The post is making me feel optimism about social technology again.

I think a world of widespread economic literacy might be even better than it is depicted here. Speculative sci-fi has traditionally suffered from issues like predicting flying cars instead of smartphones. In Optimism About Social Technology, I wrote that my pet heuristic is:

Imagine how much worse the world would be if there were a worldwide ban on e.g. standard insurance contracts--no health insurance, no auto insurance, no fire insurance.

Now imagine how much better the world would be if we had not only those things but also widespread liability insurance...or dominant assurance contracts, or prediction markets, or something that hasn't even been invented yet!

I think EY is off to a great start with Dath Ilan, but speculative fiction is hard, so I want there to be a whole genre of Dath Ilan-style world-building.

Conditional payments for paywalled content (after you pay for a piece of downloadable content and view it, you can decide after the fact if payments should go to the author or to proportionately refund previous readers)

-- Vitalik Buterin, On Radical Markets

Good post. I myself have gotten into the habit of referring to an outside view instead of the outside view.

I wonder where the Spiral of Silence fits in here. I guess opposite the Respectability cascade?

society can respond to new information relatively quickly, but does so smoothly. This seems like a good thing.

This makes me think of the Concave Disposition.

I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise that these concepts are already well-known.

Well I think independent discovery is underrated anyway.

I think this remains an outstanding, top-tier problem in group rationality. I feel like I encounter it constantly. I'm surprised this post doesn't have more engagement.

I suspect that the long days break down some of your usual defences. It makes their techniques more effective, but you may not want to provide them with this power over you.

I personally feel less concerned by the long hours than by the notion of "psychological hacks" that lead to testimonials like, “What is, is; and what isn't isn't”. That stuff makes me imagine some kind of "leap of faith" maneuver, which I usually see as unreliable and prone to misfiring.

The Western focus on individuality and autonomy can be limiting as often a push is exactly what we need. This may explain part of why they were able to achieve what seemed like remarkable results - psychologists are limited by ethics in a way in which Landmark is not.

Yeah, this is plausible. It's easy to imagine scenarios where a push from a trusted friend is exactly what I want. However, I'm still wary of hiring an organization of strangers to overpower my narratives & worldview using psychological hacks.

Contrast with certain types of meditation, whereby you can directly observe evidence that challenges your narrative, without ever doing anything epistemically questionable.

Purely for completeness, I'll go ahead and represent the opposite preference: I am noticeably energized by overcast days, and I enjoy rain. Long, unbroken sequences of sunny days feel oppressive to me. I think my ideal week would be overcast 4 days, medium-light rain 2 of those days, and sunny on the remaining 3 days for evaporation & variety.

Of course, I realize that pluviophiles are a small minority, so any community/subcultural hub in a chronically cloudy place will suffer an excess SAD burden.

The seismic shift that’s occurred in the last 10 years is the ability of social media platforms to freebase user generated content and create serious behavioral addictions with very salient real world consequences. We‘re making a category error if we continue to discuss Twitter like it’s the same platform it was 10 years ago. 

Important point, and well-put.

The Jaron quote was also powerful; I hadn't heard that sort of thing about Trump before but it's not surprising. I personally think the highest reasonable hope would be for Trump to return to how he was in 2012--the birth certificate stuff was much less bad than the Qanon stuff and the capitol insurrection. That was less bad, but it was still bad and this might undermine a sanguine narrative of "Trump in Recovery"...but if it somehow didn't, then yeah, I'd be happy to see that narrative get some airtime.

Regardless of how the stories of Trump end up being told, I do hope that people start to see Twitter as the psychotoxic game that it is. I have expressed some optimism about this in Predictions for future dispositions toward Twitter. It's possible that tech companies will eventually try to sell cleaner digital ecosystems to conscientious end-users--I imagine a high-income, tech-savvy buyer paying extra for a well-integrated device-app ecosystem that tends to respect & enhance one's mental/emotional life rather than harming it. This could come to represent a high-status, post-Twitter lifestyle. Again this is optimistic, but perhaps worth hoping for.