Slack Club

I think it's a sort of Double Entendre? It's also possible the author didn't actually read Zvi's post in the first place. This is implied by the following:

Slack is a nerd culture concept for people who subscribe to a particular attitude about things; it prioritizes clever laziness over straightforward exertion and optionality over firm commitment.

In the broader nerd culture, slack is a thing from the Church of the Subgenius, where it means something more like a kind of adversarial zero sum fight over who has to do all the work. In that context, the post title makes total sense.

For an example of this, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chez_Geek

(I don't think slack is at all about optionality over firm commitment – rather, you need to have slack to be able to make the commitments that you want to make.)

My suspicion is that people see that Eliezer gained a lot of prestige via his writing ... and I suspect people make the (reasonable) assumption that if they do something similar maybe they will gain prestige from their writing targeted to other rationalists.

I'd like to emphasize the idea "people try to copy Eliezer", separately from the "naming new concepts" part.

It was my experience from Mensa that highly intelligent people are often too busy participating at pissing contests, instead of actually winning at life by engaging in lower-status behaviors such as cooperation or hard work. And, Gods forgive me, I believed we (the rationalist community) were better than that. But perhaps we are just doing it in a less obvious way.

Trying to "copy Eliezer" is a waste of resources. We already have Eliezer. His online articles can be read by any number of people; at least this aspect of Eliezer scales easily. So if you are tempted to copy him anyway, you should consider the hypothesis that you actually try to copy his local status. You have found a community where "being Eliezer" is high-status, and you are unconsciously pushed towards increasing your status. (The only thing you cannot copy is his position as a founder. To achieve this, you would have to rebrand the movement, and position yourself in the new center. Welcome, post-rationalists, et al.)

Instead, the right thing to do is:

• cooperate with Eliezer, especially if your skills complement his. (Question is, how good is Eliezer himself at this kind of cooperation. I am on the opposite side of the planet, so I have no idea.) Simply said, anything Eliezer needs to get done, but doesn't have a comparative advantage at, if you do it for him, you free his hands and head to do things he actually excels at. Yes, this can mean doing low-status things. Again, the question is whether your are optimizing for your status, or something else.
• try alternative approaches, where the rationalist community seems to have blind spots. Such as Dragon Army, which really challenged the local crab mentality. My great wish is to see other people build their own experiments on top of this one: to read Duncan's retrospective, to make their own idea of "we want to copy this, we don't want to copy that, and we want to introduce these new ideas", and then go ahead and actually do it. And post their own retrospective, etc. So that finally we may find a working model of a rationalist community that actually wins at life, as a community. (And of course, anyone who tries this has to expect strong negative reactions.)

I strongly suspect that internet itself (the fact that rationalists often coordinate as an online community) is a negative pressure. Internet is inherently biased in favor of insight porn. Insights get "likes" and "shares", verbal arguments receive fast rewards. The actions in real world usually take a lot of time, and thus don't make a good online conversation. (Imagine that every few months you acquire one boring habit that makes you more productive, and as a cumulative result of ten such years you achieve your dreams. Impressive, isn't it? Now imagine a blog, that every few months publishes a short article about the new boring habit. Such blog would be a complete failure.) I would expect rationalists living close to each other, and thus mostly interacting offline, to be much more successful.

I agree with a bunch of these concerns. FWIW, it wouldn't surprise me if the current rationalist community still behaviorally undervalues "specialized jargon". (Or, rather than jargon, concept handles a la https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/15/can-it-be-wrong-to-crystallize-patterns/.) I don't have a strong view on whether rationalists undervalue of overvalue this kind of thing, but it seems worth commenting on since it's being discussed a lot here.

When I observe the reasons people ended up 'working smarter' or changing course in a good way, it often involves a new lens they started applying to something. I think one of the biggest problems the rationalist community faces is a lack of dakka and a lack of lead bullets. But I guess I want to caution against treating abstraction and execution as too much of a dichotomy, such that we have to choose between "novel LW posts are useful and high-status" and "conscientiousness and follow-through is useful and high-status" and see-saw between the two.

The important thing is cutting the enemy, and I think the kinds of problems that rationalists are in an especially good position to solve require individuals to exhibit large amounts of execution and follow-through while (on a timescale of years) doing a large number of big and small course-corrections to improve their productivity or change their strategy.

It might be that we're doing too much reflection and too much coming up with lenses. It might also be that we're not doing enough grunt work and not doing enough reflection and lenscrafting. Physical tasks don't care whether we're already doing an abnormal amount of one or the other; the universe just hands us problems of a certain difficulty, and if we fall short on any of the requirements then we fail.

It might also be that this varies by individual, such that it's best to just make sure people are aware of these different concerns so they can check which holds true in their own circumstance.

I've thought a bit about this common pattern [name concepts with unusual names] I see in rationalist writing and tried to formulate a theory of why it happens that accounts not only for why we see it here but also why I don't see it as much in other writing communities.

I see the pattern a lot in "spiritual" writings. See, for example, the "Integral Spirituality" being discussed in another recent post.

Seems to me that we have members at both extremes. Some of them drop all caution the moment someone else calls themselves a rationalist. Some of them freak out when someone suggests that rationalists should do something together, because that already feels too cultish to them.

My personal experience is mostly with the Vienna community, which may be unusual, because I haven't seen either extreme there. (Maybe I just didn't pay enough attention.) I learn about the extremes on the internet.

I wonder what would be the distribution in Bay Area. Specifically, on one axis I would like to see people divided from "extremely trusting" to "extremely mistrusting", and on another axis, how deeply are those people involved with the rationalist community. That is, whether the extreme people are in the center of the community, or somewhere on the fringe.