lucidian comments on Who are your favorite "hidden rationalists"? - Less Wrong

18 Post author: aarongertler 11 January 2015 06:26AM

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Comment author: lucidian 12 January 2015 06:20:20PM 9 points [-]

Highly recommend kazerad, for Scott-level insights about human behavior. Here's his analysis of 4chan's anonymous culture. Here's another insightful essay of his. And a post on memetics. And these aren't necessarily the best posts I've read by him, just the three I happened to find first.

By the way, I'm really averse to the label "hidden rationalists". It's like complimenting people by saying "secretly a member of our ingroup, but just doesn't know it yet". Which simultaneously presupposes the person would want to be a member of our ingroup, and also that all worthwhile people are secretly members of our ingroup and just don't know it yet.

Comment author: snarles 15 January 2015 09:03:09PM *  2 points [-]

Hopefully people here do not interpret "rationalists" as synonymous for "the LW ingroup." For one, you can be a rationalist without being a part of LW. And secondly, being a part of LW in no way certifies you as a rationalist, no matter how many internal "rationality tests" you subject yourself to.

Comment author: OrphanWilde 09 June 2016 08:20:09PM 0 points [-]

Highly recommend kazerad, for Scott-level insights about human behavior. Here's his analysis of 4chan's anonymous culture. Here's another insightful essay of his. And a post on memetics. And these aren't necessarily the best posts I've read by him, just the three I happened to find first.

I gave him/her a shot.

After five or six pages of angry ranting about Gamergate, which was four or five pages too many, I quit. I have no dog in that fight, and I find the notion of arguing about specific people's specific lives as if they were culturally or socially significant to be a really misguided enterprise. It's tribal superstimulus, and it is both addictive and socially self-destructive.