This feels like an important post I'm going to reread several times over the coming weeks to make sure I've ingested it fully.

I don't know a lot about church planters, but I do know a lot about startup founders and I overwhelmingly associate higher narcissism with longer hours and harder work.

There definitely is a category of lifestyle entrepreneur who wants to work as little as possible and is just hanging out for the image, but those people tend to be relatively non-neurotic social climbers who want to have a good time.

The real hardcore narcissists tend towards maximalism and masochism in their startups. They walk the halls whipping themselves so that others in the startup economy may admire how committed they are to the mission. Every project is as intense as they are, and must be executed as if its outcome has lasting consequences for the human race. 

This kind of intensity has great ergonomics for narcissism - the pain and difficulty in conjunction with a great and important mission feeds the self-image of greatness in a way that a great and important mission alone does not.

When I think about semantically central "myths" seen through a western lens, I'm guessing you're meaning religious stories from the Romans, Greeks, or an oral nativist tradition. Maybe instead of thinking about centrally pedagogic things that also happen to be myths it would be more helpful to think about centrally mythical things that might also happen to be pedagogic.

I'm not a religious scholar, but my perception is that the thing that those three types of story have in common is that they often centre on applying a cognitive model to natural phenomena. Sacrificing a goat to invite a happy fortune is a case of overfitting a dubious cognitive model onto reality.

Perhaps the perennial lesson underpinning say, Poseidon overthrowing the titans in his rise to power, is that the appropriate preparatory heuristic when approaching something as mysterious and dangerous as the ocean is to treat it as though it has hostile intent - to take fewer risks and to prepare for adversity as though it were controlled by a force that is much more familiar than tidal dynamics and meteorological patterns - that of the thought process of an abusive tyrant. 

Perhaps Athena cursed Medusa because there are utile reasons why celibacy is important to the orderly relationship between religion and the rest of society. 

What I would caution however is that when we're backfilling justifications why certain narratives exist the way they do, it's possible to backfill a wide range of frames. These ideas are definitely not the most popular explanations. 

Ideas and stories survive on account of evolutionary pressure, not on account of utilitarianism or any inherent wisdom. Most knowledge is eventually proven wrong. Sacrificing goats because you overfitted the mind model onto a random phenomenon is a cost of doing business.

Something I'm less familiar with that I think would be worth your further investigation is oral storytelling traditions in tribal cultures. The written word allows various people to write all sorts of things with less evolutionary pressure about what survives. Oral traditions are limited to memory, and so I would imagine pedagogic stories holding greater weight.

Wow that was a fascinating read, thank you for linking that. Most interesting to me was the separation of self-perfectionism from social perfectionism as a clinical concern. I've never felt social perfectionism, and ironically almost all of the trouble I got myself into as a child was from actively rebelling against social expectations. I'm glad to hear that this is also considered different in the literature.

I don't really know, the best I can offer is sort of vaguely gesturing at LessWrong's moderation vector and pointing in a direction.

LW's rules go for a very soft, very subjective approach to definitions and rule enforcement. In essence, anything the moderators feel is against the LW ethos is against the rules here. That's the right approach to take in an environment where the biggest threat to good content is bad content. Hacker News also takes this approach and it works well - it keeps HN protected against non-hackers.

ChangeMyView is somewhat under threat of bad content - if too many people post on a soapbox, then productive commenters will lose hope and leave the subreddit. However it's also under threat of loss of buy-in - people with non-mainstream views, or those that would be likely to attract backlash elsewhere need to feel that the space is safe for them to explore.

When optimising for buy-in, strictness and clarity is desirable. We had roughly consistent standards in terms of numbers of violations, to earn a ban, and consistently escalating bans (3 days, 30 days, permanent) in line with behavioural infractions. When there were issues, buy-in seemed present that we were at least consistent (even if the things we were consistent to weren't optimal). That consistency provided a plausible alternative to the motive uncertainty created by subjective enforcement - for example, the admins told us we were fine to continue hosting discussions regarding gender and race that were being cracked down on elsewhere on Reddit. 

Right now, I think LW is doing a good job of defending against bad content. I think what would make LW stronger is a semi-constitutional backbone to fall against in times of unrest. Kind of like how the 5th pillar of Wikipedia is to ignore all rules, yet policy is still the essential basis of editing discussions.

I would like to see, in the case of commenting guidelines, clearer definitions of what excess looks like. I think the subjective approach is fine for posts for now.

I spent several years moderating r/changemyview on Reddit which also has this rule. Having removed at least hundreds of comments that break it, I think the worst thing about it is that it rewards aloofness and punishes sincerity. That's acceptable to trade off to prevent the rise of very sincere flame wars, but it elevates people pretending to be wise at the expense of those with more experience who likely have more deeply held but also informed opinions about the subject matter. This was easily the most common moderation frustration expressed by users.

I think the important value here is not the assets changing hands as part of the exchange, but rather the value each party stands to gain from the exchange. Both parties are aligned that shaking hands on the current terms is acceptable to them, but they will both lie about that fact if they think it helps them move towards C or D. 

Or to put it another way, in your frame I don't think any kind of collaboration can ever be in anyone's interests unless you are aligned in Every Single Thing.

If I save a drowning person, in a mercenary way it is preferable to them that I not only save them but also give them my wallet. Therefore my saving them was not a product of aligned interests (desire to not drown + desire to help others) since the poor fellow must now continue to pay off his credit card debt when his preference is to not do that.

For me, B > A > D > C, and for the drowning man,  A > B > C > D (Here A = rescue + give wallet, B = rescue, no wallet, C = no rescue, throw wallet into water, D = walk away)

What matters in the drowning relationship (and the reason for our alignment) is B > C. Whether or not I give him my wallet is an independent variable from whether I save him and the resulting alignment should be considered separately.

In your example, I'm focusing on the alignment of A and B. Both parties will be dishonest about their views on A and B if they think it gets them closer to alignment on C and D. That's the insincerity.

I feel like this post just slapped me in the face violently with a wet fish. I'm still reeling from the impact and trying to figure out how I feel about it.