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I rarely bother to comment on this site but this is important meta information. Many outsider groups and rationalists in particular seem to dissolve the moment their exclusion from standard social systems is removed. The most dumbed down example I have, and I specifically desire to post as low brow and example as possible, is the episode of Malcom In The Middle titled "Morp." Its prom backwards in case you missed that. The outsider group starts an anti-prom where they do everything ironically, and amusingly have all the same status bullshit problems over who is in charge or what should even be done as the normal kids prom. Then when some random dumb popular girls come down, feel upper class girl pity, and invite them to real prom everyone but Malcolm goes.
Less Wrong and its specific section of the rationalist community has approached this same singularity. It was all about getting enough like-minded and conveniently located people to form your own samesy, dull, cookie cutter clique just like normal people. Alicorn is a prime example of posts that expose this issue, although that whole cuddle pile bullshit is a more general example.
Much like say Atheism+, the OB/LW community has exploded into a million uncoordinated fragments merely seeking to satisfy their standard social needs. Meanwhile each of these shards has the same number of useless, weird, counterproductive group beliefs as mainstream Christians. And they've accomplished almost nothing except maybe funding the useless MIRI, if one even considers that an accomplishment. EA people even came and said MIRI doesn't qualify for GiveWell.
Indeed I feel my comparison to A+ is quite apt. So much bullshit spewed about improving stuff, raising the sanity waterline vs inclusive atheism but each group did essentially the opposite of their goal.
As per my title and associated duties I here mark the collapse of "internet rationalists" as a cohesive, viable, or at all productive group. Scott has a popular blog, Elie has a full time job wasting his life but gets paid good money, and Alicorn can now throw "interesting" "dinner parties." Also innumerable Tumblr related bullshit storms. Well, some movements accomplished less.
Adieu.
This is undiplomatically expressed but may contain an important seed of useful information for anyone who would like to recentralize rationalism: meeting people's normal, boring, apey social needs is important for retention, especially at scale when it seems more tempting to split off with your favorite small percentage of the group and not put in the effort with the rest. If you want people to post on Less Wrong, what's in it for them, anymore?
(I understand the desire to scare-quote the interestingness of my dinner parties but they are, in fact, parties at which dinner is served, in the most literal possible sense.)
Indeed. Especially if the point of LW is to socialize newcomers to rationality, well, socializing newcomers is hard and not particularly glamorous work, and we're (to some extent) selecting for people who don't want to be socialized!
That's clearly not true. Alicorn again is a perfect of example of someone who clearly wanted to be socialized. I mean... dinner parties. Yes, I cannot get over the whole dinner party thing, get over it.
More on point though, centralization is the ultimate bug bear of the left/progressive/radicals/w.e. Look at the internecine wars of feminism or socialism or atheism. Furthermore everyone wants to address their local personal issues first and also divides who is allowed to interfere in problems among demographic or identity lines.
The success of a revolutionary movement, various religions being examples, requires both that it be more correct than what came before and that it be either equally or more satisfying. One should be careful though of copying the old systems too closely. Ethical Humanist solstice parties? Good lord what a terrible idea.
And notice how she's mostly absent on LW preferring instead to plan and arrange her dinner parties... :-P
If you say so, I barely come on here much. Today is the most active I've been in months.
What does this mean? I guess you mean "(some subset of) Alicorn's posts" (though I can't help thinking the way you've phrased it is suggestive of some kind of personal animosity), but which ones and what exactly do you think is wrong with them?