AI safety posts generally go over my head, although the last one I read seemed fantastically important and accessible.
AI-safety posts are probably the most valuable posts here, even if they crowd out other posts (both posts I think are valuable and posts I think are, at best, chaff).
If there were one dial I’d want to experiment with turning on LW it would be writing quality, in the direction of more of it.
I'd like to highlight this. In general, I think fewer things should be promoted to the front page.
[edit, several days later]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SiPX84DAeNKGZEfr5/do-websites-and-apps-actually-generally-get-worse-after is a prime example. This has nothing to do with rationality or AI alignment. This is the sort of off-topic chatter that belongs somewhere else on the Internet.
I'd like to like this more but I don't have a clear idea of when to up one, up the other, down one, down the other, or down one and up the other.
Would you rather live in a society that valued “niceness, community and civilization”, or one that valued “meanness, community and civilization”? I don’t think it’s a tough choice.
This is an awful straw man. Compare instead:
Having seen what "niceness" entails, I'll opt for (2), which doesn't prioritize niceness or anti-niceness, and is niceness-agnostic.
That’s a lot of readers to throw away
Depends on how popular you are. Even if you make the highly questionable assumption that browser statistics collected on sites like cnn.com and such are representative of the readership of jefftk.com, if jefftk.com has hundreds of readers, he's still doing a lot of work for a group that can only manage to claim that there are "dozens of us", and in any case really ought to upgrade to a proper browser (and in probably most cases, OS) anyway, for security reasons.
Daring Fireball, a site you've probably heard of, seems to do OK with only browser-supplied fonts:
font-family: Verdana, system-ui, Helvetica, sans-serif;
Also, jefftk said "requiring". Sure, he could have a site that uses Inter, either loaded from his own site or from a CDN like Google Fonts, but if Inter doesn't load (mostly likely because of user preference), then everything will be fine.
If TeX fonts don't load…then what happens? Does the user see raw TeX, or nothing at all, or…?
I’m someone who was and remains a full supporter of BLM’s policy proposals
BLM's policy proposals have changed since you wrote that. Currently, they're at https://impact.blacklivesmatter.com/policy/. They are:
(emphasis added)
Keep clicking on "Next Pillar" at the top right of the page; eventually they get around to bragging about how they've countered Amazon's attempts to keep a union from forming.
I'm not really a libertarian any more, but is this close enough to your beliefs that you still think the organization is worth supporting? Or have you considered voicing support for some other organization that has enough cachet in your social circle to ensure that you don't spend weekend nights alone?
Also pertinent is exploring why I felt so attached to something I knew I couldn’t logically defend, and the simple explanation is that it was cool. Being a libertarian can be super socially isolating, especially if you live only in places overwhelmingly surrounded by leftists like I do.
20 years ago or so, Eliezer Yudkowsky said that the biggest obstacle to raising the sanity waterline was religion. This seemed very reasonable at the time.
I'm unconvinced that's still true in the West. What seems the larger barrier now are the things people say and believe that ensure they'll keep getting invited to dinner parties.
I’m likely overlooking other factors of course, and there’s the ever-present, gnawing worry that haunts me, whispering that I might be fundamentally mistaken about something else. Maybe I am, but hopefully I’ll be better equipped to unearth it.
You've identified a very powerful bias. If you're looking for easy wins to root out incorrect beliefs, have you considered first looking at all the ones that would dry up your dating pool if you stopped believing in them and told other people in your social circle about how you changed your mind?
A key problem to loss of LBM is that you’re either losing bone density (a terrible thing) or muscle (a pretty damn bad thing).
Could also be skin. Losing skin if you're losing fat is a good thing, I'd think, since you don't want to weigh 200 pounds yet still have all the skin you had when you were 300 pounds.
Has any work been done to see where the LBM has been coming from?
I've seen mules in the wild in internet forums (which, admittedly is outside the scope of your post). They usually present as ardent defenders of the faith, repeating well-known talking points…and never updating, ever.