[LINK] Why I'm not on the Rationalist Masterlist

"A heretic is someone who shares almost all of your beliefs. Kill him." - Some card game

There is something extremely irritating about a person who almost agrees with you, and yet refuses to accept everything you say. Sometimes you get angry about them more than about your enemies, whose existence you already learned to accept. At least, the enemies are compatible with the "us versus them" dichotomy, while the almost-allies make it feel like the "us" side is falling apart.

Upvoted for that.

Also, people are free to interpret blog comments as it suits their goals.

Anyone want to set up an implicit association test for LW?

Among lurkers, the average feminism score was 3.84. Among people who had posted something - whether a post on Main, a post in Discussion, or a comment, the average feminism score was 3.8. A t-test failed to reveal any significant difference between the two (p = .49). So there is no difference between lurkers and posters in feminism score.

Among people who have never posted a top-level article in Main, the average feminism score is 3.84. Among people who have posted top-level articles in Main, the average feminism score is 3.47. A t-test found a significant difference (p < .01). So top-level posters were slightly less feminist than the Less Wrong average. However, the average feminism of top-level posters (3.47) is still significantly higher than the average feminism among women (3.1).

Possible, but I suspect the "Why our kind can't cooperate" both has a stronger effect and is more likely.

For the sake of simplicity, I used sex rather than gender and ignored nonbinaries. The average man on the site has a feminism approval score of 3.75; the average woman on the site has a score of 4.40. These are significantly different at p < .001.

The average man on the site has a social justice approval score of 3.55; the average woman on the site has a score of 4.21. These are, again, significantly different at p < .001.

Probably before the end of this month.

Attempting to discuss such issues dispassionately is a sign of privilege, and insisting that they be discussed dispassionately is an act of oppression.

Fine, then let me be passionate. You know what your atttitude reminds me most of? Those assholes in my old Greek highschool decades ago, or those assholes in the Greek media as far back as I remember, those assholes in the Greek society in general, who keep raging about how Jews/Germans/Americans/Turks/Slav Macedonians are oppressing us Greeks, those people who call it treason to have any different opinion on any "national issue"}, those people who call "toadies of foreigners" anyone who doesn't hate Jews/Germans/Americans/Turks/Slav Macedonians (who are after all oppressing us so very much that it should be actively unsafe to defend such people.)

If one defends such oppressors, they should be dragged to the courts, or beaten up, or perhaps stabbed to death. That's how the Greek establishment ensures the "unsafe" space for open discourse of issues that you also seem to be advocating for anyone who doesn't toe your favoured positions.

It must be "unsafe" to have a different opinion? Fuck you and your fascism. Fuck all the ways you use to justify your oppression. Every damn oppressor in the history of the world knows how to plays the role of the poor victim.

You think it so very advanced and so very progressive to HATE, HATE, HATE the oppressor? Well, Greek schoolchildren spent years learning such, and the result is that they end up electing Neonazis to the parliament when they grow up.

A true progressive like me is that one person in a hundred who wants to improve everyone's lives, rather than spent his time moaning about the damn privileged oppressors of another race/religion/tribe/nation/gender, and who think that by blaming other people his life will miraculously become better.

I hope you liked the passion in the above, since after all being dispassionate is supposedly a sign of privilege.

imagine the irony of a "feminist" man telling a woman what feminism is

Why? Does being born with a wrong chromozome prevent a person from understanding feminism?

A few lines sooner, you said "Being a feminist is incredibly hard." Is it hard only for men, or also for women? If it is also hard for women, then wouldn't a man who succeeds somewhat in being a feminist be qualified enough to tell women what feminism is?

Read the following sentence and try to think what is wrong about it:

imagine the irony of a "mathematician" woman telling a man what mathematics is

You know, there used to be people who believed it to be just as self-evident as what you said.

By the way, some feminists do disagree with other feminists, so even disagreeing with some feminists does not contradict being a feminist.

the reality of the LW environment being simply uncomfortable for women to inhabit.

So how do you explain the women who are here? I guess they must be white or otherwise inferior...

I've tried to introduce LW to several of my friends, partners, and comrades, as I believe its lessons to be useful, but nearly all of the people without male privilege have been turned away by it.

Nearly all of my friends, regardless of their gender, were not interested in LW. I would guess that even most of your male friends weren't.

It must be unsafe to say objectifying or misogynist things.

Let's add misandrist things to the list. Oops, now your comment would violate the rules...

(yeah, yeah, I get it; I didn't read Dworkin, therefore I am using completely wrong definitions, and furthermore I am a white man which means I can't understand anything)

At this point probably the best option would be to start a new rationalist site with the following rules:

• all members are assumed to be "white male" (WM), unless personally verified by moderators;

• a WM user is not allowed to see non-WM user's username, only their comment; unless the non-WM user flagged their comment as "private", in which case WM user sees nothing;

• any non-WM user can delete any comment made by a WM user; maybe even trusted WM users can delete any comment made by a WM user.

