Comment under this if interested :)

Thinking of starting an exobrain working group to focus on augmenting individual agency/intelligence with AI or even just software systems.

Interest areas:

• information/knowledge acquisition (better deep research, feed reader/information diet optimization, augmented reading/research workbench)
• augmented thinking (e.g. RoamResearch with AI justifier, counter-argument-producer, implicit assumption surfacer)
• personal behavioral analysis (activities tracking/insights, tracking ideas/tasks/projects, augmented life goals reflection)
• augmented agency (delegating tasks to AI agents, having AI make lower-entropy decisions when doing computer tasks)

I pointed out that this doesn’t make much sense when we are talking about a pair of agents from a federal agency with law enforcement powers; why would they pose as inspectors from a different agency, when they could just invoke their own authority? Claude immediately backtracked and explained that it had been too “caught up in classic ‘undercover’ tropes”.

This won't impact any major point of yours but a nit for this reasoning: law enforcement do sometimes pose as other law enforcement agencies to secure cooperation; a recent example in the US is ICE posing as local police.

I'm slowly working on a frontpage generally arguing that Critical Theory has value.

Hey I'm open if you want to co-write something!

I agree with your assessment that concepts within fields like Critical Theory was not discussed in the aspiring-rationalist context enough. I think most aspiring rationalists would be interested in these alternative maps, if it wasn't presented as totally disconnected to our original maps.

Respectfully disagree: I don't think enforcing something like this help towards facilitating personal blogposts on lesswrong. I think a better alternative is to create some formal styling guide and implement a formatter that strips emojis etc from the title string when posts are promoted to frontpage (or even in the "recent posts" list if you guys want that); otherwise I don't think limiting editorial choices by the author helps the case of building community blogs.

Of course it should be possible to invite LessWrong readers to debate politics outside the website, using any rules you choose.

This is a good point - or like how the SSC substack has a more political comment section for people who want to debate politics within the aspiring rationalist community.

Isn't there something to be said for recognising members of other tribes and not trying to convert or kill them? 

Yeah, I mean, what else can we do? I don't think a lot of people want to convert or eliminate people from other tribes, I'm more talking about standalone arguments here: how can we give the maximum benefit of doubt to arguments from (presumably) people from the other tribe? 

However, to be honest, I don't think we should be trying to settle debates on this side

Wholeheartedly agree. For one I don't think debates among major political camps now can be "settled" - maybe people here tends to be more open and we can settle some debate to some extent, I don't think there's more values other than practicing rationality skills.

especially since being apolitical is increasingly being slammed as political in and of itself.

I happen to be one of those people who believe this is true - but that doesn't mean we can't be apolitical anywhere: we do have the entirety of the internet at our disposal, just go to Twitter for these stuff or something. (I'm also willing to have my mind changed on this one)

I love the dashboard idea!

I think the energy metric can give us good intuition visualization-wise, since it kind of is less arbitrary and many parts of consumption/progress can be seen as components of overall energy use. 

If I'd like to add something to the graph I'd say include some additional breakdowns of the energy metric: 1) we need to figure out how to measure efficiency and represent it somehow: this is entirely in the domain of epistemic uncertainty, cause massive shifts in terms of centralization/geopolitics in the last couple decades has brought significant changes that reflected by energy usage; 2) we can add a personal/industrial division to diagnose which parts are responsible; 3) in terms of sustainability we can add something like a renewable/non-renewable breakdown to see where we're going.

I think it will also be useful from a "progress measuring" perspective to see which percents of energy are used in transportation; manufacturing; service; computing etc, in addition to other parts of the dashboard you outlined.