I suppose you'd agree that there are in fact tradeoffs at play here and that the real question is what direction the scale tends to lean. And I suppose you are of the opinion that the scale tends to lean in favor of narrower, more targeted solutions than broader, more all-in-one solutions. Is all of that true? If so, would you mind elaborating more on why you are of that belief?

Scaling the business is different than getting started.

To get started it's really useful to have a very specific problem you're trying to solve. Provides focus and let's you outperform on quality by narrowly addressing a single need better than anyone else can.

That is often the wedge to scale the business. You get in by solving a narrow, hard problem, then look for opportunities to expand your business by seeing what else your customers need or what else you could do given the position your in.

To give another example from a previous employer, Plaid got their start by providing an API to access banks, and they did everything they could to make it the best-in-class experience, with special attention on making the experience great for developers so they would advocate for paying a premium price over cheaper alternatives. That's still the core business, but they've expanded into other adjacent products both as API access to banks has become easier to come by (in part thanks to Plaid's success) and as customers have come looking for more all-in-one solutions to their fintech platform needs (e.g. a money-movement product so they don't have to manage transfers on their own, alternative credit decisions tools, etc.).

Given your desire to do something that's more lifestyle business than a high-growth startup, better examples might be to look at similar lifestyle products. In the LW-sphere there's things like Complice and Roam, and outside LW you'll find plenty of these that have been quite successful or were successful in the past (Basecamp is a prime example here, but I think Slack was arguably a lifestyle business that accidentally figured out how to take off when they pivoted to messaging away from MMOs, etc.).

Also matters what the experience is like. High prestige university allows you to get a job at a high prestige company. Low prestige university makes it a lot harder to get considered for jobs at high prestige firms. You'll have to outperform high-prestige peers by, say, 50% to get noticed if you want access to the same sort of opportunities they get access to via prestige.

(To be clear, I'm not in favor of this sort of thing, I just want to be realistic about it and I wish someone had been real with me about it when I was 17 trying to decide where to go to college. Don't rely on your ability to outperform others. Take every advantage you can get and then leverage them to do even more!)

And this really makes it hard for me as an "indie hacker" to do what people often recommend: solve one very specific problem. Find a niche. Something narrow and focused. "Zoom in". This works in areas where problems have low cohesiveness, but not when they have high cohesiveness.

It's really hard to solve a lot of problems well. The value of an all-in-one product is that you really don't need anything else. Everything it doesn't do, or doesn't do well enough to meet your needs, is a ding against it, and it's relatively easy to peel off specific problem spaces from the general problem of basic business operations needs.

Here's a specific example from the company I'm part of (Anrok). We sell a product that aims to replace a SaaS business's need for an accounting team to be compliant with sales tax & VAT. We compete against both all-in-one solutions from billing systems that offer to also solve this problem because the problem is hard and they are trying to solve at least two problems: billing and tax. Since we just try to solve tax, we can do a better job of it. We also compete against accounting firms who try to offer you all-in-one services, but again same problem, plus the cost is a lot higher because they use humans to do what we do with code.

So I wouldn't worry too much about the existence of everything apps. It takes a long time to build a good everything app that actually does "everything" within its domain (think Salesforce or Jira), and even then "everything" is often achieved via outsourcing some of the everything to third parties who build plugins and integrations.

"Unconditional" makes a lot more sense if we think of it as "unconditional, conditional on my ability to think of conditions on my love". This is what I think most people mean by unconditional love: they can't think of any reasonable conditions on their love, and would discount unreasonable conditions as unusual or outside the realm of what's meant by "unconditional".

This is probably something like a shape-rotator vs. wordcel thing: shape-rotators take words literally and are uncomfortable with a word like "unconditional" unless there are literally no conditions, while wordcels are happy to say "unconditional" if the conditions are outside their Overton Window for reasons they would stop loving someone.

Unless you are going to one of the big prestige universities, I don’t think it matters which you choose all that much. Save money.