I guess this would be enough for a version 1.0; in version 2.0 you can add intersectionality and more complex rules of evaluating privileges. There are probably many people believing that this is a good way to have discussions, so you could cooperate with them to create this necessary software.

Being a feminist is incredibly hard.

In the same way being a rationalist is hard (i.e., it's cognitively difficult.)

If a man at a LW meetup said something objectifying, misogynist, or racist, would another male LWer call them out for it?

My mental model says yes, and I have actually seen it happen twice.

I doubt most of them would speak up

I think this is strictly correct, but I predict better outcomes in the case where one person says to the offender "Hey, that's out of line" than when everyone in the room castigates the offender in unison.

imagine the irony of a "feminist" man telling a woman what feminism is!

Maybe you meant "what oppression is"? (And maybe that would be a helpful distinction to make in general.)

arguments about feminism or anti-racism on Less Wrong commonly come to a feminist stating some widely-accepted notion from feminist theory or feminist psychology, and a LWer stating that the notion must be false because of some intuition.

Do you have some examples for this?

I generally agree that there are problems with how SJ issues are addressed around here, but my experience as an Actual Female On LW doesn't correspond to the picture you are painting of it being a bunch of intellectually snobby dudebros.

At a guess, I'd say this is linked to religion. Once you split out the libertarian faction (as the surveys historically have), it's quite rare for people on the conservative side of the fence (at least in the US) to be irreligious, and LW is nothing if not outspokenly secular.

People in the rationality community tend to believe that there's a lot of low-hanging fruit to be had in thinking rationally, and that the average person and the average society is missing out on this. This is difficult to reconcile with arguments for tradition and being cautious about rapid change, which is the heart of (old school) conservatism.

I think futurism is anti-conservative.

There is a big difference between what sex you are and what beliefs you profess: The first should not be determined by how rational you are, while the second very much should. There should be nothing surprising about the fact that more intelligent and more rational people would have different beliefs about reality than less intelligent and less rational people.

Or to put it another way: If you believe that all political affiliations should be represented equally in the sceptic/rationalist community, you are implicitly assuming that political beliefs are merely statements of personal preference instead of seeing them as claims about reality. While personal preference plays a role, I would hope that there's more to it than that.

See the penultimate paragraph of this comment, take a look at this, and try to guess whether US::conservatives have higher or lower Openness in average than US::liberals.

LW is a US-centric site. When I saw the option, I assumed it meant the US interpretation of the "conservative" label, which (from Europe) seems impossible to distinguish from batshit crazy.

I like to see myself as somewhat conservative, but I even more like to see myself as not batshit crazy.

[R]eality has a well-known liberal bias.

-- Stephen Colbert

There's one of his best articles:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/

It starts rather well - discussing an interesting study by Galton. High brow, sophisticated style, almost convincing impression of an upper class liberal person, up until he gets to the issue that for some reason actually interests him - rationalizing the views of PUA community on women. I say rationalizing because, of course, mind projection fallacy would affect opinions of PUA on women just as much as it affects opinions of women on women, but of course it is only the latter in which the fallacy is noticed.

This by the way is a great example of how cognitive fallacies are typically used here.

I'm not the least bit surprised that he would also support eugenics via sterilization. edit: or express sympathy towards it, or the like.

Turns out I was wrong, according to the 2012 survey only like 65% of LWers are socialist/liberals.

Yes, the complaint strikes me as "Stop saying things we don't like, it might lead to disapproved opinions being silenced!

Wouldn't it be possible to minimize signaling given the same level of dispassionate discussion? That is, discourage use of highly emotionally charged/exosemantically heavy words/phrases if a less charged equivalent exists or can be coined and defined.

Say if you have a word X that means Y plus emotional connotation α and thede/memeplex/identity signaling effect β (not that emotional connotation is detached from the thedish/political/identity-wise context of the reader, of course), there's really no reason to use X instead of Y in dispassionate discussion. To give a concrete example, there's no reason to use 'sluttiness' (denotatively equivalent to 'sexual promiscuity' but carrying a generally negative connotational load, signaling against certain memeplexes/political positions/identities (though ideally readers here would read past the signaling load/repress the negative emotional response), and signaling identification with other positions/identities) instead of 'sexual promiscuity', which means the same thing but sheds all the emotional and thedish/tribal/whatever baggage.

(That shouldn't be read as an endorsement of the reasoning toward the same conclusion in the post, of course.)

I have a hard time believing that a policy that led to some issue only being discussed in emotionally charged terms would be a net good for society.

But you're also a white man and have an obvious lack of experience in this situation that functions as an unknown unknown. You'd be wise to be conservative in your conclusions.

