LW was started to help altruists

I agree with Nesov.

To give more detailed impressions:

• I suspect LW would be worse -- and would be worse at improving the world -- if altruism, especially altruism around a particular set of causes that seemed strange to most newcomers, was obligatory. It would make many potential contributors uncomfortable, and would heighten the feeling that newcomers had walked into a cult.

• Improving LW appears to be an effective way to reduce existential risk. Many LW-ers have either donated to existential risk reducing organizations (SIAI, FHI, nuclear risks organizations), have come to work at SIAI, or have done useful research; this is likely to continue. As long as this is the case, serious aspiring rationalists who contribute to LW are reducing existential risk, whether or not they consider themselves altruists.

• Whether your goal is to help the world or to improve your own well-being, do improve your own rationality. (“You”, here, is any reader of this comment.) Do this especially if you are already among LW’s best rationalists. Often ego makes people keener on teaching rationality, and removing the specks from other peoples’ eyes, than on learning it themselves; I know I often find teaching more comfortable than exploring my own rationality gaps. But at least if your aim is existential risk reduction, there seems to be increasing marginal returns to increasing rationality/sanity; better to help yourself or another skilled rationalist gain a rationality step, then to help two beginners gain a much lower step.

• If we are to reduce existential risk, we’ll need to actually care about the future of the world, so that we take useful actions even when this requires repeatedly shifting course, admitting that we’re wrong, etc. We’ll need to figure out how to produce real concern about humanity’s future, while avoiding feelings of obligation, resentment, “I’m sacrificing more than you are, and am therefore better than you” politics, etc. How to achieve this is an open question, but my guess is that it involves avoiding “shoulds”.

Well, maybe I did not drink enough sanity juice today :)

(This post reads as moderately crazy to me.)

rhollerith_dot_com's post or Rationality: Common Interest of Many Causes. reads as moderately crazy?

I get the vague 'hidden argument' feeling that I get from seeing Dark Arts in action.

That leads me to believe I have been insufficiently transparent about my motivations for writing, so let me try to rectify that insufficiency:

This site (and OB before it and the SL4 mailing list) has always been an congenial place for altruists, and I wanted to preserve that quality.

Now that I have the comments, it occurs to me that my post was probably too heavy-handed in how it went about that goal, but I still think that an effective way to achieve that goal is to write a post that altruists will like and non-altruists will find pointless or even slightly off-putting. if too high a fraction of the recent posts on this site have nothing interesting to say to altruists, that is a problem because most readers will not read a lot of the content written in previous years because that is the way the web is. (the post I was replying to starts by wondering whether LW should have more posts about recursive human self-improvement, and recursive human self-improvement short of whole brain emulation or similar long-range plans is not a potent enough means to altruistic end to be interesting to altruists.) But my post was too heavy-handed in that it was a reply to a post not of interest to altruists rather than being a post that stands on its own and is of interest to altruists and not of interests to non-altruists.

Another motivation I had was to persuade people to become more altruistic, but now that I see it written out like that, it occurs to me that probably the only way to do that effectively on LW is to set a positive personal example. also, it occurs to me that my post did engage in some exhortation or even cheer-leading, and exhortation and cheer-leading are probably ineffective.

I get the vague 'hidden argument' feeling that I get from seeing Dark Arts in action.

A paraphrase of a theme in my post is that people whose motives are unobjectionable and widely admired in our society have given the readers a gift motivated by X, and then to point out that many reader and posters are using that gift for motive Y, which, yeah, is a use of Dark Arts.

Is that part of your objection to my post?

I don't see that this post says anything that's actually useful

Is it not useful to know the reason why the persons who have final authority over this site started this site?

It is good for me to remain aware of that fact.

Hunh. A mentor of mine, John David Garcia, said that an altruist should probably ensure the security of his self and his family by, e.g., getting a few million dollars of net family worth and making sure all the kids have gotten a good education (3 of John's 4 children have MDs) before trying to improve the world, which is similar to the point that Pavlina seems to be making.

We do discuss the question sometimes (e.g. limitations of utilitarianism, personal identity, time discounting are all relevant to figuring out the truth of egoistic values). But I agree that egoism/altruism question having an actual answer which methods of rationality should help to find is one of the major blank spots of this post.

I'm not sure here what you mean by 'true.' One or the other may be more optimal in terms of maximizing a given utility function, but I doubt that the same answer optimizes all utility functions (so we should consider such on a case by case basis.)

Lets discuss it then. I disagree with your claim.

According to the folk who promote egoism, much of the effort of egoists is devoted to finding out what everyone else wants, and then satisfying those desires (for a price). Admittedly, that is partly self-serving mythology, but it is probably closer to the truth than the myths that altruists spin about themselves.

Similarly, egoists are likely to approve of people seeking warm-and-fuzzies as much as they approve of people seeking sexual gratification. Egoists have no problem with the values pursued by altruists - they only get annoyed when altruists band together to push their values onto others.

If altruism is true then much of the effort of egoists is wasted and vice versa, but for some reason we never discuss the question.

Can you think of an empirical test to decide the issue?