Thank you for this post, incredibly insightful, I consider it already canonical.

Especially useful is the pendulum model of traditionalism, the blue pill, and the red pill. I wonder if these cultural models are a reason for optimism or pessimism. Will society eventually settle on the healthy mean of truth?

I'm sorry this was your experience.

If you hate writing, that says more about your writing potential more than the current quality of your writing. Setting the feedback loop in motion matters more than where it starts from.

This might be a time to think about why you wanted to write in the first place. At Inkhaven, Daystar gave us a hierarchy of reasons why someone writes:

A -- I want to write.

B -- I want X to be written.

C -- I want to be a writer.

D -- I  want others to see me as a writer.

Which one were/are you?

I too struggle to understand what, if any, technical progress was made on the alignment problem.

LW discourse on alignment reminds me of the Buddha master on the mountaintop describing God: "not this, not that, not that either, and certainly not that." I saw many more posts about what the answer is not than what the answer is.

This has been proven to me on multiple occasions when I have done relatively "transgressive" things in public, things like jumping fences, and been surprised that no strangers noticed. 

I find social invisibility one of the most deeply depressing aspects of modernity. It is a minor weight on my days.

"Personally I recommend making peace with it and finding a way to enjoy life anyway, but that’s harder for some people than others."

I dislike the term "make peace with it." You "make peace" with an opponent by no longer fighting them, but most people aren't fighting social invisibility at all. Maybe if they did, say, by trying to become visibly famous or dressing in a strange way, they would be happier. I know multiple people who've successfully done this.

If you hate social invisibility, you can do something about it. I recommend moving to a community where you're not invisible. Join a group house, make friends with your neighbors, or move to a small community where everyone knows each other. 

You may want to consider the optics of telling people to focus on applying to things less, then at the end of the article saying "the the EA Hotel... happens to be an excellent place to apply to."

Sure, the EA Hotel might be legitimately different from other organizations, but I have no reason to believe that.

I'm putting this on my office wall.

LessWrong needs more posts like this, posts where the goal is not necessarily to add new knowledge but to remind people of the knowledge we have. Agency is a rationalist tenet, and mantras keep us from forgetting it. 

Thank you for just writing this!

This is exactly how my memory works as well.

This is the strongest argument for digital minimalism.

Interestingly, none of this seems India-specific.