My experience is that this is right. The list of top-tier global institutions, in terms of prestige, is short: Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, MIT, CalTech, maybe Berkeley, maybe Stanford and Waterloo if you want to work in tech, maybe another Ivy if you want to do something non-tech. The prestige bump falls off fast as you move further down the list. Lots of universities have local prestige but it gets lost as you talk to people with less context.

Prestige mostly matters if you want to do something that requires it as the cost of entry. If you can get in, it doesn't hurt to have the prestige of a top-tier institution, but there's lots of things you might do where the prestige will be wasted.

Sadly, this is a tough thing to know whether you will need the prestige or not. You'll have to make an expected value calculation against the cost and make the best choice you can to minimize the risk of regret.

Perhaps, but I also feel like this is a real misunderstanding of politics being the mind killer. Rationality is critically important in dealing with real world problems, and that includes problems that have become politicized. The important-to-me thing is that, at least here on Less Wrong, we stay focused, as much as possible, on questions of evidence and reasoning. Posts about whether Israel or Palestine is good/bad should be off limits, but posts about whether Israel or Palestine are making errors in their reporting of facts in ways that can be sussed out using statistical analysis feel very much on brand.

For comparison, COVID was a hot button issue for a long time, and Less Wrong hosted tons of great posts about various mechanical things about COVID while avoiding many of the political issues. Less Wrong has also stayed away from topics like abortion and racism because there's little to say on the topic that isn't a thinly veiled attempt to argue over values. So while some aspects of the current Israel/Palestine conflict are fights over values and should be off limits here, I'd be pretty sad if we couldn't talk about trying to understand the facts of the situation, like whether or not Palestinian death figures are correct, just like we've been able to talk about COVID origins and whether or not masks are effective and controlling the spread of COVID (if you can remember back to when that was a controversial topic!).

I actually don't think the problem with this post is politics, but that it's nothing more than a link post, and except in rare cases, I'd like to see people add something more than just provide links.

The analysis in the linked article itself is interesting and not obviously politicized (or at least, isn't from a mistake-theory standpoint; it's definitely political if you're a conflict theorist, but then what isn't!).

I don't know if there's data available to answer this question, but it'd be interesting to know if the relatively small middle class that existed prior to the 20th century also saw lower fertility than their lower and higher class peers. And in that case maybe falling fertility is a middle class phenomenon that ends when people exit the middle class either by making enough to no longer be economically middle class or by making little enough money that they cannot aspire to middle class dreams.

Here's what Claude has to say:

There is some evidence that a similar fertility pattern existed in the past when the middle class was relatively smaller, particularly in the 19th century, but the data is more limited and the trends are not as clear-cut as in modern times.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, fertility rates tended to be higher among the aristocracy and wealthy classes, as well as among the poorest segments of society. The emerging middle class, which consisted of merchants, professionals, and skilled artisans, often exhibited lower fertility rates.

Here are some examples and observations from historical studies:

1. In England and Wales, during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, fertility rates were highest among the landed aristocracy and gentry, followed by the urban poor. The middle classes, such as merchants and professionals, had lower fertility rates.
2. In France, during the 19th century, fertility rates were lower among the urban middle classes than among the nobility and peasantry.
3. In the United States, during the late 19th century, fertility rates were higher among the wealthy and poor, while the emerging urban middle class had lower fertility rates.
4. However, it's important to note that fertility patterns were influenced by a complex interplay of factors, including cultural norms, access to contraception, and economic conditions.

While the data from the 18th and 19th centuries is less comprehensive and more subject to regional variations, there is evidence that the middle classes, particularly in urban areas, were at the forefront of the fertility transition, with lower fertility rates than the wealthiest and poorest segments of society. This pattern is consistent with the idea that the marginal value of additional labor played a role in fertility decisions, although other factors were also at play.

I asked Claude for sources on the above claims. Number 2 might be hallucinated, but all the others I found quickly with Google:

1. Wrigley, E. A., Davies, R. S., Oeppen, J. E., & Schofield, R. S. (1997). English population history from family reconstitution 1580-1837. Cambridge University Press. This study analyzed parish records and found that in England, fertility was highest among the landed gentry and aristocracy in the 18th and early 19th centuries.
2. Livi-Bacci, M. (1986). Social-group fertility differential in France: An economic analysis. Population Studies, 40(2), 223-243. This paper examined data from the 1851 census in France and found lower fertility among the urban middle classes compared to the nobility and peasantry.
3. Haines, M. R. (1992). The New England Family Study: A study of fertility differentials among Pre-Industrial Urban and Rural Populations. Journal of Family History, 17(1), 17-35. This study analyzed fertility patterns in New England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, showing lower fertility among the urban middle classes.
4. Hacker, J. D. (2003). Rethinking the "early" fertility decline in the United States: Integration of old evidence and new models. Social Science History, 27(4), 545-586. This paper argues that fertility decline in the United States began earlier than previously thought, with the urban middle classes leading the trend in the late 19th century.
5. Livi-Bacci, M. (1977). A history of Italian fertility during the last two centuries. Princeton University Press. This book examines fertility patterns in Italy and found that the middle classes were often at the forefront of fertility decline in the 19th century.

Who's this ~no one? I came to see faith differently once I understood more of how the term (or another word in another language with the same base meaning of <trust>) is used in different spiritual traditions. Maybe few Christians and those primarily exposed to Christian memes conceive of faith in this way, but then this begs the question of why privilege their conceptualization of faith rather than looking for some some commonality between what people around the world seem to be pointing to when they say "faith" or a similar word to point to the idea of <trust> as part of a spiritual tradition?

I've always felt "predestination" is a funny way to phrase it. I get why it was chosen (the destination of your soul is already determined), but I think "deterministic" is better. It's a really useful frame to understand that what will happen is what was already going to happen, and it's just that you subjectively don't yet know what the future will be and couldn't compute it with certainty even if you tried (that's why we give probability estimates for things!)

I've spent some time thinking about this and can share some thoughts.

I find the framing around preserving boundaries a bit odd. Seems like lack of preservation is one way things could be bad, but I don't think it's a full accounting for badness (or at least it seems that way based on my understanding of boundaries).

In humans, I strongly suspect that we can model badness as negative valence (@Steven Byrnes recent series on valence is a good reference), and that the reason "bad" is a simple and fundamental word in English and most languages is because it's basic to the way our minds work: bad is approximately stuff we don't like, and good is stuff we do like, where liking is a function of how much it makes the world the way we want it to be, and wanting is a kind of expectation about future observations.

I also think we can generalize badness from humans and other animals with valence-oriented brains by using the language of control theory. There, we might classify sensor readings as bad if they signal movement away from rather than towards a goal. And since we can model living things as a complex network of layered negative feedback circuits, this suggests that anything is bad if it works against achieving a system's purpose.

(I have a bit more of my thoughts on this in a draft book chapter, but I was not specifically trying to address this question so you might need to read between the lines a bit.)

Goodness, in these models, is simply the reverse of badness: positive valence things are good, as are sensor readings that signal a goal is being achieved.

There are some interesting caveats around what happens when you get multiple layers in the system that contradict each other, like if smoking a cigarette feels good but we know it's bad for us, but the basic point stands.

This statement would be false is, for example, we discovered that people could change other's perceptions of the world by expecting them to be different and taking no other action.

Exactly. In each moment, the world is exactly as it is and can't be anyway other than how we find it. Then it's the next moment and the world is no longer the same as it was the moment before, yet is still however it is in that moment and no other way. The world is constantly changing from moment to moment, but always changing into exactly what it is.

I reject the claim that faith implies the world cannot change

Me too, which is why I didn't write this.

• Level Up told people to "Let your faith die," and then contrasted faith with wonder.
  
  I really don't think that most people experience faith as being in opposition to wonder. It also suggests that faith is incompatible with the sort of progress the rationalist community wants.

This bit about faith points to something that frequently annoys me when interacting with my fellow rationalists.

I'm a person with faith now, but I wasn't always, and it took me a long time to figure out what faith really means. I spent most of my life deeply misunderstanding what faith is because the Christians I grew up around often conflated faith with unwavering and unquestioning belief in dogma, to the point that even now it's unclear to me if they meant anything else by the word. I only came around on faith once I realized it was just Latin for trust, and specifically trust in the world to be just as it is.

If a person is a Christian (especially a Nicene Christian), faith will include a metaphysical belief in God because they believe the world is God's creation and evidence for God exists everywhere within it. I'm not a Christian and so don't hold such a belief, but I can nevertheless have faith that the world will always be exactly as it is, and find refuge in my trust that I cannot be wrong about my experience of it prior to interpreting and judging it.

But lots of rationalists I know don't get this. Like they can say the worlds "it all adds up to normality" but then constantly say and do things that suggest to me that they actually think that if they just try a little harder they might understand things well enough to remake the world in some fundamental way. They lack faith, and by extension humility. And while it's good to see pain in the world and want to heal it, such healing will always be limited in effectiveness so long as the world is not seen clearly, and it's my strong belief that someone is not seeing clearly if they don't have faith in the world to be as it is.

Sorry for this ranty tangent, but the song line is plucking at a thread that I think is worth pulling, and I've not spent enough time writing about my thoughts here. Hopefully this is somewhat understandable.

In a sense, yes.

Although in control theory open- vs. closed-loop is a binary feature of a system, there's a sense in which some systems are more closed than others because more information is fed back as input and that information is used more extensively. Memoryless LLMs have a lesser capacity to respond to feedback, which I think makes them safer because it reduces their opportunities to behave in unexpected ways outside the training distribution.

This is a place where making the simple open vs. closed distinction becomes less useful because we have to get into the implementation details to actually understand what an AI does. Nevertheless, I'd suggest that if we had a policy of minimizing the amount of feedback AI is allowed to respond to, this would make AI marginally safer for us to build.

Most AI safety policy proposals are of this type. I'm not suggesting this as a solution to get safe AI, but as a policy that government may implement to intentionally reduce capabilities to make us marginally safer.

Eh, I've encountered plenty of times when I really needed to understand the variance of data such that I had to "zoom in" and put the start of the axis at something above 0 because otherwise I couldn't find out what I needed to know to make a decision. But I do often like to see it both ways, so I can understand it both in relative and absolute terms.

Yes. I think that any attempt to explain wholesomeness in written words will be inadequate at best and misleading at worst.

I guess this is fine, but I'm not convinced. This mostly just seems like you pushing your personal aesthetic preferences, but it feels like I could easily come up with arguments for following exactly the opposite advice.

This post reminds me of lots of writing advice: seems fine, so long as you have the same aesthetic sensibilities as the person giving the advice.

I'm confused by the title. Reading this, I don't really see a case for the benefits of the "poison" in ayahuasca to recommend it over purer forms of DMT. My take away from your points is that ayahuasca is significantly worse than other forms of DMT and should be avoided.

It's unclear to me and I am not a lawyer: does Musk have standing?

I don't think there's any other option. Wholesomeness is something you have to learn by doing. If you try to imitate what you think is wholesome after reading about it, you'll likely end up in some uncanny valley of weirdly unwholesome behavior even though it has all the trappings of wholesomeness.

Sure, feel free to use it, or riff on it to create something better.

This is a fully general problem with using words: the categories they point to are always a bit off, especially if the reader doesn't share a lot of our context. I find it best to state things as directly as I can, and let others sort out their own confusion.

I don't think it has to be hard to say what wholesomeness is. I don't know what you mean by the word, but to me it's simply acting in a way that has compassion and respect to everything, leaving nothing out. Very hard to do, but easy enough to state.

Coming back to add another thought:

There's a difference between the idea of dependent origination and the insight into or faith in dependent origination that comes from practice. That is, in the above, I think rationalists and most people understand the idea, but I'd also claim that most don't have insight into it or trust its truth in the way you can only come to trust it by coming to see the truth of the world that we're trying to point at with the theory.

I don't want people to read the above and think "oh, well, guess I don't need to care about dependent origination", because that would be a mistake, but it'd also be a mistake to think that the average person doesn't have a reasonable understanding of the core idea, it's just that they have an abstract rather than embodied understanding of it.

First, just want to clarify some terminology, which I know can be a bit confusing when new to the site. Less Wrong is about rationality rather than rationalism, which are linguistically close and not totally unrelated, but are used as jargon to mean different things. The short way to understand it is that rationality is about having accurate beliefs, rationalism is the philosophical stance that reason is the primary source of true knowledge, as opposed to observation, prior beliefs, etc.

Second, I wrote a series of posts about the intersection of rationality and zen, since I practice both. Maybe I'll get back to adding to it one day. You might find that interesting.

Third, let's address your question, on the assumption that you meant "rationality" by "rationalism" (sorry if this is a wrong assumption!). So, to the extent that the theory of dependent origination is correct, then rational agents should place proportional credence in its truth. That said, dependent origination is a metaphysical claim, thus hard to test, so most rational agents will be forced to be relatively uncertain about its truth because we are limited in our ability to check its truth. For example, from inside the world, we can't distinguish between one where dependent origination is true and one where the world exists for exactly the single moment when you bothered to check and it just happened to be arranged in a way that made it looked like there was cause and effect, though the former belief is also obviously more useful than the latter even if you can't tell which one is really the true nature of the world.

On the other side, rationality is deeply tied up with the theory of causation because an understanding of causation is necessary to make sense of much of the evidence we observe and make updates to our beliefs that are going to be as accurate as possible. I think most rationalists implicitly believe in something like dependent origination even if they don't have an explicit theory of it because it's (mostly) part of the standard Western model of the world. Modern Westerners generally seem to understand that everything is causally connected within a given thing's Hubble volume, even if some of those connections are quite weak. So all this is to say that rationality's compatibility with dependent origination is not intentional, but because dependent origination, under different names, is now just the background assumption of the type of people who become rationalists.

That said, two additional thoughts. One, just because it's the background assumption doesn't mean people understand it well if you press them for details, and you can easily get people to claim that things are not causally connected because they are unreflectively ignoring causes that don't fit within their ontology. Second, the teaching on dependent origination is best understood in context, where it was given at a time when many people had a model of the world that suggested many things had independent causes, or maybe even no causes at all! So it's worth looking at the connection, but also don't be surprised if you dig into it and find everything adding up to normality.

Despite some problems with the dual process model, I think of this as a S1/S2 thing.

It's relatively easy to get an insight into S2. All it takes is a valid argument that convinces you. It's much harder to get an insight into S1, because that requires a bunch of beliefs to change such that the insight becomes an obvious facet of the world rather than a linguistically specified claim.

We might also think of this in terms of GOFAI. Tokens in a Lisp program aren't grounded to reality by default. A program can say bananas are yellow but that doesn't really mean anything until all the terms are grounded. So, to extend the analogy, what's happening when an insight finally clicks is that the words are now grounded in experience and in some way made real, whereas before they were just words that you could understand abstractly but were't part of your lived experience. You couldn't embody the insight yet.

For what it's worth, this is a big part of what drew me to Buddhist practice. I had plenty of great ideas and advice, but no great methods for making those things real. I needed some practices, like meditation, that would help me ground the things that were beyond my ability to embody just by reading and thinking about them.

Stepping back from the physical questions, we can also wonder why generalization works in general without reference to a particular physical model of the world. And we find, much like you have, that generalization works because it is contingent on the person doing the generalizing.

In philosophy we talk about this through the problem of induction, which arises because the three standard options for justifying its validity are unsatisfactory: assuming it is valid as a matter of dogma, proving it is a valid method of finding the truth (which bumps into the problem of the criterion), or proving its validity recursively (i.e. induction works because it's worked in the past).

One of the standard approaches is to start from what would be the recursive justification and ground out the recursion by making additional claims, and a commonly needed claim is known as the uniformity principal, which says roughly that we should expect future evidence to resemble past evidence (in Bayesian terms we might phrase this as future and past evidence drawing from the same distribution). But the challenge then becomes to justify the uniformity principal, and it leads down the same path you've explored here in your post, finding that ultimately we can't really justify it except if we privilege our personal experiences of finding that each new moment seems to resemble the past moments we can recall.

This ends up being the practical means by which we are able to justify induction (i.e. it seems to work when we've tried it), but also does nothing to guarantee it would work in another universe or even outside our Hubble volume.

Adding in a bit of my own worldview, I find this topic interesting, because I think people often conflate the "trouble" with being born and the "trouble" with being self-aware. As I see it, there's no suffering from just existing. It's only when you know you exist and can see yourself in pain that suffering is arises, and from that the aspect of pain is not existence, but a particular kind of self-awareness that's focused on suffering and the way in which each moment is being assessed to be net negative rather than neutral or net positive.

Yep, exactly, I said the past is deterministic, the future is uncertain.

Has the past ever once changed to the best of your knowledge?

Here's how I think about it.

Whether or not the world is deterministic, we still live with a single, deterministic history, and we don't know what history we'll be in until we already have lived it. We also live the computation of events as they happen. We don't get to choose where we end up, but we also can't know where we will end up because we are the computation happening that creates the single, fixed past we know about.

Demotivation about determinism happens because you thought you had a choice and now you're bummed that you don't. But if you realize that you never had a choice, you can't be demotivated because that's just how things are and demotivation requires some gap between expectation and reality.

Feeling a lost sense of purpose or motivation is normal upon realizing that we can't control the past, don't know the future, and can't know in full how we come to live in that fixed history. It's also a phase you have to go through, and out the other side is acceptance that the world works as it does because you had already been living it, and the demotivation will evaporate because the disappointment at not having free will goes away.

I just want to note here that I think this is an interesting framing. It might also be useful to think about self-trust (trust of oneself to actually do something, trust of one's future self to do what one's past self wants, etc.). I think it's probably also worth seeing what happens if you taboo trust in each of these situations and break down the specific mechanisms that lead to whatever trust is, since that might point the way to interventions that could help with each disorder (or maybe with multiple disorders via the same method!).

Maybe someone somewhere has made this sort of mistake at some point, but I can’t recall ever encountering such a person. And to claim that such a mistake arises, specifically, from the map-territory metaphor, seems to me to be entirely groundless.

I think you should seriously consider you live in a bubble where you are less likely to encounter the vast valley of half-baked rationality. I regularly meet and engage with people who make exactly this class of errors, especially in practice, even if they say they understand in theory that this is not the whole task of LW-style rationality.

Oh wow! Everyone I know who is into contra dancing in the Bay Area seems to be late 20s to early 30s. I don't go to contra dances myself, though, so seems I may have incorrectly extrapolated about the demographics.

Sure, these are all relevant factors to why some people may want a vaccine requirement, but Jeff seems to mostly be concerned about making the choice that is best for the health of attendees and not about signaling tribal affiliation, and so it's in that context that I suggest this fact is weak evidence in support of his choice.

We made a similar decision at my Zen center, although for different reasons.

When we re-opened to in-person sitting in 2022, we required both masking at all times indoors and that everyone be fully vaccinated.

Early in 2023, we dropped both requirements. We looked, and estimated that >90% of people likely to attend the Zen center would be vaccinated or have naturally immunity from prior infection. Additionally, mask requirements were rapidly disappearing across the Bay Area, and keeping one felt silly since we were all going out to places without masks on.

Here in early 2024, things are basically back to normal after a year of gradually ramping reduced mask usage. We don't ask or really think about vaccination status. We have an air purifier in the zendo, and people do occasionally wear masks if they want, and we added some text to our webpage encouraging people to stay home and join us on Zoom if they are sick or have recently been exposed to someone who was sick.

Given attendance is back up at or above pre-pandemic levels, I feel comfortable saying that the lack of restrictions is not in general deterring folks, and as far as I know we've not heard from anyone that they would attend in person if we had a mask or vaccine requirement.

I suspect there is some heavy overlap between people who attend the zen center and people who would attend a contra dance, although I'm guessing contra dance attendees skew younger than zen center attendees. If anything you'd expect old people to be more worried about COVID, so I consider this weak evidence that you're making the right choice.

