The person who proudly works themselves to death at a charity, because they value their own life as much as someone else’s and someone else is dying.
This one feels different from the remaining options, because there is no exploitative bad actor, no factual mistake, and in a hypothetical universe where no one is dying, this behavior would stop.
I think the official Catholic version is that there is a... some kind of "lesser heaven"... for the unborn children. So they kinda win the lottery in avoiding hell, but lose the lottery in experiencing the full heaven.
If that's what will make solar panels more popular in USA, I say let's do it!
Not sure if this is obvious, but maybe instead of just yes and no we should assign numbers, like "X matters 10 times more than Y", and then it is obvious that Y matters, but also that it does not matter as much as X.
That would solve some philosophical issues, like we could decide that each particle in the universe has an inherent moral worth, it's just their moral worths, even taken together, are negligible.
And it would open other issues, like how to calculate it specifically, and whether it can even be added linearly (maybe 100 A's and 100 B's are worth more than 200 A's alone or 200 B's alone, because there is a bonus for diversity), etc.
Sometimes people make a mistake because they desperately try to avoid making a different mistake. That's what sometimes locks them in the bad place: "but if I stop doing X... wouldn't that make me Y?"
There is another group of people who approximately never think a negative though about themselves, and it's narcissists. They know that it's everyone else who sucks and is responsible for everything bad.[1]
That could be an (unspoken) obstacle against getting rid of the self-negativity: "but won't that make me a narcissist?" or "but won't that make my parents/friends believe that I am a narcissist?".
Ironically, this behavior could have started in the past as an attempt to appease some narcissist in the victim's environment. "If I keep acknowledging that I suck, maybe they will stop attacking me so much?"
But there is a third option, which is simply to abandon the negative thoughts, without redirecting them.
- ^
Some people insist that actually, deep down, the narcissists are deeply insecure, and their outward behavior is merely their desperate attempt to push that internal negativity away. Unless I get some data to support this, I am going to assume that this is just another case of the typical mind fallacy: someone who has negative thoughts about themselves failing to imagine that someone else might simply not have them. If it is possible for a healthy person to have no negative feelings about themselves, why wouldn't it be also possible for the right kind of unhealthy person?
Thank you, the description is hilarious and depressing at the same time. I think I get it. (But I suspect there are also people who were already crazy when they came.)
I am probably still missing a lot of context, but the first idea that comes to my mind, is to copy the religious solution and do something like the Sunday at church, to synchronize the community. Choose a specific place and a repeating time (could be e.g. every other Saturday or whatever) where the rationalists are invited to come and listen to some kind of news and lectures.
Importantly, the news and lectures would be given by people vetted by the leaders of the rationality community. (So that e.g. Ziz cannot come and give a lecture on bicameral sleep.) I imagine e.g. 2 or 3 lectures/speeches on various topics that could be of interest to rationalists, and then someone give a summary about what things interesting to the community have happened since the last event, and what is going to happen before the next one. Afterwards, people either go home, or hang out together in smaller groups unofficially.
This would make it easier to communicate stuff to the community at large, and also draw a line between what is "officially endorsed" and what is not.
(I know how many people are allergic to copy religious things -- making a huge exception for Buddhism, or course -- but they do have a technology for handling some social problems.)
I clicked the link. I usually don't read LinkedIn, but I think the things that rub you (and me) the wrong way are simply how the LinkedIn power users communicate normally. Their bubble is not ours.
Seems to me that Luiza Jarovsky made a big step outside the Overton window (and a few replies called her out on that), which is as much as we could reasonably hope for. Mentioning the book as "important, although I disagree with the framing" is a huge improvement over the "low-status shit, don't touch that" current status.
1Is this really how people in general think?
Yes, I think this is considered standard outside the rationalist community. Strong opinions, zero evidence, sometimes statements that contradict facts that should be common knowledge, the general vibe of "I am very smart and everyone who disagrees with me is an idiot and will be attacked verbally".
It is so easy to forget when you are inside the rationalist bubble. But I think it is a reason why some people are so attracted to the rationalist bubble (even if they may not care about rationality per se, e.g. many ACX readers).
Hacker News is much better than the average, but even there I often find factually wrong trivially verifiable statements that remain unchallenged and upvoted as long as they have the right vibes. Even if I reply with a short factual correction and link the evidence, no one seems to care.
Many frequent users of LinkedIn are managers, and those are subject to specific selection pressures. I understand that comment as a public reminder for Luiza Jarovsky that she is outside the Overton window. Translated to autistic speech, the comment says: "High-status people propose solutions, low-status people complain about problems. The book mostly talks about problems, therefore it is low-status and you should not associate with it."
EDIT: Oh, more horrible comments:
A: I would recommend doing some research on the authors before advertising their books… just a thought
B: Can you tell us what our findings then would be? With links, perhaps?
A: you’re the editor and researcher right? You’ll find plenty of reasons why this shouldn’t be endorsed.
This would get an instant ban on ACX. The usual frustrating "there is a problem with your argument, but I am not telling you what it is". Like a monkey throwing feces.
capitalism already killed humans
Oh sure, that's why you are still typing. What kind of discourse is possible with people who can't distinguish between a literal meaning and a metaphor?
(Compared to this, comments like "The tool cannot outpace the source" are at least honest arguments.)
1houses full of unemployed/underemployed people at the outskirts of the community
Oh, this wasn't even a part of my mental model! (I wonder what other things am I missing that are so obvious for the local people that no one even mentions them explicitly.)
My first reaction is a shocked disbelief, how can there be such a thing as "unemployed... rationalist... living in Bay Area", and even "houses full of them"...
This goes against my several assumptions such as "Bay Area is expensive", "most rationalists are software developers", "there is a shortage of software developers on the market", "there is a ton of software companies in Bay Area", and maybe even "rationalists are smart and help each other".
Here (around the Vienna community) I think everyone is either a student or employed. And if someone has a bad job, the group can brainstorm how to help them. (We had one guy who was a nurse, everyone told him that he should learn to code, he attended a 6-month online bootcamp and then got a well-paying software development job.) I am literally right now asking our group on Telegram to confirm or disconfirm this.
Thank you; to put it bluntly, I am no longer surprised that some of the people who can't hold a job would be deeply dysfunctional in other ways, too. The surprising part is that you consider them a part of the rationalist community. What did they do to deserve this honor? Memorized a few keywords? Impressed other people with skills unrelated to being able to keep a job? What the fuck is wrong with everyone? Is this a rationalist community or a psychotic homeless community or what?
...taking a few deep breaths...
I wonder which direction the causality goes. Is it "people who are stabilized in ways such as keeping a job, will remain sane" or rather "people who are sane, find it easier to get a job". The second option feels more intuitive to me. But of course I can imagine it being a spiral.
it seems helpful to me to spend some time naming common ground
Yes, but another option is to invite people whose way of life implies some common ground. Such as "the kind of people who could get a job if they wanted one".
Yeah, "collective sense-making" feels right to me. Individual aspiring rationalists sometimes say crazy things, but the rest of the group usually corrects them when they do.
As opposed to (in my opinion typical) situations outside of Less Wrong where:
So either the truths do not appear, or the falsehoods do not disappear. Basically a group of normies is usually approximately as smart/sane as its highest-status member. Aspiring rationalists do better (although not perfectly) at merging individual knowledge into a smarter whole.
Thus you can have rare specialists talk about e.g. covid or crypto and have an impact on the community at large, as the community collectively evaluates it as probably correct. But this is not the same as "open-mindedness" as understood usually, because the community can also collectively reject various things; otherwise we would see here all kinds of scams and hype.
(In this context, it is worth paying special attention to various rationalist cults, but it seems to me that they all happened in the periphery of the community, at places isolated from the collective feedback. Again, some of us are individually quite insane, but we are collectively sane. Insanity prevails when a charismatic person succeeds at creating an isolated bubble of wannabe rationalists.)