I'm pretty sure people drifted away because of a more complex set of dynamics and incentives than "Said might comment on their posts" and I don't expect to see much of a reversal.
1People dropping in on an unfamiliar website can have very hair-trigger reactions on any sort of AI art. I heard someone say they felt like immediately writing off a (good) Substack post as fake content they should ignore because of the AI art illustration at the top of the post. And I think the illustration generator is a built-in option on Substack because I see constant AI illustrations on Substacks of people who are purely writers who as far as I can tell who aren't very interested in art or web design. But this person wasn't familiar with Substack, so their brain just went "random AI slop site, ignore".
Bad call. You don't exactly have an unlimited supply of people who have a solid handle on the formative LW mindset and principles from 15 years ago and who are still actively participating on the forums, and latter-day LessWrong doesn't have as much of a coherent and valuable identity to stand firmly on its own.
A key idea in the mindset that started LessWrong is that people can be wrong. Being wrong can exist as an abstract thing to begin with, it's not just an euphemism for poor political positioning. And people in positions of authority can be wrong. Kind, well-meaning, likable people can be wrong. People who have considerate friendly conversations that are a joy to moderate can be wrong. It's not always easy to figure out right and wrong, but it is possible, and it's not always socially harmonious to point it out loud, but it used to be considered virtuous still.
A forum that has principles in its culture is going to have cases where moderation is annoying around something or someone who doggedly sticks to those principles. It's then a decision for the moderators whether they want to work to keep the forum's principles alive or to have a slightly easier time moderating in the future.
How did you connect the objects you see as glowing with UV light specifically? Couldn't the glow be a hallucination or a perceptual rewiring like the persistent "breathing wallpaper" LSD users can start seeing, or some different physical property entirely? Can you see UV light emitted by machines that should be invisible like a person in the newscientist link claims he could after he got an artificial lens?
On leaving hospital, I decided I deserved a pint of bitter. Standing at the bar of my local pub, I noticed that their device for detecting counterfeit banknotes was emitting very bright bluish light. I mentioned this to the barman, who looked at me with a very quizzical expression but made no comment. I then realised that he couldn’t see the light: it was visible through my right eye alone.
Huh, apparently this is a thing. Retinas can see into UV, but UV light is normally filtered out by the lens.
Medical article about cataract surgeries and UV protection
No idea how you could start seeing UV by rewiring your brain if your eyeballs still have the original lenses though.
what do you mean by “psychic pain”?
As far as I've understood, a big idea with dukkha is that you have an intense desire for things to not be the way you perceive them to be, even though you might not have any concrete means of changing things, and the psychic pain is your constant awareness that reality isn't the way you want. "Regret" and "yearning" both seem like good words to describe types of this, though you probably want to imagine the more extreme versions of both, not just mild wistfulness.
If you've looked into predictive processing, this sounds familiar. The low-level story might be something like being stuck with persistent predictive errors where you can neither update your model or act to change your circumstances.
Presumably we have the capacity to suffer because it facilitated our survival somehow. How are you so sure you don’t need to hear the message suffering was sending you?
We could try to figure this out by teaching lots of people to get rid of suffering and then watching them to see if it fucks them up.
This seems more like referring to a completely different thing, which is not suffering, but calling it “suffering” for some reason.
Well, yes. It's a translation of a word that's used somewhat like technical vocabulary in meditation tradition. Article about the translations, Dukkha is a bummer.
Meditation isn't supposed to make the pain go away, it's supposed to train you to suffer less from the pain. So for meditation the idea would just be to make it a game of seeing if you can train to do it longer and better despite the averse feelings, and learn to detach from the feelings. But if your internal motivation is toast, that might be hard to make happen. You might try seeing an actual meditation teacher about this.
The point where you have started the task and then get bored and stop sounds like the key point here. Can you try focusing (maybe in the sense of Gendlin's focusing) on what goes on in detail with your mind, the task and how you're conceptualizing working on the task right now and in the future? My experience is that I can procrastinate on starting a task but when I do start it, if it's something like housework I've done it hundreds of times before and can go on autopilot.
I guess it's mostly housework-like autopilotable stuff for me now. After 20 years of trying I threw in the towel on getting myself to do stuff that's difficult, I don't really want to do, and not doing it won't literally get me killed, which pretty much crashed the whole studying-and-employment pipeline.
I'm having a hard time finding examples in that list that feel like they really match the idea. Most of them seem to be about people figuring out they're in a Matrix and then punching the Matrix Lord in the face. One example I remember which does go directly from realization to nonexistence is Orqwith in Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol. The idea that you can directly affect the physical universe, though not necessarily to the point of nonexistence, by messing with sufficiently complex calculations shows up pretty much as is in Greg Egan's Luminous.