While the framing of treating lack of social grace as a virtue captures something true, it's too incomplete and imo can't support its strong conclusion. The way I would put it is that you have correctly observed that, whatever the benefits of social grace are, it comes at a cost, and sometimes this cost is not worth paying. So in a discussion, if you decline to pay the cost of social grace, you can afford to buy other virtues instead.[1]
For example, it is socially graceful not to tell the Emperor Who Wears No Clothes that he wears no clothes. Whereas someone who lacks social grace is more likely to tell the emperor the truth.
But first of all, I disagree with the frame that lack of social grace is itself a virtue. In the case of the emperor, for example, the virtues are rather legibility and non-deception, traded off against whichever virtues the socially graceful response would've gotten.
And secondly, often the virtues you can buy with social grace are worth far more than whatever you could gain by declining to be socially graceful. For example, when discussing politics with someone of an opposing ideology, you could decline to be socially graceful and tell your interlocutor to their face that you hate them and everything they stand for. This would be virtuously legible and non-deceptive, at the cost of immediately ending the conversation and thus forfeiting any chance of e.g. gains from trade, coming to a compromise, etc.
One way I've seen this cost manifest on LW is that some authors complain that there's a style of commenting here that makes it unenjoyable to post here as an author. As a result, those authors are incentivized to post less, or to post elsewhere.[2]
And as a final aside, I'm skeptical of treating Feynman as socially graceless. Maybe he was less deferential towards authority figures, but if he had told nothing but the truth to all the authority figures (who likely included some naked emperors) throughout his life, his career would've presumably ended long before he could've gotten his Nobel Prize. And b), IIRC the man's physics lectures are just really fun to watch, and I'm pretty confident that a sufficiently socially graceless person would not make for a good teacher. For example, it is socially graceful not to belittle fledgling students as intellectual inferiors, even though they in some ways are just that.
Related: I wrote this comment and this follow-up where I wished that Brevity was considered a rationalist virtue. Because if there's no counterbalancing virtue to trade off against other virtues like legibility and truth-seeking, then supposedly virtuous discussions are incentivized to become arbitrarily long.
The moderation log of users banned by other users is a decent proxy for the question of which authors have considered which commenters to be too costly to interact with, whether due to lack of social grace of something else.
A statement of "we won't do X" is just words. By themselves, they don't make for a trustworthy commitment or promise, certainly not something a human or AI should plan actions around that relate to their very survival.
If you're going to assign the blame for the world wars to nationalism, why not also assign the credit for positive things to nationalism? Like the industrial revolution (courtesy of the British Empire), the success of the United States (and in particular its successful war of independence against Britain) and so on? Putting the suffering and damages caused by two World Wars on one side of the scale is indeed a tall order to overcome, but if much of the rest of modern history is put on the other side of the scale, that can easily outweigh them.
Regarding cosmopolitanism, I think the backlash to cosmopolitan immigration policy in all Western countries is a good example to illustrate the shortcomings of this worldview. There's a certain perspective that praises immigration on the grounds of democracy and openheartedness, but stops listening as soon as their own voters are against it. For instance, the rise of the AfD party in Germany occurred due to this: historically I've only been familiar with leftist parties splitting up due to ideological differences, but when the dominant conservative CDU party embraced immigration, lots of conservative voters understandably viewed that as a betrayal and thus moved to a further-right party. Personally in such situations I blame the actions of the moderate parties more than the voters who moved to the more extreme parties.
As for the EU project, I'm not opposed to it in principle. But the strategy of gradually enlarging and growing the project over time was bound to result in increasing resistance and backlash. And it's furthermore incompatible with the notion that you need to require many decisions to be unanimous for nations to buy into the project in the first place. And it resulted in bizarre design compromises like having a currency union but no fiscal union, which e.g. wrecked Greece after the 2008 financial crisis because it didn't have a separate currency it could devalue. 17 years later, the country still hasn't recovered its GDP from that time.
That's an interesting historical perspective, thanks! Though my point was mostly about whether a voter in a European nation in the 20th or 21st century should vote to join, empower, or expand the EU. Whereas citizens in earlier centuries didn't even have the option to vote against the actions of their governments.
This comment is far too negative on nationalism, and far too positive on the EU based on its concept rather than what it turned out to be in practice. National sovereignty is important! What does democracy even mean when your vote can't even in principle influence the laws of where you live? Why should any populace grant its authority to enact certain laws to a larger entity that doesn't share its values? Etc.
It's all well and good to say that international cooperation is positive and that nationalism is misguided, but international cooperation doesn't necessarily result in policies you as an individual would like. Besides big-picture items like low economic growth in the EU region, a smaller one that comes to my mind is the occasional push to restrict speech and outlaw encryption on the altar of "think of the children". That's not an EU-specific problem, but it is yet another vector by which bureaucrats and politicians try to restrict freedom for some nebulous security reason.
Similarly, I also don't like the labeling of the two factions as "progressive" and "conservative", since many politically liberal-minded readers might associate those terms with "good" and "bad". How about "cosmopolitan" vs. "nationalist" instead?
I share your frustration and anger with how we dealt with the Covid pandemic, and that experience certainly made me a lot more pessimistic about our ability to deal with any other impending disasters like AGI doom.
That said, the first part of your post feels to me like it's equating "we didn't fund preparation for this" with "we didn't learn from this". I agree with the latter, but there are tons of things our civilization could've done that hardly required any funding (in particular, removing regulatory barriers, e.g. to things like human challenge trials), and conversely, we can and do put arbitrarily high amounts of funding into various topics without actually doing much or any good on them.
And separately, to me there's a far more fundamental lesson from events like Covid than "Humanity learned nothing": namely that there is no such thing as a 'Humanity' that could learn from things and that no-one is in charge. (On LW, this meshes with concepts like Heroic Responsibility and HMPoR's Nihil Supernum.)
There are occasionally individuals and individual organisations that act with some kind of agency towards some particular purpose, and which sometimes accomplish good things (one I read about was VaccinateCA). But Humanity is not a hive mind, we're merely the aggregate of a few billion humans, and while we do certainly act with more purpose and direction than the particles in a gas, we don't ultimately act with that much more purpose. To me it looks more like we're at the mercy of faster and stronger processes: like the exponential growth of Covid infections, or the seeming inevitability of economic and technological growth.
I like this attempt to explain the EU. Though as a EU resident, I still don't feel like it particularly answers the questions one might ask about it. Questions like:
Also, I'm wary of sentences like "this instability gives the Union more wiggle room and the opportunity to try alternative approaches" which assign more agency and coherence to such an entity than seems warranted.
I found that event online, but not the claim that this was what motivated the shift in policy.
immigration is very good for economic growth
This is certainly true for US-style immigration, where immigrants are higher-skilled and likely to speak English. But surely the effect is comparatively worse for European-style immigration, where immigrants tend to be much poorer, often refugees from religious third-world countries, and have a low chance of speaking the native language. All of which complicates integration and increases anti-immigration sentiment.
That "final step" line is fun because one doesn't need any math background to understand it: