At first I did not understand your comment, so almost downvoted it. However, GPT helped me understand the point, and just want to post what I think is the core of idea to make it easier for others:
-If rationalists want to address the social and epistemic issues postmodernism highlights (power, context, narrative, knowledge construction), they may need a stripped-down, formal version of postmodernism—just as decision-theory formalizations reduce existentialism to operational decision rules, at a cost.
-One of postmodernism’s central concerns is making sense of power, coercion, and violence—especially sexual violence—at a level of psychological and social realism that allows actual prediction and explanation. Three Worlds Collide and HPMOR handled these themes in a way that anyone with an understanding of postmodern analysis of power was filtered out from the community.
I agree with the first point.
The second point might be technically off: A lot of people do not come via TWC and HPMOR, and more importantly, people can acquire the understanding of postmodernism later. It is true though that LW is very mistake-theory focused and selects out (most) conflict theorist. This does not mean there are no rat or rat adjacent conflict theorists. However there is some selection effect pushing out those who are "pro postmodernism" but not those who are against it, even though both are conflict theorists: as mainstream ideas are (were?) primarily influenced/supported by pro postmodernists, mistake theory rats argued against them due to these ideas not reflecting reality. These are in turn used as ammunition/safe place for conservative/anti postmodern conflict theorists. In my experience (via meetups/forums), most rats are indeed cooperative mistake theorists, irrespective of whether they are left (e.g. EA types) or right (e.g. libertarians), but the very few conflict theorists seemed to be of the conservative kind. This is also a possible explanation why Vance is the most politically successful rat adjacent figure.
I am myself thoroughly confused on this point (and for what its worth, a lot of our experience seem to overlap), but I can provide some competing hypotheses:
Another way of pointing to the same concept is how a chain as a whole is a resilient thing, but this is because each link has enough give to absorb strain. So a system is made durable not by its components being unbreakable, but by ensuring that individual parts can bend/fail/adapt. A society can hence be enduring only if its parts can be sacrificed for the whole. If a single specific part is worth you more than anything else, the system/society may be traded away for it.
(I think this thought is from Nassim Taleb, but I am paraphrasing a lot and cannot pinpoint the exact source, likely it is Antifragile)
Why? Do you mean that cis women use height only to filter out males that are shorter than them?
If so, I do not think that is the case. Statistics from dating apps (e.g. https://x.com/TheRabbitHole84/status/1684629709001490432/photo/1 ) and anecdotal evidence suggest over 50% of American women filter out man below 6 feet in dating apps/sites even though only 1% of American women are 6 feet or taller.
This and the different distribution of ratings (https://shorturl.at/EZJ7L ) implies that the requirements are not absolute, but relative: majority of women aim for a top subsection (probably top decile?) male partner. Hence if all American males magically become one feet taller, likely this filter would increase to ~7 feet.
Because "tall" is context dependent. In Laos the average male height is 163 cm (5"4). In the Netherlands it is 184 cm (6 ft). If your height is 180 cm, you are very tall in Laos, but below average in the Netherlands.
"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."
The concept of nation state is already guilty of this all. The smallest legislature is your city/town/village council, followed by county, and in some cases even a regional legislature-like body. A nation state already takes most of the legislative rights from these and dilutes your votes with millions of other citizens.
Before nation states were invented in the 19th century*, afaik most European laws were actually pretty much locally made and enforced by the feudal lord or town council of the territory. It is feels unfathomable today, but back than a lot of towns had basically the same level of sovereignty as countries do now.
*Technically it started eroding earlier with kings trying to centralize power, but in a lot of places still was mostly intact until incorporation into nation states.
How likely do you think this quality aspect to stay there long-term? Are you able to allocate more time to quality due to having been sped up on the "core" part of development, but expectations haven't been increased accordingly? When organizations realize they can push out more productivity, speed of development timeline might be forced to increase and quality may drop back to current levels.
Alternatively, do you think paying/preventing technical debt is quicker with LLM assistance than otherwise? I mean as relative cost compared to building out the specific features.
By the way, what IDE are you using with Claude?
I am pretty sure there are honest and well-meaning financial advisors too. E.g. there are valid and professional blogs/youtube channels (e.g. "The Plain Bagel"). There are some confounding factors though, in particular, pretty much anyone can call himself a financial advisor. Even if they do not know anything about finance and their only goal is to sell overpriced insurance policies.
"Essentially, the Culture must have value lock-in for the values of the Minds that were present at its founding."
Probably at least some value lock-in is somewhat required, unless you want the particular civilization to fracture. If it is allowed to create your own cult of space nazis intent on exterminating everyone else, your post scarcity utopia may not live long. Even "live and let live" is a value, and many people do not subscribe to it.
"But I think it is more likely that it was achieved by genetic changes, so that it’s safe to raise full Culture citizens in other cultures"
I agree, or at least that genetic change is also a strong contributor. However, if you think about sociopathy as a disability that in most cases makes one's and their fellows life worse, this genetic modification is a good thing.
"In other words, these superhuman minds have not solved alignment"
I think they did kinda solve it, as long as the other system is somewhat dumber than they are. Just as we are able to more-or-less align dumb systems, probably Minds can do that too. As long as they are not another mind or comparable level.
I think it really is a somewhat large disempowerment to humanity, but I see this as a better alternative. It might sound great to make all the important decisions, but in the end, humans are just too limited and we would likely fail and ruin ourselves. A Culture where humans make the final decision could not have won the Idiran War. If I am to play chess against Kasparov and my life depends on it, I would much rather let Stockfish make the decisions.
You could build an app that blocks scammers or a service that connects scammed people and pursues class action lawsuit to help them. You could also scam scammers themselves. You can recognize before other people that a company is a scam instead of the productive business it pretends to be and get rich by shorting it or gain fame and influence by proving it to the rest of the world.
I think the general message of the quote is that if one believes that they see the world much more accurately than (almost) anyone else, and yet they do not use this supposedly superior knowledge to make their own life better, they are actually not smart, but losers shifting blame.