I'd be surprised if Yudkowsky has read Sartre. But it's a natural thing to do. Harry Potter is (unfortunately) the closest thing we have to a national epic we have these days... well, an Anglosphere epic, but you get the idea.

If this is the sort of thing you're interested in, you might want to read Benedict Anderson's book Imagined Communities.

I have taken the survey.

I think this discussion is somewhat confused by the elision of the difference between 'autodidact' and 'lone wolf'. 'Autodidact', in internet circles, is generally used to mean 'anyone who learns things primarily outside a formalized educational environment'; it's possible to be an autodidact while still being heavily engaged with communities and taking learning things as a social endeavor and so on, and in fact Eliezer was active in communities related to LW's subject matter for a long time before he started LW. By the same token, one of the main things I took from reading Ben Franklin's autobiography was that, despite having little formal schooling and being solely credited for many of his innovations, he didn't actually do it alone. I doubt he would've been even a tenth as successful as he was without something like his Junto.

Some people will get more out of formal education than others, although getting things out of formal education is itself a skill that can be learned. (It seems to require an ability to buy into institutions on an emotional level that many of us lack. I saw college as an obnoxious necessity rather than a set of opportunities, and as a result got much less out of it than I could have. This seems to be a common mistake.) But I just don't think it's possible to become a spectacular writer, or even a middling one, as a lone wolf. If nothing else, you need feedback from a community in order to improve. Look at lone-wolf outsider art -- it's frequently unusual, but how much of it is good?

When you ask someone if they would like a debate platform and describe all the features and content it'll have, they go: "Hell yeah I'd love that!" And it took me a while to realize that what they are imagining is someone else writing all the content and doing all the heavy lifting. Then they would come along, read some of it, and may be leave a comment or two. And basically everyone is like that: they want it, but they are not willing to put in the work. And I don't blame them, because I'm not willing to put in the work (of writing) either. There are just a handful of people who are.

This is what incentive structures are for. There are quite a few people who have strong incentives to publish high-quality writing, you know...

An open-access journal for debates seems like it ought to be possible, although it'd have to actively solicit contributions (an encyclopedia for debates?) and reward them with academic status, which means you'd need solid academic backing.

Yes, so you send everyone out and hide most of the beds when the inspectors come around.

This is probably not desirable for communities with children, but it's common for co-ops in places with those laws.

It's a coastal, urban American custom. To a first approximation, it's illegal to build in coastal cities and most of the land in them is uninhabitable because crime.

Would be interested if I lived in a place amenable to this. Seconding dropspindle's recommendation of Appalachia, since that's where I'm already planning to move if I can get a remote job.

It may be worth looking to see whether there are any large, relatively inexpensive houses near major cities that could be converted. There are a lot of McMansion developments in the suburbs north of DC that have never looked particularly inhabited.

Yes, I know. I bet Islamists don't think highly of it either.

If Nazis got punched all the time, they would be perceived as weak and nobody would join them.

Two thousand years ago, some guy in the Roman Empire got nailed to a piece of wood and left to die. How did that turn out?

I guess the second part is more important, because the first part is mostly a strawman.

Not in my experience. It may seem like it now, but that's because the postrationalists won the argument.