I thought it would be interesting to try having Claude Code download my entire LessWrong and EA Forum post and comment history and evaluate it for my own cognitive biases and problematic communication patterns. I told it to focus especially on problems that have persisted over my 7-year history on those sites. I also had it look at my lichess blitz rating history, which I've noticed tends not to wobble randomly but go through consistent increases and decreases between set points, despite my lack of any disciplined practice.
There are a few reasons I thought it might be interesting to post publicly.
As a commitment device for myself to work on these problems.
Because AI is uniquely capable of working on this type of problem. It's also a good argument for writing online and gives a new spin on the idea of "writing for the AI" that feels more affirming of the human mind than how I normally read the phrase (as offering up your words as fodder for AI training, perhaps in hope of influencing its alignment in beneficial ways).
To stimulate other people to consider whether they might want to do this, and see what other people think about the exercise. Post history and online game scores are forms of rich longitudinal personal data that might directly reflect mood, cognition, and other factors, and that we are generating for free. Perhaps it's worth trying to harvest insight about ourselves from these resources.
I considered including apologies to the specific users who Claude identified as being on the receiving end of my episodes of poor communication. But I thought that felt a bit cheap or mechanical. Instead, I'll simply say that this post is meant as a sincere step toward improving my art of rationality, and I hope that it will lead to improvements in how I communicate with other people, including on LessWrong.
Epistemic status: Casually prompted Claude Code running Opus 5.5 to assess my LessWrong and EA Forum post and comment history along with my Lichess blitz scores over the last 7 years to understand persistent forms of cognitive bias, communication problems, and potential associations with aging, stress, isolation and conflict. I understand there is quantitative and semantic analysis along with agentic scoring of text, but I haven't actually looked into it beyond the summaries provided in Claude Code. This is basically me interpreting a conversation I had with an AI model. Everything in this post is my own words, not AI writing.
Low-scoring comments and problem patterns
Nearly all my low/negative-scoring comments, of which I generate around 1-4% per year, are in disagreement threads.
The persistent communication patterns that are found in my low-karma posts include:
Misreading, strawmanning, or skimming the words of my conversation partner, missing the nuance and detail, filling in the blanks with my own assumptions about the content, and arguing with the oversimplified, paraphrased version.
Leading with overbroad, absolutist claims in posts and comments where I'm really making a more narrow, defensible point.
Accepting corrections to my incorrect statements, then appearing to forget the correction and going back to my previous incorrect point of view.
Confident technical claims just outside my expertise.
Conceding corrections about what someone meant, but trying to rescue my original interpretation, asserting a narrower version is what I meant all along, or shifting to tone or conduct. This appears to be the thing that irritates other people the most of all my flaws.
Attributing motives or psychology to other people. In the wake of arguments where I do this, I have at least once conceded explicitly that I was doing this, and that it's what generated the argument, but then I went on to continue doing it. This is an especially big problem for me on EA forum.
Thinking out loud in public. Making basic factual or mathematical errors within posts, or statements with huge inconsistencies across different comments and posts.
A gulf between the standards of evidence I demand from other people and what I myself provide.
My problem comments often are mostly OK but have one particularly stupid remark, often in the first or last sentence, that becomes the primary point of contention. Often, the problem isn't the position I'm taking (others will echo it and get upvoted), but the sweeping, sneering way I was expressing myself.
The pattern that unites all these problems is a single cycle. I make a loose claim about a neighbor to my conversation partner's point. This draws a correction, which I defend by narrowing, attributing motive, or making an asymmetric demand for rigor.
My strengths and positive patterns
Domain expertise in biotech, medicine, literature critique
Checking primary sources
Neutral summaries of debates, especially on scientific topics
Paraphrasing what other people said, and then asking them if I'm representing their argument correctly. I'm consistently able to do this well, when I try.
To practice
Always be polite, never post when I'm in a bad mood.
Restate other people's claims with attention to detail and steelman them before I attempt to rebut them.
Consider counterexamples to my own claims before I post them.
Concede my mistakes in plain words and revise the original openly.
Check my work more carefully.
Root causes
I think that these critiques are basically right as a summary of my most pressing flaws as a thinker and communicator. My problems with tone have also gotten substantially worse over the last two years. I've noticed this, and whatever's underpinning my increasingly cantankerous relationship with LessWrong has also infected other aspects of my life. I'm grouchier, write less, and am in some ways less curious than I used to be. So I thought it would be interesting to consider the biographical factors that might contribute to this pattern.
In 2019, I was starting to pivot my career. I was 30 years old and transitioning from becoming a music teacher to going into the sciences. It was pre-COVID, pre-AI-explosion, pre-Scott-Alexander-doxxing, pre-FTX era. LessWrong and Effective Altruism felt like new discoveries, and EA hadn't been rocked by the FTX scandal. My pivot into scientific work felt exciting. I was 7 years younger than I am now. Worries about pandemics and AI risks were interesting ideas, not live concerns. The community at LessWrong seemed more focused on human rationality and to have a more diverse array of discussion topics.
Since then, we all lived through the disasters, scandals, and the rise of AI. I got 7 years older, did a very isolating and stressful MS in biomedical engineering in Michigan, and am about halfway through a PhD in the same subject in Oregon. In some ways, the culture of these sites has changed, as I remember seeing others note at various times.
I tasked Claude with evaluating whether patterns over time seem to primarily reflect a change in the site's other users or in the way I participate on the site, and to try to locate the changes with more precision. Some of its findings:
I've exhibited the same cognitive flaws described above throughout my time on the site. I am better about avoiding factual errors now than I was in the past.
My net-negative comment karma rate has gone up 6x over 2025-2026 compared to 2020-2023, and my share of comments below the median for their thread rose from 27% (2023) to 45% (2026).
This decline in standing was associated with a substantial decrease in hedging language and a marked increase in contempt words. It seems to me important that the bad comments come in bursts, not a steady slide.
The FTX scandal and collapse of EA as a safe identity is not well supported, though I did get more cantankerous on the EA forum (doubling my comment downvote rate after FTX).
Changes in site culture are also weak explanations in general. Claude finds that the site's downvote rates appear to be flat. However, I do appear to have become more willing to criticize popular ideas and people on the site (Tyler Cowen, prediction markets), and it looks like there's some site tribalism playing into how that criticism has been received in some, but not all, cases. I also have started hedging less specifically outside my domain of expertise (politics and forecasting, AI).
2025-2026, my worst posting years, are also the second Trump administration. I think that to some extent, I have started to become paranoid. In this era, it's become harder to see people as individuals with sincerely held beliefs, and easier to assume that what's going on is mind-games within the intelligentsia that have to do with some hard-to-explain nexus of the AI buildout, crypto, prediction markets, and political corruption in the Trump administration. That's not an accusation or argument, it's just an attempt to point a finger at the set of associations I recognize as being in my mind that have made it difficult to participate in nuanced debate.
I've substantially moved away from posts and to shortform comments over time, and my shortform comments have always been less hedged. So it may reflect that over time, I've stopped putting in the effort to write more substantive posts and started posting less well considered ideas as shortforms. I would also say that the rise of AI has made me less interested in trying to post my own writing, because I have started to feel that if anybody was interested in the topic I'd be writing about, then they could get more and better information on it by dialoging about it with AI, so what's the point of me putting in the effort to write it up?
In July 2023, I announced I was leaving the site at 1:25 AM, announcing that I'd stopped trusting major voices on LessWrong. I posted 41 comments in 2024. Then I came back in 2025 at about a third of my previous post volume, mostly into community dispute threads. This makes me think that the decline in reception in 2024-2026 is easy to explain (I'm specifically returning to joust and am not putting the effort in to write posts people appreciate) and what needs explaining is why I lost trust in the site. I didn't keep notes on this, so I had Claude investigate.
My 2023 blowup
In 2023, I developed a year-long grievance about voting, and had what looks like an acute stress window in June-July. My comments were at their best earlier in the year before I left, particularly in Feb 2023. In June–July 2023 I published 13 posts across both forums in about seven weeks, and most landed poorly, while my comments held roughly steady.
Claude identified a few factors that seem pertinent:
I flagged the circumstances in a couple cases, pointing to writing while distracted and in a rush, including packing for a move from Seattle to Oregon.
Prior to this troubled period, a lot of my commenting activity was in interactions with Said (since banned), Duncan (also left the site angrily, still posts occasionally, but listed as "inactive").
I wasn't making my points in some of the posts at this time period clearly. Some of them were advocating for proposals contrary to community norms. And some respondents were loosely paraphrasing what I had to say, which is the same issue I so often have exhibited toward others.
Chess
I also downloaded 9,960 of my Lichess blitz games from Aug 2020-2026. This is a nice second signal of my cognitive performance and sleep/wake patterns.
In Jan-Nov 2023, I went through a steady slide from a plateau score of around 1600 to a low of 1467-1495 in Oct-Nov 2023. The time window of my grievance and blowup coincides with this time window. This is a period when for part of the time, I was working every single night for weeks on end alone in a lab doing an extremely demanding experiment, then coming home and blowing off steam in the very small hours before grabbing a few hours of sleep. I was eating Domino's pizza every single day and was getting fat. In May, I moved cross country and lived by myself in a crappy Seattle apartment while working very hard at a startup - a positive and meaningful experience at work, but still an isolated life after work. In September, I came to Oregon and moved in with my then-girlfriend, now-wife to start my PhD. This was a huge lifestyle improvement, though it came with plenty of challenges and adjustments.
My score recovered to around 1590 by May 2024 during my LW hiatus.
I had another burst of disputes on LW in Aug 2025 that coincided with a dip in my score to around 1493-1510, lowest since late 2023.
I had a burst of disputes about prediction markets in May 2026, which coincided with strong performance on Lichess.
The fact that my chess scores have returned to their peak levels over time despite no increased focus or change in play levels suggests that general cognitive decline from age 30-37 isn't really the issue.