As a white man myself, I feel it's entirely reasonable to refuse to dispassionately discuss the matter of a boot on one's own face. There are some situations in which case it is entirely appropriate to react with the deepest of passions.

If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is cool, and it is hot, the Way opposes your calm.

I'm a white man who's done handsomely in the privilege lottery and I find quite a lot of LW utterly offputting and repellent (as I've noted at length previously). I'm still here of course, but in fairness I couldn't call someone unreasonable for looking at its worst and never wanting to go near the place.

Someone affected by the issue might bring up something that nobody else had thought of, something that the science and statistics and studies missed

Aye !

but other than that, what marginal value are they adding to the discussion?

Is that not enough for You ? Especially in some discussions, which are repetitive on LW ?

Someone affected by the issue might bring up something that nobody else had thought of, something that the science and statistics and studies missed - but other than that, what marginal value are they adding to the discussion?

Thinkers - including such naive, starry-eyed liberal idealists as Friedrich Hayek or Niccolo Machiavelli - have long touched on the utter indispensability of subjective, individual knowledge and its advantages over the authoritarian dictates of an ostensibly all-seing "pure reason". Then along comes a brave young LW user and suggests that enlightened technocrats like him should tell people what's really important in their lives.

I'm grateful to David for pointing out this comment, it's really a good summary of what's wrong with the typical LW approach to policy.

(I'm a repentant ex/authoritarian myself, BTW.)

There's lots of talk about religion which is almost the definition of a socially strong group.

the percentage of LW women has grown slightly (lazy to look up the census result)

It grew from 3% in 2009 to 8.9% (cis) + 1.3% (trans) in 2012.

I don't think simple invitations are going to make much difference.

If some marginal group didn't drift here spontaneously because they're inherently interested in the community, then we must provide them other incentives. Unfortunately this might mean privileging them some way, which to be honest I usually find so unjust and contrary to truth seeking it pisses me off.

Perhaps there are benign forms of such privileging, but none are cognitively available to me at the moment.

Eh, yes and no. This attitude ("we know what's best; your input is not required") has historically almost always been wrong and frequently dangerous and deserves close attention, and I think it mostly fails here. In very, very specific instances (GiveWell-esque philanthropy, eg), maybe not, but in terms of, say, feminism? If anyone on LW is interested tackling feminist issues, having very few women would be a major issue. Even when not addressing specific issues, if you're trying to develop models of how human beings think, and everyone in the conversation is a very specific sort of person, you're going to have a much harder time getting it right.

I don't see this as a problem, really. The entire point is to have high-value discussions.

High-value discussions here, so far as is apparent to me, seem to be better described as "High-value for modestly wealthy white and ethnic Jewish city-dwelling men, many of them programmers". If it turns out said men get enough out of this to noticeably improve the lives of the huge populations (some of which might even contain intelligent, rational individuals or subgroups), that's all fine and well. But so far, it mostly just sounds like rich programmers signalling at each other.

Which makes me wonder what the hell I'm still doing here; in spite of not feeling particularly welcome, or getting much out of discussions, I haven't felt like not continuing to read and sometimes comment would make a good response. Yet, since I'm almost definitely not going to be able to contribute to a world-changing AI, directly or otherwise, and don't have money to spare for EA or xrisk reduction, I don't see why LW should care. (Ok, so I made a thinly veiled argument for why LW should care, but I also acknowledged it was rather weak.)

Even with malaria nets (which seem like a very simple case), having information from the people who are using them could be important. Is using malaria nets harder than it sounds? Are there other diseases which deserve more attention?

One of the topics here is that sometimes experts get things wrong. Of course, so do non-experts, but one of the checks on experts is people who have local experience.

The entire point is to have high-value discussions.

Feminism and possible racial differences seem like pretty low-value discussion topics to me... interesting way out of proportion to their usefulness, kind of like politics.

And in the African malaria case, being inclusive would obviously hurt our problem-solving capability.

Maybe I'm being dense, but I don't see why this is obviously true.

Anecdote time:

I'm currently dispassionate about racial issues, and can (and have) openly discussed topics such as the possibility that racial discrimination is not a real thing, the possibility that genetically mediated behavioral differences between races exist, and other conservative-to-reactionary viewpoints. Some of those discussions have been on lesswrong, under this account and under an alt, some have been on other sites, and some have been in "real life".

Prior to the age of ~19, I would have been unable to be dispassionate about issues of race and culture. I would understand the value of being dispassionate and I would try, but the emotions would have come anyway. Due to my racial and cultural differences, I've fended of physical attacks from bullies in middle school and been on the receiving end of condescending statements in high school and college, sometimes from strangers and people whom I do not care about and sometimes from peers who I liked and from authority figures who I respected. When it came from someone i liked/respected, it hurt more.

