Editing Essays into Solstice Speeches: Standing offer: if you have a speech to give at Solstice or other rationalist event, message me and I'll look at your script and/or video call you to critique your performance and help

Ironic, considering Duncan's one of the first three names that come to mind as perpetrators. Fortunately his attempts to push boundaries resulted in him being pushed off LW rather than successfully destroying its norms.

Though my perception is that they did considerable damage to norms I care about that were already very vulnerable. I was only paying close attention to the dispute with Said_Achmiz but I observed a larger pattern of decreasing honesty and forthrightness beyond that, with Duncan as one of the main vocal champions of the change. For reasons that sounded plausibly good which I think he believes in. But which I have never been confident are his true rejection, or that of others.

Absolutely not. From my experience, not at all. I have turned down sex with someone I'd been on a date with, found attractive, and was generally interested in because they were, that day, boring me enough that the attraction couldn't stick.

Other things like kinks and fantasies can get more flexible far easier than the appeal of a partner. Conversely, an intellectually appealing partner makes everything else more flexible, including beauty standards and what seems hot.

I guess that disqualifies him as an intellectual? But when he does the same thing on purpose that the people he's accusing do by accident - ignore any subtleties or higher-order effects and just go with the simple idea - I submit that it makes him part of the category he's described. If you don't want to be grouped with the people you're insulting, stay well clear of behaving like them.

As someone with plenty of experience being full of contempt for just about everyone and (mostly) not being a bastard about it, I kind of think the most helpful lens is less philosophical per se and more practical and ~political. Namely, libertarianism and the knowledge problem.

The world is full of idiots. The country is full of idiots. The government is full of idiots. The corporations are full of idiots. The charities, the social media feeds, the buses and trains, they're all full of idiots. Some of those are more true than they were twenty years ago but they were all true then too.

But they still know their own lives better than us. They do things that are objectively kind of terrible like get payday loans and buy tons of lottery tickets, but almost always it's because the better options are blocked off to them or not as good as they look, even if it's not possible to explain why to an outsider like us even if we were to poke our nose in and ask. (And they wanted to answer for some ungodly reason.)

Libertarianism mostly likes to talk about how the government should butt out and let people live their lives. And this is true, it should. But the same argument also applies to elitists. Yes, they're doing a bunch of dumb shit, and probably if they were smarter they would change some of it and make their lives better, but you can't just drop yourself into their lives and 'fix' things and expect it to work out. Some of it would make things worse, some of it would theoretically make things better but only if you changed their entire social sphere at once too, and some of it you wouldn't notice you'd fucked up for years. And mostly that's still true if "drop yourself into their lives" is replaced with "give insistent well-meaning advice" or "ruminate on how they're idiots and if they just listened to you, the superior person, they'd be better". (Okay, the practical issues prohibiting getting any positive impact from ruminating are mostly more obvious than this. But this too.)

Calibrating appropriately is hard. You do, sometimes, want to give advice once or twice. If you figure out when to do that and when to back off, tell me, please. What advice I could try to give there is neither specific nor wonderfully effective so I won't bother.

But I think this is generally pretty effective at being, technically, contemptuous of most strangers you interact with but mostly keeping it from being something they notice or one of the top three things you notice when having a conversation with them, and that's pretty good at not encouraging behaving contemptuously, and that's pretty good at avoiding steeping in contempt until your standards for lack of contempt rise, and then apply to precisely seven people in the world none of whom is you. (Which I think is a risk here.) And that's, I suspect, at least what you need short-term.

I think those are all more gift economies than they are market economies. I've never been part of a dojo long-term but there was 'hey want a ride' 'sure I'll pick up dinner' at least a bit even with the one I was part of briefly. Buying and selling MtG was something you did with the store, not the other players, almost always. (Some people were aggressive value traders but they were almost their own subculture because no one really enjoyed dealing with them.) And for the kind of card trades that didn't look at all at what book value was and just swapped what seemed good to them... Man, I guess that's at least 40% market economy but it sure didn't feel transactional. And it died pretty rapidly when the aggressive value traders who were indisputably a market economy showed up, which feels like that's a sign the market economy part was fragile and noncentral?

I have never been part of a (non-children's) sports league but I would guess they did a lot of 'sure do you a favor' the same way I'd expect from dojos. And I avoid Toastmasters* like it's radioactive, so IDK.

I think there's a very fuzzy distinction between 'technically gift economy but not ~integrated enough to meaningfully be trading' and 'not a gift economy'. Probably a similar distinction exists at the low end of market economy, though I suspect on no direct evidence it's less fuzzy.

(*Even if I witnessed some Master Toasts trading things or doing favors, I still wouldn't know, because my experience is that a Master Toast emits primarily Simalacrum-Level-4 statements with the occasional S3 or S2 and so I couldn't begin to guess whether their 'favors' were actually favors.)

Is any subculture not a gift economy? Smuggling in 'small' connotations to exclude things like 'the gay community' (though ca. 1960 maybe them too) or 'goths,' but I think it's the default and it's notable when a subculture deviates from it.

Possible places to find exceptions, highly monetizing and/or systematizing, many of which I suspect are as much gift economies as us:

• Anglophone quant traders
• Pro and semi-pro poker players
• Crypto coin boosters
• /r/WallStreetBets

C.S. Lewis is the usual author to cite for the other direction, and I've met both. More common among rationalist types. The Moon Is Harsh Mistress is possibly more effective than Rand.

if we needed correct internal computations for qualia (and not just correct behavior) would mean the overall system would falsely believe to have a quale (like being in pain), it would act, in all ways, like it was in pain, but actually, it wouldn't be in pain.

To all appearances LLMs already do that and have for several years now. So, yes, that is clearly possible for a non-conscious thing to do.

Your definition of qualia is nonstandard, and defines it out of meaningfulness. More standard definitions generally include at least one synonym for 'ineffable' and I believe them to be entirely mysterious answers to mysterious questions.