No, you are missing the point. Even the signal being sent out by it is much more contingent than you seem to realise. In the culture you are familiar with, wearing a fedora inappropriately is strongly correlated with having the neckbeard personality type and being engaged in some pretense or another, but that correlation is far from universal. Neckbeards wear fedoras to LARP as stylish (without understanding how style actually works), much like neckbeards wear trenchcoats to LARP as Neo from the Matrix, etc. But that whole pattern of behaviour is just much less common on a global scale than you think it is. In the environments familiar to you, that kind of neckbeard-poser type accounts for the majority of people wearing fedoras inappropriately. In other places it accounts for only a minority.

Moreover, the loathing directed at neckbeardy types is itself less pronounced outside of nerd-culture. Many nerds are chronically afraid of being deemed neckbeard-adjacent, and hence treat it as the worst thing a person could be. That is also not a universal.

Knowing little isn't the same as knowing nothing. Suits and fedoras are things that even people who don't know much know enough not to wear inappropriately.

No, you are simply underestimating how clueless most people are about these things. A great many people still think of American culture as revolving around cowboy hats. Even the concept of situationally dependent dress codes is highly counterintuitive to the many people whose identities are less contextual than those of urbanites. Most people in the world at present, and almost everyone in premodern history, have a communal sense-of-self where who they are is tied up with their role in the community. A medieval blacksmith did not merely "have a job" as a medieval blacksmith, he was a blacksmith, through and through.

Print shirts were not a thing until recently, so older apparel has a tendency to look distinctly "proper" to modern beholders. But an urban worker in Victorian England would not put on an evening suit just because he was seeking a favour with an upperclass gentleman. He would make sure his clothes were tidy and that he was overall well presented, but he would not even know what outfits a gentleman would deem appropriate for the occasion, much less own them. The upper classes of the time did have contextually dependent dress codes, but that is because they were fully living in modernity and engaged in urban commerce.

It means "you've spent some of your weirdness points, but not so many as to end the friendship".

No, the whole construct of "weirdness points" is completely missing the mark where people of this sort are concerned. There actually just isn't a threshold of weirdness where these types will conclude you are crazy. They do not have Aspergers and are therefore perfectly capable of telling the difference between weirdness and craziness without relying on degree at all. On the other hand, even quite small amounts of craziness will tend to alienate them quite a bit. If they are financially struggling, they tend to be suspicious towards anything that seems foreign, but that's not quite the same as weirdness, but even setting aside that distinction, it is still not the case that a large amount of slightly weird behaviours add up linearly into a large amount of weirdness, like spending weirdness points. That's just not how it works outside of the spheres that Peter Wildeford had in mind when writing about weirdness points.

Late to the thread, but wearing a suit or indeed even a fedora only sends that message to a very particular type of person — to an approximation: highly parochial people who have spent too much time immersed in WASP culture, ie. the same people who care a lot about professionalism and think it's inappropriate to strike up conversation with strangers on a bus or train.

For a highly insular and parochial crowd like the LessWrong community, that type of person may simply seem like a "normal person", but normal people (for example: people who live in rural areas and spend much less time online) would disagree. Moreover, it is not possible to avoid giving that kind of WASPy person the impression of social cluelessness without being conformist to the point of profound repression, which is why so many rednecks, blacks, gays, and latinas can agree that you all are kinda hard to get along with.

If you go to a place full of normal people, you will find that the men generally know very little about clothing and will wear what looks good to them, which is basically just a combination of what their friends wear, what the local people they look up to wear, and what they see in American television. If they wear genuinely odd things like a fedora, they will probably be teased a lot by their friends (which is a good sign; it means full acceptance and not just toleration), but it will not be deemed a social faux pas since the "fedora = neckbeard" association only exists in very specific social spheres. I live in a small town in the middle of nowhere, and I bet you that most people here have never even heard of Reddit and have no idea what a neckbeard is.

TL;DR: not everyone is a yank, if you'll excuse my French.

Edit: why are y'all downvoting me? Are you just confirming the stereotype about extreme insularity or are you making a non-obvious point? Experience leads me to suspect it's the former, which makes me wonder: is there anything, even in principle, which could get you to change your mind? If nothing else, could you at least clarify which parts of the post you disagree with? 