The way human brains work, is when a neutral stimuli (here, racist viewpoints) is repeatedly paired with a negative stimuli (here, physical harm and/or loss of social status), the neutral stimuli can involuntarily trigger pre-emptive anger and defensiveness all on its own. If your experience of people who posited Opinion X was that they proceeded to physically attack you / steal your things / taunt you openly in a social setting, you too would probably develop aversive reactions to Opinion X.

--

EDIT: just read the linked post. It independently echoes my account:

This is because respect for said arguments and/or the idea behind them is a warning sign for either 1) passively not respecting my personhood or 2) actively disregarding my personhood, both of which are, to use some vernacular, hella fucking dangerous to me personally.

--

The above is an explanation as to why it happens and how it is. I'm not saying it's justified, or that it aught to be that way. I made a conscious effort to fight down the anger and not direct it at people who were clearly not trying to physically harm me or lower my social status in a group. I think others should do the same.

For an extreme example, in the past an authority figure made a racial joke at my expense in the presence of other students who had previously physically taunted me, thereby validating their behavior - and I took care to not direct the anger at the authority figure (who was simply ignorant of the social status lowering effect of the joke, not maliciously trying to harm me). For a tamer example, I've never actually ended a friendship with someone for espousing certain views - I've only been angry and forced myself not to say anything until after calming down.

Currently, I don't feel emotionally angry at all when faced with those views, and i think every one else should strive to that. However, that doesn't mean that people who haven't faced this sort of thing are allowed to simply expect that people who have faced it will have that sort of emotional control. I'm pretty sure I'm an outlier with respect to unusually good emotional control (globally, if not on LessWrong) - most people can't do it. It also really helps that my current social bubble has less of that sort of thing.

That said (and this is where I disagree with the linked poster) I don't think it's a good idea to censor views for the sake of not triggering anyone's emotions. Dispassionate discussion of a topic unpairs the neutral stimuli with a negative stimuli - in fact, I would go so far as to recommend that people who are psychologically similar to myself (intellectually curious, emotionally stable) who have been hurt by racism should spend time talking on the internet to white nationalists and reactionaries, and people who have been hurt by sexism should spend time talking to pua's / redpill / the "manosphere". Talking about charged topics in settings where people are powerless to actually hurt you is a great way to remove emotional triggers.

That said, the small but vocal prevalence of meta-contrarian, reactionary ideology on LW has probably driven away a lot of smart people. There's even dirty tactics at play here - such as the down-voting of every single comment of anyone who explicitly expresses progressive views or challenging reactionary views. I myself am on the receiving end of this nonsense - every post is systematically downvoted by exactly -1 ever since I mentioned some biological evidence about sexual orientation that could be construed as liberal. I think our kind is so partial to contrarians that we actually give people a pass from the downvote simply because they went against the grain even when the actual ideas aren't especially insightful. Remember, well-kept gardens die by pacifism - reactionary ideas are fine if they are supported by real evidence and logic of the same standard you would hold if someone espoused a common viewpoint which is fairly obvious and popular. If it reads like pseudo-intellectual fluff, it probably is. Don't go easy on it just because it's contrarian.

You are positing that folks who are affected by some issues would not participate in frank, dispassionate discussion of these same issues... why exactly? To preserve their ego? It seems like a dubious assumption.

This doesn't really seem like a dubious assumption to me, practically everyone is more motivated to preserve their ego than to think rationally.

http://imgur.com/ZaYq9Y5

hard to be frankly dispassionate when you're affected by an issue. That tends to encourage self-serving passion.

The apparent inconceivability (in this thread) of the notion that someone might disagree on a deep level with local memes without being insane is quite amazing. [...] If you're serious about working for all of humanity, it may conceivably be useful to seriously listen to some who don't already agree with you.

I don't think that's the case. If people would find that notion inconceivability I doubt that the thread would be upvoted to 19 at the point of this writing.

I would also point out that the kind of ideology that expressed in the linked post comes from the Bay Area. As far as core differences in ideologies goes pitting one Bay Area ideology against another Bay Area ideology isn't real diversity of opinion.

The apparent inconceivability (in this thread) of the notion that someone might disagree on a deep level with local memes without being insane is quite amazing. Typical mind fallacy, the lack of realisation that there exist unknown unknowns.

I considered posting a third-hand account in the rationality quotes of a blind couple who, in a public park and not hearing anyone else nearby, decided to have sex. They told the judge they did not know that anyone could see them; maybe they didn't, what with plausibly having no idea what vision is capable of.

It felt too lengthy, and it wasn't originally intended as a parable, so I decided against posting it. I think it more easily explains itself in this context, though.

I don't see where those who disagree with local memes are being accused of insanity, and not noticing something like that scares me. Could you please point out where it's happening?

People with strong political identities usually have their maps systematically distorted.

Oh, certainly. Feminism points out, though, that the social mainstream is also a strong political identity which systematically distorts people's maps. They use somewhat unfortunate historical words for this effect, like "patriarchy". That's just a label on their maps, though; calling a stream a creek doesn't change the water.

So combining this with your guideline, we should be careful not to invite anyone who has a strong political identity ... but we cannot do that, because "ordinary guy" (and "normal woman") is a strong political identity too. It's just a strong political identity one of whose tenets is that it is not a strong political identity.

We don't have the freedom to set out with an undistorted map, nor of having a perfect guide as to whose maps are more distorted. Being wrong doesn't feel like being wrong. A false belief doesn't feel like a false belief. If you start with ignorance priors and have a different life, you do not end up with the same posteriors. And as a consequence, meeting someone who has different data from you can feel like meeting someone who is just plain wrong about a lot of things!

Also ... I wonder what a person whose maps of the social world were really "no better than random" would look like. I think he or she would be vastly more unfortunate than a paranoid schizophrenic. He or she would certainly be grossly unable to function in society, lacking any ability to model or predict other people. As a result, he or she would probably have no friends, job, or political allies. Lacking the ability to work with other people at all, he or she would certainly not look like a member of any political movement.

As such, I have to consider that when applied to someone who clearly does not have these attributes, that expression is being used as merely a crude insult, akin to calling someone a "drooling moron" or "mental incompetent" because they disagree with you.

I can see the problem you're trying to avoid-- the assumption that one sort of feminism is typical for women. And I think it's worth avoiding.

However, you seem to be implying that men aren't excessively clustered by politics at LW.

Also, the problem pointed to in the Not on the Master List article doesn't generally manifest at that level of fear. I think the more common negative reaction to LW is moderate revulsion, and I suspect that just inviting more women isn't going to solve it.

If anyone tried the experiment of inviting more women, it might be world posting about how it worked out.

the cry of "Diversity!" is invoked exclusively by those who are trying to import to a group those demographics which tend to offer political support to the left.

I wouldn't mind "importing a demographics which tends to support X" assuming that we continue using the existing filters on content, and require rational comments and avoiding mindkilling politics. The difference between 55% and 44% seems unimportant, because we don't use majority voting in LW anyway. It's not like a 5% advantage would make someone win or lose an election. Unless we really lose our basic community values, it wouldn't even mean that the minority group would automatically get negative karma for every comment.

I am more concerned about "importing a subset of a demographics, selected by its support for X". As a strawman example, by suggesting that we need more Obama-voting women, but we actually don't care about Romney-voting women. As a more realistic example, by trying to optimize LW for women from the feminist / social justice warrior cluster, instead of for women in general. (Because, you know, there are also women who prefer free speech, and some changes would make LW even less attractive for them.)

Therefore I think new demographics should be invited here, but in a way that does not signal preference for a political group X. Specifically, we should invite women, not feminists. (If some of those women who come happen to be feminists, that's perfectly okay. As long as they are equally invited if they are libertarian, conservative, neoreactionary, or whatever.) If we want to invite the demographics, let's really invite a demographics, instead of making a power grab for a political group X in the name of inviting the demographics.

Consider these two theories:

Liberal politicians promote the well-being of minority groups because they want their votes. This constitutes a naked power grab.

Minority groups vote for liberal politicians because they expect them to promote their well-being. This constitutes democracy working as intended.

How would you tell which of these theories is true?

I hear you saying that women and men are measurably different in their political and social views; and that whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians are likewise different in their views.

(I broadly agree, although I think you exaggerate on the political-party issue specifically — and indeed to the point of logical inconsistency. You note that 45% of men voted for a center-left candidate, and then say that "women support the left and men do not". These statements are logical contraries) and cannot both be true.)

However then I hear you saying that there is more intellectual diversity among "an exclusively middle class white male group" than among a demographically diverse group. This statement is a direct contradiction of your (correct) point that different demographic groups are measurably different in their views.

Of course, you've read my above comment and so you already know that I think there is a good reason that reasonable people from different backgrounds can arrive at different views; namely that they are in possession of different information about the world.

Again, the cry of "Diversity!" is invoked for those trying to add women to a group, and rarely for men.

Men are already overrepresented on LW.

The comment you're replying to actually doesn't discuss that idea at all. Did you attach this reply to the wrong comment?

This encourages me to think more about just what I was proposing....

A lot of what I was trying to do was demonstrate that I think the writer of the original link has a point. This is not quite the same thing as a call for action, even though I'd be happier without the trolley problems.

Another angle I was taking was that LW is theoretically open-minded, but is actually much more hospitable to some sorts of radical low-empathy ideas than others.

What I think is more feasible than changing LW (which is not to say very feasible) would be an empathy-tilted rationalist blog. It might be an independent development or started by disaffected LWers.

Have a probably empathic idea: HBD focuses on IQ, but there's little or no discussion of the possibility of tech for raising IQ from 90 or so to 110, even though that would make a large positive difference.

Meanwhile, I'll mention Hillary Rettig, a progressive who's good on instrumental rationality.

LW historically has had a habit of choosing examples with shock value beyond what's necessary to make the point; granted, this no longer seems quite so fashionable for new top-level content, but it does remain noticeable in comments and in older posts, including parts of the Sequences. I view this habit as basically a social display: a way of signaling "I can handle this without getting mind-killed". Now, let me be very clear: I do not regard this as intrinsically destructive, nor do I place substantial terminal value on avoiding offense. But I do think its higher-order effects have avoidably reduced the quality of discussion here.

The fundamental issue is that not everyone here is equally able to avoid derailing discussions when exposed to topics like, say, torture. Even people who are generally very rational may find particular subjects intolerable; judging from experience, in fact, I'd say that most of the people here have one or two they can't handle, including myself. Avoiding these is part of our culture when they overlap with talking points in mainstream politics, and that's good; but there remains a wide scope of weakly politicized yet potentially mindkilling ones out there, many of which we've historically thrown around with the gleeful abandon of a velociraptor plunging into a vat full of raw meat.

I think we should stop doing that, at least to the extent that we avoid conventional politics and for most of the same reasons.

Torture as an example seems like a bad idea in the same way that the Reagan/Quaker/Pacifist question is a bad example - it's political, it draws one's attention away from the actual argument.

That post struck me as ignoring any advantages divorce might have (like getting out of bad marriages) for women.

Doesn't this problem gradually fix itself? For example, at the beginning I was interested in Moldbug's articles, but these days I just consider them boring. I have already heard the big picture; there is now nothing new, just reiterating what was already said; the lack of evidence or even clear explanations is very annoying, and I have already given up hope that it could be improved.

These days, if someone says something seemingly smart like "Cthulhu always swims left", my first though is: give me a definition of what the hell do you even mean by this, then give me an evidence that it really happens, and if you don't give any of it (which is my expectation based on previous experience) then just please shut up because you're wasting my time.

Speaking for myself, the neo-reactionaries had their chance (which I consider to be a good thing -- because I learned a few interesting things), and they wasted it.

I know smart Americans who grew up very poor, and don't seem to have received a lot of help.

In Slovenia at least we have scholarships handed out to people who preform very well on aptitude tests, is this something that doesn't happen as reliably in the US?

Several states have merit-based scholarships (though these usually require performance in classes as well as aptitude tests, so there is a conscientiousness element as well as an intelligence element). I myself am going to university on a Bright Future scholarship. However, my impression is that federal need-based aid is a lot more common than state merit-based aid.

Better to hit the other car rather than the pedestrian. The people in the car are protected by a lot of metal and will tend to suffer much less damage.

This puzzles me. Would you elaborate on the reasons why you found it distressing?

We already practice eugenics, every time we do a genetic test and abort a fetus when it has some horrible transferrable genetic disorder. Frankly, we could do with a bit more of that - there are many, many horrible recessive genetic diseases which people should never have to endure, and which should be eliminated if at all possible. Not doing so strikes me as similar to not trying to cure polio.

Yes, they need to know our buttons and press them. Such as:

• you are an unfriendly place for women;

• you say that politics is the mindkiller, but secretly all of you are libertarians (or all of you are conservatives);

• you are actually a cult;

...and for the best impact: all of the above, in a long article, with citations out of context from random parts of the website; quoting some offensive and heavily downvoted comments and presenting them as a typical LW content; claiming to be an expert on artificial intelligence or quantum physics and claiming that everything LW says on these topics is a pseudoscience. Did I forget something important? Oh yes, the basilisk! And end with a huge generalization that this all proves that LW is a horrible group of people, and that you will tell everyone you know to avoid LW: both your personal friends, and also any scientist or an organizer of an atheist or skeptic meetup.

(I am not saying this is what the linked article did. Just that this is what I would include into a troll manual, and bet money that LW couldn't resist discussing such article. But a subset of this is enough to succeed.)

What might it have been?

Why wouldn't the author say what it was, if there was such a thing?

Read the "tl;dr" part at the end of the article. (Someone used the word "eugenics", and the author was trigegred by this word.)

Why [do you believe there was most likely one specific thing that offended the author]?

The contrast between the widely general text of the article, so that I had problem finding out "what exactly is this person trying to say?", and the very specific "tl;dr" at the end, which I really would have problem to extract as the main point from the article.

My model of humans (which may be more or less correct, but this is what I use) says that the most likely way to this outcome is the following:

Author reads something and becomes angry. In their mind this connects with dozen other things (which weren't actually present in the article). Author decides to write a reply in the form of article in their blog. Author writes very generally, because they want to show how things are connected; to emphasise that the thing that triggered them is not just a trivial detail, but a part of an important whole. Overwhelmed by emotions, author writes too general article, and only at the end notices they actually didn't write the thing that triggered them. But the article is already finished, so they add a "tl;dr" at the end.

