, is to simply say "x is y". Evidently, for the 0.005% of cases in which the that guess was incorrect, it makes sense to say they were "incorrectly AM/FAB", but outside of these exceptional cases of misassignment, using these expressions gives the impression the assignation is incorrectly made way more often than it in fact is.

"I don't see people in terms of race"

You are the only person on LessWrong who wrote a post using that phrase. 

Google currently gives me: No results found for site:lesswrong.com "I don't see people in terms of race".

I haven't heard any rationalist say it. If you don't like it, I think you should think about why you want to make the phrase part of the discourse by using it in a post. 

It is matter-of-course for such a homogeneous group to say…uninformed things…about non-white non-Western ciswomen.

It's unclear to me why you would make such an accusation without bringing any examples of what uninformed things about non-white non-Western ciswomen are supposedly said on LessWrong.

This is an excellent critique, thank you for writing and posting this.

Anecdotally, I've noticed a slow but growing shift away from reactionary anti-traditionalism (I don't know what to call that phenomenon other than that) on LessWrong, though I wouldn't say we're in a great place as a community regarding that yet either. The Sequences were thoroughly saturated with anti-traditional often reactionary sentiments, usually directed at Christianity but really no tradition seemed safe from that ire. And for good reason at the time I think, what with New Atheism dominating online discourse then and honestly the niceness + novelty of encountering a large-ish group of people who weren't religious: this community has definitely served as a refuge for those from religious and/or conservative upbringings such as myself.

You are spot on about the dangers of extracting useful techniques, ideas, and so on from foreign-to-the-group traditions and cultures and stripping said traditions and cultural practices from what is extracted: as others have written, this can often lead to bad things that the extracting culture may not know how to even pinpoint or handle. Implicitly, I believe your post says that such extraction is disrespectful, not courteous, and I agree. I appreciate your recommendation awhile back that I read Zen Flesh Zen Bones and Three Pillars of Zen to obtain a deeper understanding of Zen Buddism via more traditional teachings rather than secular teachings...this has been helpful to me instrumentally plus I've enjoyed learning the history and cultural background to that practice, and feel that knowing that background also makes my practising better, richer, fuller, etc.

I feel similarly about keeping one's identity small (and really like this post on the subject [LW · GW]), and would ask those who feel that their identity is tiny to really try and notice what they are not noticing about their own identity and lived experiences. This question is purposefully vague and not easy to throw intellect at. Anyway. I at one point tried to keep my identity small, but that was harmful to me because doing so caused me to sometimes forget who I am and what I care about, partially, but mostly because I was constraining myself and in so doing forced myself to be not who I am: I'm a human, a trans woman, a rationalist when I try, a lover, a friend, a fighter, and so much more.

Just as it is good to know what language game you are participating in when speaking of X idea, it is similarly good to know the lineage, baggage, history, tradition, culture, and so on of a technique, practice, move, etc. when crafting the art of rationality and improvement. If some technique works and has been well curated then you can gain benefit from practising it without knowing any of such context, but you can never become a chef, an independent thinker, a rationalist without knowing that context.

For example, mindfulness meditation has been secularized and is being taught to many students with the religious framework removed. This is a good thing insofar as it produces calmer kids who can focus better.

But when you throw out the traditional framework it's easy to forget that meditative techniques were designed to produce mystical experiences. I experience energy surges and muscle spasms when I meditate. (This is perfectly normal if you're doing it right.) Meditation creates states of mind so powerful people used to think they were in the presence of God. I feel my sanity untangling while I stare into a Lovecraftian abyss. (Once again, this is perfectly normal if you're doing it right.) Secular mindfulness programs often throw out the safeguards protecting practitioners from Yog-Sothoth.

The issue is not secularization. It's reducing meditation into what Jon Kabat-Zinn could fit into a standardized 2-month course. 

Danis Bois and the community around him manage to teach secularized meditation quite fine while keeping all the spirtiual depth. 

The phrase keep your identity small is a good thing to tell yourself when your identity is trivial and superficial. It is a harmful, insensitive thing to tell a discriminated-against minority when you are a member of the majority.

I think the ideal would be the majority (or the powerful, capable of doing the discriminating) keeps their identity small AND the minority (or the less powerful, the target of the discriminating) keeps their identity small (without said discrimination, there then would be lowered need for defensive identity-forming). Thus, making people super individualistic.

After all in some sense, it's because the majority doesn't keep their identity small but enlarges it to be the normative "norm" that the minority suffers. It's those who don't realize they're not keeping their identity small at all (seeing oneself as default is not humility or keeping one's identity small). If the minority's traits were seen as just as neutral (neither more good or more bad than the majority's) just as the majority's traits were neutral, there wouldn't be a problem with either one's identity being kept small or large.

But absent that, it's riskier for groups targeted based on some identity to keep their identity small I agree. I think a lot of the problem with the whole identity discourse is people fail to distinguish between voluntary vs. involuntary identities (glossing over problems with wording like "self-identify as"). Voluntary identities you can keep large or small based on your own will. Involuntary ones forced upon you force you to be reactive.
 

Especially when you are a formal academic context!

Is this statement complete?