That idea is a shield against reality, a mirror that makes everything behind it seem real, when it is just a distorted reflection of oneself.

This is a good point. Thanks for pointing it out to me. I've been having a crisis of faith on quite a few of those "red pill" ideas recently and I'm sure this will be useful next time I think about any of it.

That said, it seems to me that the standard cult attractor advice and conservation of expected evidence is sufficient to diffuse this effect. Do you think so, too? Or do you think we are not good enough at it such that we have to add extra caution? Or something else?

Basically what do you recommend for a well-sequenced LWer to do to entangle their beliefs with reality on these sorts of issues?

That is not my observation.

Huh. I wonder why. I don't really hang out anywhere like PUA forums or racist blogs or anything like that, so maybe I only encounter the good stuff that has enough sensibleness to it to filter into the rest of the internet? I guess then we would see the opposite on PUA forums; mostly average idiots who can't handle the is-ought distinction, and a few intelligent mainstreamers coming in and poking holes in people's tripe (I also might expect a few more troll raids from mainstreamers than there are troll raids from PUA to mainstreamer areas, though this could easily be confounded by other factors)

The article linked here is a good example of red-pill performance ranting.

That article is fucking gold. Thanks for the link. Now unfortunately that was not the point you were trying to make...

I did notice (since you sent me there looking for it) that it was callous and condescending and such (even for cracked). I also noticed that I don't usually notice that kind of stuff outside LW and other "intellectual areas". If you hadn't pointed it out, I would have just filtered the crusty crap and kept the good advice at it's core. I guess it's a habit I picked up from 4chan.

The whole thing could just as easily be expressed as platitudes of Deep Wisdom: "ask not what other people can do for you, but what you can do for them", "to give is to receive", etc., and in other places it would be.

I've got a better one. I summed up the whole thing with "Just Do It!". However, I don't think it's a good idea to dismiss an article because you can say the same thing without 99% of the article. Here's why:

I run into pieces of genuine good advice all the time, on LW and elsewhere, and I've noticed that I can't really learn or take advice from just a summary of it. Summaries of ideas works really well to precipitate concepts that you already have all the support for, and to convey dry facts, but not for advice and experience. See moral truth in fiction for an analogous argument. As an example, When I read truly a part of you, I was like "yeah that's cool", it wasn't until later that I figured the idea out for myself and realized "holy crap someone already told me this."

So with that said, even if you can boil down the essential idea of an article to a single sentence, it may still have substantial value as something that creates the experience required for you to actually get the idea. I think that cracked article works like this. It's a simple idea (not even 6 simple ideas), but all the added inflammatory crust create an experience the actually communicates the idea, instead of just saying it.

I can believe that that article is not written in a way that works for everyone, but I think that for some people (the target audience, for example), it's exactly what they need to hear, and anything nicer wouldn't get the point across.

I will throw in that the "come on aren't you man enough to hear the truth?" thing is toxic as a rhetorical device, as it can make otherwise worthless stuff more compelling. (because if you don't even read this then you are weak).