A competing hypothesis would have to explain why the "tl;dr" is seemingly unrelated to the rest of the article, when in fact it should be a summary of the article. (My hypothesis is that it is a summary of what author had in mind when deciding to write the article.)

To maximize open discourse, you have to close down discourse against open discourse.

It's just Marcuse's paradox (which I'm pretty sure I'm coining here): to maximize tolerance, you have to be intolerant toward intolerance. Or in the legal arena: "the Constitution is not a suicide pact."

There are two arguments in that post: "certain elements within the rationality thing signal more than is necessary", the correction of which would aid the goal of generating high-quality open discourse, and "certain conclusions should not even be considered, certain arguments should not be made, no matter their strength, because certain people have memetic immune reactions to them that drive them away from participating at all", the correction of which would mean an end to open discourse. Given that ThrustVectoring (presumably) values open discourse, the response of "I don't even want to discuss anything from that direction" is exactly correct.

That doesn't mean that it can't be discussed, of course; it just means that a community that values open discourse can't discuss it. If apophemi wants there to be a community based around limited rationality -- that is, rationality-minus-discourse-about-certain-things -- well, one can always be started. Secession is always an option, and online, you don't even have to figure out how to build a seastead to secede.

I agree about political discussion. But LessWrong isn't about political discussion. Far more important to a typical LessWronger would be something like community building, which correct me if I'm wrong but that's pretty much a textbook example of what "safe space" is good for. This criticism was not directed at us per se, but we can extract useful information from it.

The Occupy Wall Street example in particular was talking about their use of what they call "the Progressive Stack" to organize meetings. The general idea was this - people want to speak up, but not everyone can talk at the same time, so we need some sort of system for choosing who gets to speak when. First in first out isn't fair enough when you factor in things like minorities or women feeling more inhibited about speaking, so let's let them jump the queue and speak before people who are white and/or male.

It's an idea that sounds just fair enough to be considered, and has the benefit of both having passionate supporters on the left and of having an obvious path to paint opponents as sexist racists that want to silence women and minorities. The left won on this point at the cost of driving off much of their popular support, and the movement has been marginalized since.

The above is my understanding of what happened with this, synthesized over a fair amount of reading and research. It may well be wrong, and the situation may well be more complicated than I described. As far as I understand it, though, it's the major mistake that the movement made - it let itself be co-opted into caring about social justice at the cost of their other goals.

As far as Atheism+ goes, it's an organized group spearheaded by people like Rebecca Watson who are outraged -- outraged -- at the behavior of atheists being insufficiently pro-woman and pro-social justice. Rebecca Watson in particular has a laser-like focus on sexism within the atheist and skeptic community, at the expense of the larger groups' nominal goals. She's responsible for the whole "elevatorgate" debacle, and responded to Richard Dawkins' claim that she was overreacting by going after Dawkins personally with this piece of loveliness. It says it's not a call for a boycott, but it's a call for a boycott ("Nope, I didn’t call for a boycott. I’m relaying the fact that I have no interest in giving this person any more of my money or attention." I read that as "I want to hurt Dawkins personally but realize that I don't have the social capital to carry off leading a boycott, so I'm going to encourage people to boycott Dawkins while saying that I'm not doing so)

I actually haven't done all that much analysis of Atheism+. I pretty much have discarded it as a group of people who have been successfully derailed by people like Rebecca Watson talking about sexism constantly within the atheist and skeptical community, and want to do the same. Just look at the first sentence of their FAQ

Atheism Plus is a term used to designate spaces, persons, and groups dedicated to promoting social justice and countering misogyny, racism, homo/bi/transphobia, ableism and other such bigotry inside and outside of the atheist community.

They are essentially policing the atheist community for compliance with social justice ideas. Their own website is saying the same things I am about them with different wording and connotations.

I've nothing to say about OWS, but as an ex-member of Freethought Blogs and I've written a bit about the problems with that clique, for example here. (PZ Myers is the most popular blogger on the FTB network, and not all bloggers do the kind of shit he does but quite a few do.)

Except that the broad umbrella of ideas which even a reasonable person might construe to be "racist, misogynist, or queerphobic" covers a lot of things which are nowhere close to being settled questions the way theism is.

There a ban on talking about religion on Lesswrong that I'm aware off. I'm aware off a ban on talking about the basilisk and a ban from talking about advocating specific violence.

Could you point to an discussion in which Lesswrong supposedly agreed that talking about religion is wrong?

I think it's more of a matter that this community lacks people who can make interesting arguments in favor of religion.

