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Vaniver comments on Lesswrong, Effective Altruism Forum and Slate Star Codex: Harm Reduction - Less Wrong
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Comments (150)
Not that they aren't here, but which ones are you talking about? What's a weird fixation to some might be an attractor for others, and visa-versa.
In terms of weird fixations, there are quite a few strange things that the LW community seems to have as part of its identity - polyamory and cryonics are perhaps the best examples of things that seem to have little to do with rationality but are widely accepted as norms here.
If you think rationality leads you to poly or to cryo, I'm fine with that, but I'm not fine with it becoming such a point of fixation or an element of group identity.
For that matter, I think atheism falls into the same category. Religion is basically politics, and politics is the mind-killer, but people here love to score cheap points by criticizing religion. The fact that things like the "secular solstice" have become part of rationalist community norms and identity is indicative of serious errors IMO.
For me, one of the most appealing things about EA (as opposed to rationalist) identity is that it's not wrapped up in all this unnecessary weird stuff.
So, maybe this is just my view of things, but I think a big part of this conversation is whether you're outside looking in or inside looking out.
For example, I'm neither poly nor signed up for cryo, but I'm open to both of those things, and I've thought them through and have a balanced sense of what facts about the world would have to change for my identification / recommendations to have to change. In a place where most people have seriously considered the issue, that gets me no weird looks.
But saying "I'm open to cryo" to an audience of stereotypical skeptics comes across as an admission of kookery, and so that's the relevant piece about LW they notice: not "they don't scoff at ideas" but "they believe in cryonics more than normal."
Is that true? I mostly don't notice people scoring cheap points by criticizing religion; I mostly notice them ignoring religion.
Mmm. I would say that "religion is basically community"--they're the people you spend a lot of time with, they're the people you have a shared history / myth base with, they're people you can trust more than normal. And any community, as it becomes more sophisticated, basically becomes a 'religion.' The Secular Solstice is part of making a genuine sophisticated rationalist community--i.e., a rationalist religion, of the "brownies and babysitting" variety rather than the "guru sex cult" variety.
I'm on the inside and I think we should get rid of these things for the sake of both insiders and outsiders.
See for instance Raising the Sanity Waterline, a post which raises very important points but is so unnecessarily mean-spirited towards religion that I can't particularly show it to many people. As Eliezer writes elsewhere: