I think communities are typically about avoiding responsibility for making personal progress. People who choose to take a more central role in a community typically have emotional problems they are trying to work out via the dynamics in the community. The whole is typically much less than the sum of its parts.
Just wanted to note that this seemed like an interesting claim that seems relevant to my interests to take seriously.
Meta: I think I'd find it easier to process this if this post picked a subset of these questions rather than all at once (And then could devote more space to argue about individual answers to questions or clusters of questions)
Try harder to learn from tradition than you have been on the margin. Current = noisy.
What does "Current = noisy" mean here?
A couple months back Raemon wrote this excellent question to which Scott Alexander shared his ongoing list. I think it would be great to have people try to give their current guesses for a lot of these. My guesses in a comment below. My intuition is that value is created in four ways from this:
1. Discovery of things you didn't realize you believed in the process of writing the answer.
2. Generation of cruxes if people give you feedback/alternatives for answers.
3. Realization that your guess isn't even wrong, but fundamentally wasn't built from building blocks that can, in principle, be rearranged to form a correct answer.
4. Help in coordination as people get a sense of what others believe about navigating this space. Seeing cognitive diversity on fundamental questions has helped me in this area.