The last interesting discussion about religions on Lesswrong I remember was how the catholics scored best on the reverse ideological turing test. I think that making arguments on that level about religion is welcome on LW.

Having a policy of not permitting people to say overtly racist, misogynist, or queerphobic things because they're wrong* isn't any worse than shutting down talking about religion because it's wrong.

I have a simpler idea: How about a policy against saying wrong things regardless of topic, or since it's hard to know ahead of time whether something is wrong a policy against making claims without evidence.

Perhaps what I was saying wasn't precise enough there. I'm talking about how when a community starts responding to certain arguments by vilifying their proponents, there's a chilling effect on the discourse in the community.

Openness of discourse is more of a matter of degree than on/off, anyways, much like a 'free' market.

There is no such thing as open discourse ... Implicit and explicit power and privilege always prevent both. People trying to create workarounds for this fact strikes me as a good thing.

What makes you think that this is a functional workaround, as opposed to compounding the problem? The underlying idea seems to be a preference for "safe spaces" - hardly a move towards more openness.

Implicit and explicit power and privilege always prevent both.

If I register an anonymous account on a forum than power doesn't prevent me from speaking. I might get disapproval, I might even get banned but I don't have to expect repercussion for my daily life from speaking my mind.

It's not like a face to face conversation where you have serious consequences for speaking against power.

"there are differences that are demarcated by ethnicity" and "it sucks when people suffer" seem orthogonal to me.

Let me have a go at this.

Fellow effective altruists! It is your moral duty to familiarize yourselves with biological realities, many of which are relevant to deciding the morally optimal course of action. For example, "findings from twin studies yield heritability estimates of 0.50 for prosocial behaviours like empathy, cooperativeness and altruism". (source) Please take this into account when deciding whether to have children.

Fellow HBDers! It is your moral duty to take up the white man's burden and donate to GiveWell today. If giving money directly to poor people in Kenya doesn't seem paternalistic enough then go for the deworming options.

Have I successfully alienated everyone yet?

Of course! Racism is evil and charity is good! If you try to mix them you get an explosion.

No. A person may donate heavily to cure rare diseases in cute puppies without believing that puppies should have the vote.

It wasn't my point that the racists and the donors are non-overlapping, though — rather that they are not necessarily overlapping, and that the overlap — if it exists — should not be taken as defining the whole population. (Which is what the "But they're racists who ..." statement does.)

There are probably people named Muhammad Wang, after all; just not very many of them.

(I don't think there are any Hasidic parrots, though.)

Not necessarily, and in the case of "avowed racists of Less Wrong" almost certainly not. The "biological realism" concept is that there are genetic and physiological differences split so sharply along racial lines ("carves reality at its joints") that it is correct to say that all races are not born equal. Proponents of this concept would claim it is obviously true, and they would also be called racists. These people could donate heavily to African charities out of sympathy for what is, in their eyes, the "bad luck" to be born a certain race, and it would be consistent.

(I believe that biological realism is the main form of racism amongst LW posters, but I have nothing to back this assertion up except that I recall seeing it discussed)

Depends on the type of racist.

It depends on the definition of "racist" that you use. Anyone who self-identifies as "racist" is probably in a hateful enough place that the idea of saving African children from malaria doesn't even cross their mind as a possibility. On the other hand, if you define racism as "any idea held by white people that PoC disapprove of", well, most white folks are racist.

I agree with Romeo Steven's comment that the issues seem orthogonal. As an example, (caveat YMMV), Steve Sailer believes in HBD. However, he frequently cites lower growth in african american wages as a reason to shut the american borders down to low skilled workers.

However, in today's environment, I'm not sure how many top-rated charities are HBD believing. A neoreactionary charity aiming at improving Africa might do many things differently. And being a relatively new ideology, most policies would not have substantial support of data. Hence, atleast in the current scenario, you would not find many people that were HBD aware and contributed greatly to african charities. However, it is not intellectually inconsistent.

I agree with Romeo Steven's comment that the issues seem orthogonal. As an example, (caveat YMMV), Steve Sailer believes in HBD. However, he frequently cites lower growth in african american wages as a reason to shut the american borders down to low skilled workers.

However, in today's environment, I'm not sure how many top-rated charities are HBD believing. A neoreactionary charity aiming at improving Africa might do many things differently. And being a relatively new ideology, most policies would not have substantial support of data. Hence, atleast in the current scenario, you would not find many people that were HBD aware and contributed greatly to african charities. However, it is not intellectually inconsistent.

I didn't downvote you, but consider the impact this picture would have on someone quickly looking at this post to see if they want to participate in LW. Are you being ironic or something?

This picture of a lynching is closer to my "why I think racism is bad" image.

Didn't downvote you, but I'm willing to bet it was because you embedded an image rather than linking it.

The politically correct response to your valid objection would be to claim that the positive characteristics come from discrimination, historical oppression, and unjust privileges.