I wasn't aware it used to talk about a 'mating plan' everywhere, which I think is amusing and I agree sounds kind of socially oblivious.

I really think that we shouldn't optimise for people not joining us because of weak, negative low-level associations. I think the way that you attract good people is by strong wins, not because of not hearing any bad-associations. Nassim Taleb is an example I go to here, where the majority of times I hear about him I think he's being obnoxious or aggressive, and often just disagree with what he says, but I don't care too much about reading that because occasionally he's saying something important that few others are. 

Elon Musk is another example, where the majority of coverage I see of him his negative, and sometimes he writes kinda dumb tweets, but he gives me hope for humanity and I don't care about the rest of the stuff. Had I seen the news coverage first, I'd still have been mindblown by seeing the rockets land and changed my attitude towards him. I could keep going on with examples... new friends occasionally come to me saying they read a review of HPMOR saying Harry's rude and obnoxious, and I respond "you need to learn that's not the most important aspect of a person's character". Harry is determined and takes responsibility and is curious and is one of the few people who has everyone's back in that book, so I think you should definitely read and learn from him, and then the friend is like "Huh, wow, okay, I think I'll read it then. That was very high and specific praise."

A lot of this comes down to the graphs in Lukeprog's post on romance (another dating post, I'm so sorry). 

I think that LessWrong is home to some of the most honest and truth-seeking convo on the internet. We have amazing thinkers who come here like Zvi and Paul and Anna and Scott and more and the people who care about the conversations they can have will come here even if we have weird associations and some people hate us and call us names.

(Sarah also wrote the forces of blandness post that I think is great and I think about a lot in this context.)

I guess I didn't address the specific example of your friend. (Btw I am also a person who was heavily involved with EA at Oxford, I ran the 80k student group while I was there and an EAGx!) I'm sorry your friend decided to write-off LessWrong because they heard it was sexist. I know you think that's a massive cost that we're paying in terms of thousands of good people avoiding us for that reason too. 

I think that negative low-level associations really matter if you're trying to be a mass movement and scale, like a political movement. Republicans/Democrats kind of primarily work to manage whether the default association is positive or negative, which is why they spend so much time on image-management. I don't think LW should grow 100x users in the next 4 years. That would be terrible for our mission of refining the art of human rationality and our culture. I think that the strong positive hits are the most important, as I said already.

Suppose you personally get really valuable insights from LW, and that people's writing here helps you understand yourself as a person and become more virtuous in your action. If you tell your EA friend that LessWrong was a key causal factor in you levelling up as a person, and they reply "well that's net bad because I once heard they're sexist" I'm not that impressed by them. And I hope that a self-identified EA would see the epistemic and personal value there as primary rather than the image-management thing as primary. And I think that if we all think everybody knows everyone else thinks the image-management is primary... then I think it's healthy to take the step of saying out loud "No, actually, the actual intellectual progress on rationality is more important" and following through.

There was also nothing about dating on LW back when I had the discussion I've referred to with the person who thought (and probably still thinks) that a big driver behind the appeal of LW is sexism.

I'm having trouble understanding what this would mean. Why would a big driver behind LW's appeal be sexism?

As I've said in another comment, the person I've mentioned is highly intelligent, a data scientist, effective altruist, signed the Giving-what-we-can pledge, and now runs their own business.

If someone can look at LW, with its thousands of posts discussing futurism, philosophy, rationality, etc, and come away concluding that the appeal of the site is sexism (as opposed to an interest in those topics), I feel tempted to just write off their views.

Sure, you can find some sexist posts or commenters here or there (I seem to remember a particular troll whom we eventually vanquished with the switchover from LW 1.0 to LW 2.0). But to think that they're the norm, or that it's a big part of the general appeal of the site?

To conclude that, it seems like you'd either have to have gotten an extremely biased sample of LW (and not been thoughtful enough to realize this possibility on your own), or you'd have to have some major blindspots in your thinking about these things, causing you to jump to bizarre conclusions.

In either case, it seems like the issue is more with them than with LW, and all else equal, I wouldn't feel much drive to cater to their opinion. (Even if they're otherwise an intelligent and productive individual.) People can just have blindspots, and I don't think you should cater to the people with the most off-base view of you.

