This article is a deliberate meta-troll. To be successful I need your trolling cooperation. Now hear me out.
In The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You Eliezer talks about asognostics, who have one of their arm paralyzed, and what's most interesting are in absolute denial of this - in spite of overwhelming evidence that their arm is paralyzed they will just come with new and new rationalizations proving it's not.
Doesn't it sound like someone else we know? Yes, religious people! In spite of heaps of empirical evidence against existence of their particular flavour of the supernatural, internal inconsistency of their beliefs, and perfectly plausible alternative explanations being well known, something between 90% and 98% of humans believe in the supernatural world, and is in a state of absolute denial not too dissimilar to one of asognostics. Perhaps as many as billions of people in history have even been willing to die for their absurd beliefs.
We are mostly atheists here - we happen not to share this particular delusion. But please consider an outside view for a moment - how likely is it that unlike almost everyone else we don't have any other such delusions, for which we're in absolute denial of truth in spite of mounting heaps of evidence?
If the delusion is of the kind that all of us share it, we won't be able to find it without building an AI. We might have some of those - it's not too unlikely as we're a small and self-selected group.
What I want you to do is try to trigger absolute denial macro in your fellow rationalists! Is there anything that you consider proven beyond any possibility of doubt by both empirical evidence and pure logic, and yet saying it triggers automatic stream of rationalizations in other people? Yes, I pretty much ask you to troll, but it's a good kind of trolling, and I cannot think of any other way to find our delusions.
That making lots of money and becoming socially influential and powerful in the real world has a vast chance of massively increasing the extent of achievement of any goal that people here have - such as making scientific discoveries, saving the world or living forever, or a myriad of other goals that money is just really effective at achieving.
Yet, most people here are not millionaires, and are not actively taking extreme steps to change this because ultimately, they have weak personalities or fall into the "beta male" category of weak, nerdy men who are irrationally frightened of going out into the real world and standing up for themselves, and they don't have the requisite greedy, self-interested personality to motivate themselves to put in the necessary work. One of the main contributors to this is that most people here don't value social status enough and (especially the men) don't value having sex with extremely attractive women that money and status would get them. It also probably helps to feel quite a lot of animosity towards the rest of the society, to have some sense of needing to "show them you were right" by becoming rich and famous, or to have a family reputation that needs to be upheld or something. Essentially, too much Linux forums, not enough playboy is screwing you all over. A summary of this position:
Furthermore, there are many people who are probably already aware of this to some extent, and THEY ARE NOT DOING ANYTHING ABOUT IT
I'm not convinced that financial success actually increases your success with women, although I'd love it if that were true. I suspect that appearance and behavior play a bigger role as soon as you have an apartment, a car, and a cell phone.