DeVliegendeHollander comments on How has lesswrong changed your life? - Less Wrong

15 Post author: mstevens 31 March 2015 10:12PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 02 April 2015 11:18:08AM *  4 points [-]

The weirdest aspect is that the general mood is more useful to me than the list of methods. I constantly feel like given encouragement to have the courage to not repeat tribal-membership-signalling truths but try to find out real ones. I constantly feel like being encouraged to have the courage to not think like "I must say X because Y people already dislike me and I need the support of X people" but "come out of the closet" as an independent thinker without allegiances.

A very good place to practice is https://www.reddit.com/r/purplepilldebate/ the whole color coding is encouraging people to don a tribal jersey and say things like "I as a bluepiller think..." "you redpiller guys think that..." injecting a "no-pill" attitude into this takes quite some courage, is useful for exercising and growing this kind of courage-muscle, and with LW I feel I have a non-tribe tribe at my back who understands what I am trying to do and useful to lean back to when I feel like redpillers think I am bluepill, bluepillers think I am redpill and both distrust me. (I am not using this nickname there.)

And another useful thing is that I feel I am being encouraged to not simply adopt a lofty "I am above both" attitude which is very, very tempting but fruitless and narcissistically smug, as feeling superior to mud-wrestling tribes is a textbook classy intellectual move but totally vacuous, rather I feel encouraged to go down into the mud, and fish truths out of it, some red, some blue.