I don't want to knock your insight, but this looks like a partial realization and you're running too far with it.

To pick on just one of your examples, this is not true is some important ways:

"Zoom" is Infinite
By Zoom I mean zooming into the micro level, and zooming out the macro. We haven't been able to find the smallest building blocks of the universe, nor the largest. Even if we did find the smallest - what is genuinely stopping us from zooming in further?

We can't zoom in or out indefinitely. The speed of light creates a practical limit on how far we can zoom out, and we don't know what's going on outside our Hubble volume. We have similar problems trying to zoom in, because to observe things we must interact with them, and those interactions limit what we can known due to quantum indeterminacy.

There is a sense in which there is infinite "zoom", but it only exists in the space of concepts, because there's an infinite regress of distinctions and deconstructions of concepts that doesn't ground out unless we step out of ontology and look at why our minds created an ontology to begin with.

The phrasing that "everything is infinite" is weird to me, but based on what you wrote, I suspect that you've hit on what I might call the anti-realist insight: ontology is not fully constrained by the otherwise seemingly fixed world that exists outside your mind.

But at some point between 1799 and 1870, someone switched out lemons for limes, which contain a lot less vitamin C.

I recall reading, but can't find a source now, that this happen due to early confusion about citrus fruit among the British, who called all varieties of lemons and limes "limes" and thus made this mistake repeatedly not only by mixing up lemons and limes, but also mixing up lime varieties with more and less vitamin C because they didn't have words to specify the difference. It was only in the 20th Century that the problem got sorted out when British grocers started to regularly stock multiple lime varieties thanks to improvements in shipping.

(Very happy to be corrected or provided a source. This feels like the kind of thing that could be true, but also could be apocryphal and made up by an author, retold by others, and now there's a bunch of sources that just claim it's true.)

I don't know a ton about Burns or his work, but for things in the class of stuff like psychotherapy, meditation, and other ways to work with your problems and (hopefully) improve your life so you more live the life you want to live, two claims can be simultaneously true:

1. Psychotherapy-like-stuff can and should be able to fix acute problems in short order, and if it's not you're using an ineffective technique for the problem at hand
2. Psychotherapy-like-stuff has to be done ~forever because there are always subtle ways you're getting in your own way that you could work on to get marginal gains

The trouble is we don't do a great job of making these two competing claims clear, nor do we often make clear for any particular intervention, technique, practice, etc. whether it is intended for acute or chronic use.

My guess is that some versions of psychotherapy are a scam if you have to pay for more than 5 sessions, and some versions are doing exactly what they should be if you are paying to go every week, and that's because they are serving different purposes. Alas, we don't make this clear, and I think sadly there are enough unscrupulous providers who profit from the ambiguity that there's not a strong push to clear this point up with the general public.

Personally I try to leave a comment explaining my vote in such cases, as many voters don't. If someone worked to post something and it's not the kind of thing I want to see on LessWrong, the only way the author is likely to know what I and others here would like to see is to explain it, as the vote on the post is low bandwidth and only kind of useful as a feedback signal if a person posts a lot.

I'm still likely to downvote if I think a post is really bad, even if it has gone negative, although sometimes I refrain and just leave my comment about how I think the post could be better.

Sadly I don't have time to do this for all such posts and I end up ignoring most of them.

I don't have the energy to get into it in depth, but I think you're being pretty uncharitable here and it feels to me like you're trying to weaponize rationalist applause lights. Some quick thoughts on what I think is insufficient about your comment:

• You claim he already wrote the bottom line, but you provide no evidence to substantiate that.
• You claim that Hegelian dialectic is a dark art technique with no justification.
• You makes some claims about what's written in Buddhists texts, but offer no reference to the specific arguments that were made to justify the claim that he set up strawmen, which would also require proving that they were strawmen at the time, not just now with 2500 years of philosophical progress.
• You offer what I guess I can best interpret as an attempt to dunk on Chapman for promoting "ancient" ideas, as if ancient ideas were inherently bad (lots of math is just as old and we still use it every day, so being old is obviously not the problem; would you dunk on someone for promoting the "ancient" belief in the Pythagorean theorem?).

I'd say they very much are, they just aren't as prevalent on Less Wrong (and I think there are still plenty of them on LW!). My experience is that you can't throw a stone without hitting a logical positivist (even if they don't know that they are, if you talk to them it's clear those are their beliefs) in any STEM university department, engineering company, etc.

I agree with some of your points here, disagree with others. I'll just focus on one that seems worth discussing:

...ok, this is a weird idea, but from a certain angle Chapman himself fits the role of a Fake Creator with regards to the rationalist community. First you have the rationality guru (Eliezer), then come his fans (rationalists), then come people who enjoy the community but don't really buy that stuff that Eliezer teaches (post-rationalists), and then comes a new guru bringing new wisdom optimized for the post-rationalists (Chapman). Interesting.

I think this is not right. Chapman isn't really part of the rationalist community, and was working in parallel on something different that has now intersected because both Chapman and Eliezer are trying to reach similar audiences. I also think it's wrong to say that post-rationalists "don't buy that stuff that Eliezer teaches" as this misunderstands what post-rationality is about, although there are fake fans of post-rationalists, to borrow your terminology, who do reject rationality and it's pretty annoying that they've co-opted the term.

Although dual process theory has its issues, folks have talked about the failure mode of prioritizing System 2 over System 1. This is a thing that the type of person who's likely to become a rationalists is already predisposed to do, and rationality writing gives them lots of advice to prioritize S2 over S1 even more. And while S2 is extremely valuable, especially for the art of rationality, it can't function well unless it's integrate with S1 and S2 is used to operate feedback loops to train S1 towards rationality, as without S1 being inline S2 will always be disembodied.

The archetypal example is in the category of what folks might call the Reddit Nerd: someone who lives on the computer, seems really smart, but has little to no success in life. They don't actually get the things they want because they live in their head and don't know how to take effective action, so they retreat to online forums and games (board games, MMOs, etc.) where they can be achieve some measure of success without having to deal with S1.

I'm a bit unsure what you mean by social insecurity, but I'm going to take it as something like social anxiety that people feel.

Most social anxiety, as I see it, comes from a fear of exclusion rooted in the evolutionary very real threat of death as a result of exile. Today few people actually die of ostracism, but it certainly makes one's life worse, and social reality includes a lot of in between where you might not be at risk of dying but certainly you'll lose status and access to opportunities if you look bad. From there we worry about any number of things.

Some things that seem common to me:

• offending a high status person
• looking foolish
• thinking things are fine but people are talking behind your back
• imposter syndrome (not cool/smart/etc. enough to hang)

I almost downvoted, but didn't because this isn't on the frontpage. Reasons I wanted to downvote:

• weird writing style that was hard for me to parse what you were trying to say
• when i figured it out you didn't really say much
• you used the terms idealism, realism, and pragmatism, which are jargon in philosophy, but it took me a bit to realize you didn't mean to use them in that way
• this post is kind of like advice, but you don't really justify that advice or give me a reason to think it's worth following

Basically this post felt like a nothing burger, and I come to Less Wrong to read things that are substantive. In my mind this might have been better as shortform, and probably even better if you had posted it on Twitter instead of Less Wrong.

I can't really disagree here, and yet I still feel like you're leaving out some important component of what love means by just focusing on prioritization. It's like there's multiple things going on, and prioritization often gets bundled with love in everyday use, but you can love without prioritization, that's just not what most people do.

Sure! Christians are pretty mainstream, and they regularly talk about God's love for them, but in Christian theology, God's love is for everyone, and so God is not prioritizing anyone.

I admit that's not a very central example, though, so here's something more mundane:

I think someone saying "I love cats" is not necessarily a statement of prioritization. Sure, I love cats, but I'm not going out of my way to prioritize cats in general over other things. Although I do prioritize some specific cats, I also love cats in general, and this carries no real burden of prioritization, as I don't have to love other things less, and my feeling of love for cats doesn't really go away when I'm thinking about my love for other things.