By "planting flags" on various potentially important and/or influential ideas (e.g., cryptocurrency, UDT, human safety problems), I seem to have done well for myself in terms of maximizing the chances of gaining a place in the history of ideas. Unfortunately, I've recently come to dread more than welcome the attention of future historians. Be careful what you wish for, I guess.
Free speech norms can only last if "fight hate speech with more speech" is actually an effective way to fight hate speech (and other kinds of harmful speech). Rather than being some kind of human universal constant, that's actually only true in special circumstances when certain social and technological conditions come together in a perfect storm. That confluence of conditions has now gone away, due in part to technological change, which is why the most recent free speech era in Western civilization is rapidly drawing to an end. Unfortunately, its social scientists failed to appreciate the precious rare opportunity for what it was, and didn't use it to make enough progress on important social scientific questions that will become taboo (or already has become taboo) once again to talk about.
This ended up being my highest-karma post, which I wasn't expecting, especially as it hasn't been promoted out of "personal blog" and therefore isn't as visible as many of my other posts. (To be fair "The Nature of Offense" would probably have a higher karma if it was posted today, as each vote only had one point back then.) Curious what people liked about it, or upvoted it for.
There's a time-sensitive trading opportunity (probably lasting a few days), i.e., to short HTZ because it's experiencing an irrational spike in prices. See https://seekingalpha.com/article/4379637-over-1-billion-hertz-shares-traded-on-friday-because-of-bankruptcy-court-filings for details. Please only do this if you know what you're doing though, for example you understand that HTZ could spike up even more and the consequences of that if it were to happen and how to hedge against it. Also I'm not an investment advisor and this is not investment advice.
Lessons I draw from this history:
Speaking of parents obsessed with getting their kids into an elite university, here's an amazing exposé about a corner of that world that I had little idea existed: The Mad, Mad World of Niche Sports Among Ivy League–Obsessed Parents, Where the desperation of late-stage meritocracy is so strong, you can smell it
Another detail: My grandmother planed to join the Communist Revolution together with two of her classmates, who made it farther than she did. One made it all the way to Communist controlled territory (Yan'an) and later became a high official in the new government. She ended up going to prison in one of the subsequent political movements. Another one almost made it before being stopped by Nationalist authorities, who forced her to write a confession and repentance before releasing her back to her family. That ended up being dug up during the Cultural Revolution and got her branded as a traitor to Communism.
Upvoted for the important consideration, but your own brain is a source of errors for which it's hard to decorrelate, so is it really worse (or worse enough to justify the additional costs of the alternative) to just trust Zvi instead of your own judgement/integration of diverse sources?
ETA: Oh, I do read the comments here so that helps to catch Zvi's errors, if any.
My grandparents on both sides of my family seriously considered leaving China (to the point of making concrete preparations), but didn't because things didn't seem that bad, until it was finally too late.
You mention "defenses will improve" a few times. Can you go into more detail about this? What kind of defenses do you have in mind? I keep thinking that in the long run, the only defenses are either to solve meta-philosophy so our AIs can distinguish between correct arguments and merely persuasive ones and filter out the latter for us (and for themselves), or go into an info bubble with trusted AIs and humans and block off any communications from the outside. But maybe I'm not being imaginative enough.