For clarification, I don't think Duncan is actually playing the game your post was describing, but I think virtually all the other commenters who objected to your post were. I think this justifies the forceful framing of the overall intervention, all the more so because Duncan is averse to generalizations anyway and thus unlikely to be swayed by them when it comes to his own self-concept.

But also, Duncan Sabien's psychology simply isn't as rare as he seems to believe. I actually like him in a personal sense and find him interesting as an exemplar of a particular worldview that Duncan distills to an unusual purity. But the worldview is not particularly uncommon, and Duncan stands out only be the extent to which he takes it. Roughly speaking, the worldview comes from a merger of technocratic liberalism (think Keynesianism and Chicago school, both originating ultimately from Fabian socialism), itself tinged heavily by social justice (which traces partly to ecumenism via the social gospel movement and partly to the New Left) and a sort of hybrid of libertarianism and mainstream Republicanism that forms the "right wing" in Silicon Valley and to an extent California more broadly, and definitely forms the "right wing" in LessWrong and SSC circles. The mainstream Republicanism is basically the exoteric counterpart to neoconservatism, which is founded by the Trotskyites James Burnham and Irving Kristol, and the libertarianism comes from Rothbard's alliance with the old right, who of course drew heavily upon Ayn Rand's synthesis of Misesianism with a Marxian sociology that begat right-wing syndicalism, agorism, etc. — so basically most of it just comes from Karl Marx when you trace the lineages back.

But the point I'm getting at is not that most of the ideologyspace of LessWrong and SSC and their peripheries trace largely to Karl Marx, the point is that it's a highly specific form of Marxism, ie. there are identifiable ideological and cultural currents that have shaped Duncan Sabien's way of thinking, which you can plainly by see by how he still today straddles the line between the social justice tinged liberal wing of LessWrong/SSC culture and the neocon-paleolibertarian wing of LessWrong/SSC culture. Add to this a certain level of neurodivergence, but also a frankly wholesome libidinous love of movement, and you basically wind up with Duncan Sabien. Like, it's a highly specific combination, but it's also basically a hegemonic politics, so if we loosen up the category to include not just Duncan Sabien but also people who are broadly like him, then we wind up with hundreds of thousands of highly educated, well-connected people who possess a lot of cultural capital.

My main gripe with Duncan — keeping in mind that I actually like the guy — is that he does not know himself. He has undoubtedly reflected on his own intellectual background, in the sense of thinking about when and how he changed his mind about important things, etc., but he has not done the work of studying his own intellectual lineage in depth. If he did, he'd see that his habitual "you don't exist, Duncan" framing is missing the mark entirely.

Stumbled upon this. Duncan overlooked the fact that there are good reasons to use a very forceful framing when you're doing an intervention to help an addict. He got offended by the generalizations because of his tendency to take all such generalizations personally. This distortion causes him to do things like claiming you made "not even a token acknowledgement of the possibility that perhaps some of it is not this particular game", which is flatly, unambiguously false, because your entire last section of the post was practically filled with such token acknowledgements.

Why does Duncan do this? Because he has an elaborately constructed self-narrative that he is in love with, and when people disagree with his self-narrative, he feels profoundly invalidated and underestimated, and has a distinct habit of phrasing this as "you don't exist, Duncan". Actually it's just a very particular form of vulnerable narcissism, and many aspects of his self-narrative are unambiguously untrue if you just look.

In short, you're good, and he's not actually making a point that's worth taking in. If anything your intervention is not forceful enough. There are many people in this comment section behaving like abject drug addicts and completely failing to realize it.

Though I do feel I ought to add that Buddhism is itself another addiction of this sort, much like Christianity is. Where Christianity rejects worldliness, Buddhism rejects samsara. Both of these are actually rejections of embodiment, even if they do sometimes use embodiment instrumentally. If you're interested in Eastern philosophical traditions, I strongly recommend Chinese chan over Japanese zen. And when it does come to zen, rinzai zen is a better choice than soto zen.

Edit: upon reflection I agree that the comment was too combative. I still qualitatively endorse most of the claims made, though I think the harshness is misleading. For example, I think the "vulnerable narcissism" thing is technically true, but misleading because it is mitigated by a sufficient level of principled virtue that its connotations are simply too harsh for the description to properly apply. In short, it's a characterisation that is more technically accurate than emotively accurate.