Am I missing something? Do you think their view was more justified than this? Or do you just think it's worth paying more costs to cater to such people, even if you agree that they're being unreasonable?

I have an extremely negative emotional reaction to this.

More seriously. While LW can be construed as "trying to promote something" (i.e. rational thinking), in my opinion it is mostly a place to have rational discussions, using much stronger discursive standards than elsewhere on the internet.

If people decide to judge us on cherry pickings, that is sad, but it is much better than having them control what topics are or are not allowed. I am with Ben on this one.

About your friend in particular, if they have to be turned off of the community because of some posts and the fact we engage with idea at the object-level instead of yucking-out socially awkward ideas, then she might not yet be ready to receive rationality in her heart.

Before the edit, I think this post had the property that if the wrong people read it, their opinion of LW is irreversibly extremely negative.

Was the edit just to add the big disclaimer about motivation at the top? If nothing else was changed, then I struggle to see what would have been so objectionable about the pre-edit version. I might be missing something, but I don't for example see it advocating any views or practices that I'd consider harmful (in contrast to some PUA stuff).

Seems like the worst thing you could reasonably say about it is that it's a bit heteronormative and male-centric. I don't think there's anything wrong with having a dating advice post written from that perspective, but I do think it would have been good to add a sentence clarifying that at the top, just so that non-heterosexual male readers don't feel like they're assumed not to be part of the audience.

But other than that, is there anything else about it that would need to change?

Happy to discuss it. (I feel a little guilty for cussing in a Less Wrong comment, but I am at war with the forces of blandness and it felt appropriate to be forceful.)

My understanding of the Vision was that we were going to develop methods of systematically correct reasoning the likes of which the world had never seen, which, among other things, would be useful for preventing unaligned superintelligence from destroying all value in the universe.

Lately, however, I seem to see a lot of people eager to embrace censorship for P.R. reasons, seemingly without noticing or caring that this is a distortionary force on shared maps, as if the Vision was to run whatever marketing algorithm can win the most grant money and lure warm bodies for our robot cult—which I could get behind if I thought money and warm bodies were really the limiting resource for saving the world. But the problem with "systematically correct reasoning except leaving out all the parts of the discussion that might offend someone with a degree from Oxford or Berkeley" as opposed to "systematically correct reasoning" is that the former doesn't let you get anything right that Oxford or Berkeley gets wrong.

Optimized dating advice isn't important in itself, but the discourse algorithm that's too cowardly to even think about dating advice is thereby too constrained to do serious thinking about the things that are important.

I'll comment on this post from Geoffrey Miller's perspective (which I still believe is the closest map to the territory for heterosexual men)

1. Examining your goals is really valuable. I agree you should start by exploring your goals and your ethics.

take the simplistic belief "women prefer rich men". Assuming that you believe that, and therefore you want to become rich;

This is good advice. To clarify neither I nor Miller believe that women prefer rich men. Financial success is probably correlated with extrovertion, intelligence, conscientiousness, social skills, the ability to provide, an effective degree of assertiveness, which are all attributes women have evolved to be attracted to.

But AB testing out the preferred attributes yourself would take a lifetime. The evopsych approach is to get a prior for which traits are attractive from evolutionary thought experiments, then test the beliefs with psych methods. I decided to get my priors from Miller because his epistemology seems sound in interviews and writing. Then I a/b tested his theories by posing hypotheticals to female friends and trying to guess which behavior they would label more attractive. I found Miller's theories generalize pretty well, much better than my own mind projection. So I went with it. So beliefs about what women prefer are empirical, use you scholarship and low-cost tests.

Generally, if you believe that X helps at dating, focus on X, and stop talking about dating.

I agree with this too. My strategy is hyperfocusing on dating theory for a month, then writing up what you learned for comprehension. Now I can stop talking about dating moving forward, which is awesome!

The wrong kind of debate (about dating, politics, etc.) is when people already come with their ideologies fully formed, and try to get the majority of the audience on their side.

This is usually true. For my part, my orginal ideology a month ago said that women do not prefer high-status men. I realized I was in conflict with the data and my incorrect belief was hurting me. So I changed it. Unfortunately, new readers may assume my original ideology was "women are gold diggers". Se la vie!

Honesty does not require saying everything you think. I feel like you haven’t really addressed the concern here. And i didn’t say anything about judging you for preferring attractive women.