Editing Essays into Solstice Speeches: Standing offer: if you have a speech to give at Solstice or other rationalist event, message me and I'll look at your script and/or video call you to critique your performance and help

Wednesday yes, sorry.

Trying this again I think the question sets need a little work.

But Doctor, I am Kaufman!

EDIT: Oh wait, he linked this joke himself. I feel less clever now.

As usual after Solstice, I had an urge to write about Solstice, in this case a speech I may someday give.

Tried to leave this as a review comment, which is blocked:

Even with the benefit of hindsight proving that Trump could and would get reelected, this still looks just as badly-constructed as it did at the time. This was an argument based in fear and rationalization, not a clear-eyed prediction of the future. The bottom line was written first.

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Standing offer: if you have a speech to give at Solstice or other rationalist event, message me and I'll look at your script and/or video call you to critique your performance and help

I don't have much understanding of current AI discussions and it's possible those are somewhat better/less advanced a case of rot.

Those same psychological reasons indicate that anything which is actual dissent will be interpreted as incivility. This has happened here and is happening as we speak. It was one of the significant causes of SBF. It's significantly responsible for the rise of woo among rationalists, though my sense is that that's started to recede (years later). It's why EA as a movement seems to be mostly useless at this point and coasting on gathered momentum (mostly in the form of people who joined early and kept their principles).

I'm aware there is a tradeoff, but being committed to truthseeking demands that we pick one side of that tradeoff, and LessWrong the website has chosen to pick the other side instead. I predicted this would go poorly years before any of the things I named above happened.

I can't claim to have predicted the specifics, I don't get many Bayes Points for any of them, but they're all within-model. Especially EA's drift (mostly seeking PR and movement breadth). The earliest specific point where I observed that this problem was happening was 'Intentional Insights', where it was uncivil to observe that the man was a huckster and faking community signals, and so it took several rounds of blatant hucksterism for him to finally be disavowed and forced out. If EA'd learned this lesson then, it would be much smaller but probably 80% could have avoided involvement in FTX. LW-central-rationalism is not as bad, yet, but it looks on the same path to me.

I still prefer the ones I see there to what I see on LW. Lower quantity higher value.

Currently no great alternatives exist because LW killed them. The quality of the comment section on SSC and most other rationalist blogs I was following got much worse when LW was rebooted (and killed several of them), and initially it looked like LW was an improvement, but over time the structural flaws killed it.

I still see much better comments on individual blogs - Zvi, Sarah Constantin, Elizabeth vN, etc. - than on LessWrong. Some community Discords are pretty good, though they are small walled gardens; rationalist Tumblr has, surprisingly, gotten actively better over time, even as it shrank. All of these are low volume.

It's possible in theory that the volume of good comments on LessWrong is higher than those places. I don't know, and in practical terms don't care, because they're drowned out by junk, mostly highly-upvoted junk. I don't bother to look for good comments here at all because they're sufficiently bad that it's not worthwhile. I post here only for visibility, not for good feedback, because I know I won't get it; I only noticed this post at all because of a link from a Discord.

Groupthink is not a possible future, to be clear. It's already here in a huge way, and probably not fixable. If there was a chance of reversing the trend, it ended with Said being censured and censored for being stubbornly anti-groupthink to the point of rudeness. Because he was braver or more stubborn than me and kept trying for a couple years after I gave up.