You are reading this post on LessWrong. If you're like most of my rationalist friends, you believe that LessWrong's culture of decoupled and straightforward communication and focus on timeless issues of rationality and world-optimization has created a community of like-minded people that you enjoy interacting with and learn a lot from. Once in a while, I tell my LessWrong friends that they should get on Twitter, that the culture of memes and half-joking deeply contextualized and obscure banter on the latest breaking news and culture war topics has also created a wonderful community of like-minded people you can learn a lot from. My rationalist friends are horrified at the suggestion.

They're almost as horrified as people who've tweeted for years about sex and astrology and pineal glands are to discover that half their mutuals are actually LessWrongers.

So, what the hell is going on? Is rationalist twitter a thing and if so, why? Are postrats just rats who post? And am I writing this off the cuff with little editing because that faithfully communicates my Twitter style or because it's Goodheart week? Read on to find out!

Twitter Counterculture

The problems with Twitter are obvious on the surface:

It mostly consists of partisans of competing culture war tribes fighting over polarizing object-level topics with no desire or ability to go meta.
No matter how clearly you express yourself, people will misunderstand it in the least charitable way.
There's no way to enforce barriers to entry, any rando can comment on anything.
But well-known journalists and other bluechecks are even worse, using Twitter either to parrot the same coordinated narrative or to viciously settle personal scores.
The nuggets of vital breaking info and true deep insight are buried under a torrent of bullshit.
Anonymity + audience + zero personal stake in relationships = people being total fuckwads.

But also Twitter is the place where Elon Musk challenges Vladimir Putin to hand to hand combat for the future of Ukraine. People don't want to miss out on that.

To get the best parts of Twitter without the worst, you'd want to join as part of a community with norms that defuse and ameliorate Twitter's worst tendencies. A community where:

Object-level pontificating is looked-down upon, and partisanship is outright scorned.
Illegibility to outsiders is prized, so that only those who

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