I have long held the view that good deeds are as relevant to justice as bad deeds, and that the failure to reward good deeds is if anything a worse injustice than the failure to punish bad deeds. I grant that this is a slight asymmetry in the opposite direction, but I don't think this is a problem, because this kind of asymmetry discourages inaction, and I think inaction is a net negative.

But there is another way in which my conception of justice differs from your conception of symmetric justice, namely: I would never allow bad points and good points to cancel out. Bad deeds ought to be punished irrespective of good deeds, and good deeds ought to be rewarded irrespective of bad deeds. When you earn a reward, you should have the reward without fear of losing it as a punishment. When you've earned a punishment, you should accept the punishment and not try to desperately weasel out of it by frantically doing good deeds (this is a problem because it leads to associating good deeds with avoidance, desperation, and stress - makes it a frantic fight to escape punishment rather than a joyous thing). If you do a bad deed, but then do a good deed that more than makes up for it, that simply means you should receive a punishment and then receive a reward that more than makes up for the punishment. Bad deeds call for punishment and good deeds call for reward and that is that.

On another note, I am in favour of corporal punishment. It is barbaric to lock people away as a punishment for petty crimes. It should only be used where the criminal is actually too dangerous to roam free. Otherwise, corporal punishment is sufficient. This also has another advantage: where financial punishments make something illegal unless you're very wealthy, and penitentiary punishments make something illegal unless you're very nihilistic and don't care about prison, corporal punishments make something illegal unless you are very desperate.

Also, in the case of a misdeed, once appropriate punishment has been dealt, there is no longer any injury to the institution of justice, and so the criminal has now effectively been cleansed of his criminality and can once again be thought of as a just, law-abiding citizen. The punishment closes the issue and permits him to have a clean conscience again. This is an important part of redemption.

I'm two years late to the discussion, but I think I can clear this up. The idea is that a person without qualia might still have sensory processing that leads to the construction of percepts which can inform our actions, but without any consciousness of sensation. There is also a distinction between sensory data and sensation. Consider this scenario:

I am looking at a red square on a white wall. The light from some light source reflects off the wall and enters my eye, where it activates cone and rod cells. This is sensory data, but it is not sensation, in that I do not feel the activation of my cone and rod cells. My visual cortex processes the sensory data, and generates a sensory experience (qualia) corresponding in some way to the wall I am looking at. I analyze this sensory experience and thus derive percepts like "white wall" and "red square". The generation of these percepts will typically also lead to a sensory experience (qualia) in the form of an inner monologue: "that's a red square on a white wall". But sometimes it won't, since I don't always have an inner monologue. Yet, even when it doesn't, I am still able to act on the basis of having seen a red square on a white wall. For example, if I am subsequently quizzed on what I saw, I will be able to answer it correctly.

Well, that's my formulation of how qualia works, having thought about it a great deal. But there are people who profess that they experience qualia and yet suspect that the generation of percepts does not come from the analysis of conscious sensory experience, but from the processing of sensory data itself, and that the analysis of sensory experience just happens to coincide with it (Leibniz's pre-ordained harmony of God).

Finally, we could also imagine cases where the sensory experience is not generated at all; where there is merely sensory data that, despite being processed by the visual cortex, never becomes sensory experience (never generates the visual analogue of an internal monologue), but still crystallises into sufficiently ordered sensory data that it can give rise to percepts. This would be the hypothetical "philosophical zombie".

I don't think this last scenario is possible, because I don't think qualia are epiphenomena; I think they are an intrinsic part of the process by which human beings (and probably other entities with metacognition) make decisions on the basis of sensory data. Without this, I do not believe our cognition could advance significantly beyond that of infancy (I do not think infants possess qualia), but there are certain cases where our instincts can respond to sensory data in a manner that does not require attention to qualia, and may indeed not require qualia at all.

A messy onset featuring transient beating caused by a piano key being out of tune with itself is usually insignificant, but it is not necessarily insignificant if it occurs during a mellow, legato passage, where that particular note plays an especially central role. It can ruin the phrase completely. Still only in the ears of skilled musicians, but if you say this is unimportant because skilled musicians are vastly outnumbered by the general population, then you wind up creating a strong disincentive from advancing in skill beyond a certain point, and you wind up giving least consideration to those people who have most to do with music.

That exquisite piano solo on that close-to-perfectly tuned piano (wow, "god's joke on musicians" must drive folks like that nuts:) is high art, but equally so is the juxtaposition of multiple notes and lyrics to produce an emotional effect.

Not equally so, but moreso. Singing, dancing, figure skating, etc. are the highest performance arts because less mediated. They place greater psychological demands on the performers; strain their spirits to the utmost. There is something divine in it, to a degree beyond the divinity in instrumentalism. The emotional depth is greater because the performer needs by necessity to embody the emotions, and is faced with the audience without the protection of an instrument in the way. Psychologically it is a different caliber of performance. Even the greatest concert pianists (Horowitz, for example), can never quite match the olympian quality of the greatest singers.

I personally find the art of rock and roll more impressive

And for that reason, you would be among those harmed if quality distinctions were eroded in rock and roll. Popular audiences who have only a transient interest and might switch to Billie Eilish the next day will not love rock and roll the way you do, and so they will not care if good rock and roll becomes replaced with total garbage that sounds superficially similar. They will not know the difference. You would, and you would mourn the loss, but when it comes to classical, you side with the unknowing masses, for all that they could just as well be kept occupied by any other entertainment. Netflix, for example.

along with multiple interacting musical themes.

This is a strange statement. Rock is much more monodic than common practice period music. Even music from the classical period, which basically invented monody, was more polyphonic than most rock.

High art is gravy

High art (theatre in particular), is the centrepiece of just about every great civilisation in known history. The works of Aristotle, as they were preserved and studied by the Catholic church, were not what sparked the Renaissance. The humanistic works were.

and there are so many ways to make high art that losing one particularly type shouldn't concern us much.

The arts are connected and many things you take for granted (novels and rock music) could not have arisen except out of a canon with high art at its centre. Novels came out of chronicles and epics, and rock music features chords, which are not such an obvious idea as they might seem. Chordal music came very gradually out of a very long tradition of polyphonic choral music. The discovery of antique classics was what sparked the renaissance, so it should be obvious at a glance (or at the very least from Chesterton's fence esque reasoning), that losing connection with that canon would be a very serious loss.

Edited to add:

Incidentally, I think it's only intellectuals who would question the value of exquisite quality and the fine discernment of a skilled craftsman. To regular people, the value of these would be obvious. It is precisely to intellectuals that it is not obvious.

It is part Ayn Rand, part Curtis Yarvin. Ultimately it all comes from Thomas Carlyle anyway.

And there is no need to limit yourself to potential obligations. Unless you have an exceedingly blessed life, then there should be no shortage of friends and loved ones in need of help.

Imagine an alternate version of the Effective Altruism movement, whose early influences came from socialist intellectual communities such as the Fabian Society, as opposed to the rationalist diaspora.

That's a lot closer to the truth than you might think. There are plenty of lines going from the Fabian society (and from Trotsky, for that matter) into the rationalist diaspora. On the other hand, there is very little influence from eg. Henry Regnery or Oswald Spengler.

“A real charter city hasn’t been tried!” I reply.

Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore is close enough, surely.

“Real socialism hasn’t been tried either!” the Effective Samaritan quips back. “Every attempt has always been co-opted by ruling elites who used it for their own ends. The closest we’ve gotten is Scandinavia which now has the world’s highest standards of living, even if not entirely socialist it’s gotta count for something!”

This argument sounds a lot more Trotskyist than Fabian to me, but it is worth noting that said ruling elites have both been nominally socialist and been widely supported by socialists throughout the world. The same cannot be said in the case of charter cities and their socialist oppositions.

For every logical inference I make, they make the opposite. Every thoughtful prior of mine, they consider to be baseless prejudice. My modus ponens, their modus tollens.

Because your priors are baseless prejudices. The Whig infighting between liberals and socialists is one of many cases where both sides are awful and each side is almost exactly right about the other side. Your example about StarCraft shows that you are prone to using baseless prejudices as your priors, and other parts of your post show that you are indeed doing the very same thing when it comes to politics.