Conclusion
It seems like stress and exhaustion make me more conflict-oriented and grievance-prone. I treat other people with contempt, have less interest in what other people have to say, and participate in forum conversation mainly to fight. Unfortunately, it also looks like isolation leads me to post on the forum in a bid for engagement, and when I'm being lazy or cantankerous because of stress and exhaustion, I piss people off, get a muted or negative reception, take it hard because of the isolation, and spin out.
My takeaways:
LessWrong isn't a place to satisfy a basic need for social engagement, and it's not a place to engage when I'm worn out and isolated.
I should prioritize engaging with content and writers I'm interested in and respect enough to take seriously.
While for some people, relaxing standards around the amount of work they put in before posting may be the right advice, for me, the best advice is to spend more time checking my work and critiquing my own writing.
I need to pay more attention to my stress, exhaustion, isolation, and sleep/wake cycle. If I'm not keeping myself emotionally and socially regulated, then I am not able to reliably engage in productive intellectual conversation.
I thought it would be interesting to try having Claude Code download my entire LessWrong and EA Forum post and comment history and evaluate it for my own cognitive biases and problematic communication patterns. I told it to focus especially on problems that have persisted over my 7-year history on those sites. I also had it look at my lichess blitz rating history, which I've noticed tends not to wobble randomly but go through consistent increases and decreases between set points, despite my lack of any disciplined practice.
There are a few reasons I thought it might be interesting to post publicly.
I considered including apologies to the specific users who Claude identified as being on the receiving end of my episodes of poor communication. But I thought that felt a bit cheap or mechanical. Instead, I'll simply say that this post is meant as a sincere step toward improving my art of rationality, and I hope that it will lead to improvements in how I communicate with other people, including on LessWrong.
Epistemic status: Casually prompted Claude Code running Opus 5.5 to assess my LessWrong and EA Forum post and comment history along with my Lichess blitz scores over the last 7 years to understand persistent forms of cognitive bias, communication problems, and potential associations with aging, stress, isolation and conflict. I understand there is quantitative and semantic analysis along with agentic scoring of text, but I haven't actually looked into it beyond the summaries provided in Claude Code. This is basically me interpreting a conversation I had with an AI model. Everything in this post is my own words, not AI writing.
Low-scoring comments and problem patterns
Nearly all my low/negative-scoring comments, of which I generate around 1-4% per year, are in disagreement threads.
The persistent communication patterns that are found in my low-karma posts include:
The pattern that unites all these problems is a single cycle. I make a loose claim about a neighbor to my conversation partner's point. This draws a correction, which I defend by narrowing, attributing motive, or making an asymmetric demand for rigor.
My strengths and positive patterns
To practice
Root causes
I think that these critiques are basically right as a summary of my most pressing flaws as a thinker and communicator. My problems with tone have also gotten substantially worse over the last two years. I've noticed this, and whatever's underpinning my increasingly cantankerous relationship with LessWrong has also infected other aspects of my life. I'm grouchier, write less, and am in some ways less curious than I used to be. So I thought it would be interesting to consider the biographical factors that might contribute to this pattern.
In 2019, I was starting to pivot my career. I was 30 years old and transitioning from becoming a music teacher to going into the sciences. It was pre-COVID, pre-AI-explosion, pre-Scott-Alexander-doxxing, pre-FTX era. LessWrong and Effective Altruism felt like new discoveries, and EA hadn't been rocked by the FTX scandal. My pivot into scientific work felt exciting. I was 7 years younger than I am now. Worries about pandemics and AI risks were interesting ideas, not live concerns. The community at LessWrong seemed more focused on human rationality and to have a more diverse array of discussion topics.
Since then, we all lived through the disasters, scandals, and the rise of AI. I got 7 years older, did a very isolating and stressful MS in biomedical engineering in Michigan, and am about halfway through a PhD in the same subject in Oregon. In some ways, the culture of these sites has changed, as I remember seeing others note at various times.
I tasked Claude with evaluating whether patterns over time seem to primarily reflect a change in the site's other users or in the way I participate on the site, and to try to locate the changes with more precision. Some of its findings:
My 2023 blowup
In 2023, I developed a year-long grievance about voting, and had what looks like an acute stress window in June-July. My comments were at their best earlier in the year before I left, particularly in Feb 2023. In June–July 2023 I published 13 posts across both forums in about seven weeks, and most landed poorly, while my comments held roughly steady.
Claude identified a few factors that seem pertinent:
Chess
I also downloaded 9,960 of my Lichess blitz games from Aug 2020-2026. This is a nice second signal of my cognitive performance and sleep/wake patterns.
Conclusion
It seems like stress and exhaustion make me more conflict-oriented and grievance-prone. I treat other people with contempt, have less interest in what other people have to say, and participate in forum conversation mainly to fight. Unfortunately, it also looks like isolation leads me to post on the forum in a bid for engagement, and when I'm being lazy or cantankerous because of stress and exhaustion, I piss people off, get a muted or negative reception, take it hard because of the isolation, and spin out.
My takeaways: