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Comment by Mirzhan Irkegulov (mirzhan-irkegulov) on Something about Status Ladders in Berkeley · 2018-01-11T19:22:27.122Z · LW · GW

It's clear that you were uncomfortable sharing this feeling with LessWrong 2.0, so I just want to applaud you for your bravery and to encourage you to write more in the future, so you know that at least one person will react positively :).

Never been to Bay Area, so the only rationalists I met were on EA events or LW meetups. I get bad vibes you described from one in every two self-described rationalists on average. I don't get these vibes from Marxists, Social Justice activists or fundamentalist Christians, so something seems very wrong. I haven't conceptualized my fuzzy perception yet, but absolutely alien social dynamics that many rationalists exhibit both on the internet and in real life makes me vaguely uncomfortable to a point, that I don't feel like there's any point in participating in rationality activities, networking with rationalists and even identifying as a rationalist.

You didn't feel ‘at home’ in Berkeley? This is how I felt about LessWrong 2.0 when it started.

Note, though, that I have none of those issues with people, who identify as primarily Effective Altruists. EAs seem, on the contrary, nicer and warmer than the average person.

Comment by Mirzhan Irkegulov (mirzhan-irkegulov) on Something about Status Ladders in Berkeley · 2018-01-11T18:56:04.920Z · LW · GW

You either don't understand the post, or don't understand people. Vibes are not terminal goals to optimize for, they are side-effects of something deeper. If you get bad vibes from a person, it means they are unwittingly communicating bad intentions or personality flaws. This has nothing to with social skills: a person can focus solely on facts, being abrasive and unpleasant to talk to, but still not give bad vibes.

Also, please note that you are at -5 votes now. There is this failure mode, most commonly shared by online atheist posters, when they post something technically correct, but completely irrelevant and in bad faith towards the interlocutor. You're being deliberately obtuse, if you imply that OP is some kind of anti-fact person, in contrast to rationalists, who are very pro-fact.