Of all the possible intellectuals I was exposed to, surely it is suspicious that the ones whose conclusions matched my already held beliefs were the ones who stuck.

Your evaluation of both, as well as your selection of opposition (Whig opposition in the form of socialism, rather than Tory opposition in the form of eg. paleoconservatism), shows that your priors on this point are basically theological, or more precisely, eschatological. You implicitly see history as progressing along a course of growing wisdom, increasing emancipation, and widening empathy (Peter Singer's Ever-Expanding Circle). It is simply a residue from your Christian culture. The socialist is also a Christian at heart, but being of a somewhat more dramatic disposition, he doesn't think of history as a steady upwards march to greater insight, but as a series of dramatic conflicts that resolve with the good guys winning.

(unless of course he is a Trotskyist, in which case we are perpetually at a turning point where history could go either way; towards communism or towards fascism)

Yet, the combined efforts of our charity has added up to exactly nothing! I want to yell at the Samaritan whose efforts have invalidated all of mine. Why are they so hellbent on tearing down all the beauty I want to create? Surely we can do better than this.

Sure, I can tell you how to do better: focus your efforts on improving institutions and societies that you are close to and very knowledgeable about. You can do a much better job here, and the resultant proliferation of healthy institutions will, as a pleasant side effect, spread much more prosperity in the third world than effective altruism ever will.

This is the position taken by sensible people (eg. paleocons), and notably not by revolutionaries and utopian technocrats. This is fortunate because it gives the latter a local handicap and enables good, judicious people to achieve at least some success in creating sound institutions and propagating genuine wisdom. This fundamental asymmetry is the reason why there is any functional infrastructure left anywhere, despite the utopian factions far outnumbering the realists.

We both believe in doing the most good, whatever that means, and we both believe in using evidence to inform our decision making.

No, you actually don't. If your intentions really were that good, they would lead you naturally into the right conclusions, but as Robin Hanson has pointed out, even Effective Altruism is still ultimately about virtue signalling, though perhaps directed at yourself. Sorta like HJPEV's desperate effort to be a good person after the sorting hat's warning to him. This is a case of Effective Altruists being mistaken about what their own driving motives actually are.

For us to collaborate we need to agree on some basic principles which, when followed, produces knowledge that can fit into both our existing worldviews.

The correct principle is this: fix things locally (where it is easier and where you can better track the actual results) before you decide to take over the world. There are a lot of local things that need fixing. This way, if your philosophy works, your own community, nation, etc. will flourish, and if it doesn't work, it will fall apart. Interestingly, most EA's are a lot more risk averse when it comes to their own backyard than when it comes to some random country in Africa.

To minimize the chance of statistical noise or incorrect inference polluting our conclusions, we create experiments with randomly chosen intervention and control groups, so we are sure the intervention is causally connected to the outcome.

This precludes a priori any plans that involve looking far ahead, reacting judiciously to circumstances as they arise, or creating institutions that people self-select into. In the latter case, using comparable geographical areas would introduce a whole host of confounders, but having both the intervention and control groups be in an overlapping area would change the nature of the experiment, because the structure of the social networks that result would be quite different. Basically, the statistical method you propose has technocratic policymaking built into its assumptions, and so it is not surprising that it will wind up favouring liberal technocracy. You have simply found another way of using a baseless prejudice as your prior.

But this is the most telling paragraph:

Like my beliefs about Starcraft, it seems so arbitrary. Had my initial instinct been the opposite, maybe I would have breezed past Hanson’s contrarian nonsense to one day discover truth and beauty reading Piketty.

Read both. The marginal clarity you will get from immersing yourself still deeper into your native canon is enormously outshadowed by the clarity you can get from familiarising yourself with more canons. Of course, Piketty is really just another branch of the same canon, with Piketty and Hanson being practically cousins, intellectually. Compare Friedrich List, to see the point.

My initial instinct was social democracy. Later I became a communist, then, after exposure to LessWrong, I became a libertarian. Now I'm a monarchist, and it occurs to me in hindsight that social democracy, communism, and libertarianism are all profoundly Protestant ideologies, and what I thought was me being widely read was actually still me being narrowminded and parochial.