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Raelifin comments on Marketing Rationality - Less Wrong
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My main update from this discussion has been a strong positive update about Gleb Tsipursky's character. I've been generally impressed by his ability to stay positive even in the face of criticism, and to continue seeking feedback for improving his approaches.
I just wanted to interject a comment here as someone who is friends with Gleb in meatspace (we're both organizers of the local meetup). In my experience Gleb is kinda spooky in the way he actually updates his behavior and thoughts in response to information. Like, if he is genuinely convinced that the person who is criticizing him is doing so out of a desire to help make the world a more-sane place (a desire he shares) then he'll treat them like a friend instead of a foe. If he thinks that writing at a lower-level than most rationality content is currently written will help make the world a better place, he'll actually go and do it, even if it feels weird or unpleasant to him.
I'm probably biased in that he's my friend. He certainly struggles with it sometimes, and fails too. Critical scrutiny is important, and I'm really glad that Viliam made this thread, but it kinda breaks my heart that this spirit of actually taking ideas seriously has led to Gleb getting as much hate as it has. If he'd done the status-quo thing and stuck to approved-activities it would've been emotionally easier.
(And yes, Gleb, I know that we're not optimizing for warm-fuzzies. It still sucks sometimes.)
Anyway, I guess I just wanted to put in my two (biased) cents that Gleb's a really cool guy, and any appearance of a status-hungry manipulator is just because he's being agent-y towards good ends and willing to get his hands dirty along the way.
I'm not sure whether that's a good idea. Writing that feels weird to the author is also going to transmit that vibe to the audience. We don't want rationality to be associated with feeling weird and unpleasant.
/thinks about empty train tracks and open barn doors... :-/
Yeah, we're not optimizing for warm-fuzzies from Less Wrongers, but for a broad impact. Thanks for the sympathetic words, my friend.
This road of effective cognitive altruism is a hard one to travel, neither being really appreciated, at least at first, by the ones who we are trying to reach, nor by the ones among our peers whose ideas we are bringing to the masses.
Well, if my liver gets consumed daily by vultures, this is the road I've chosen. Glad to have you by my side, and hope this doesn't rebound on you much.
Yes. That's what the status quo is, and how it works. More, there's are multiple levels to the reasons for its existence, and the implicit suggestion that sticking to the status quo would be a tragedy neglect those reasons in favor of romantic notions of fixing the world.
Call me a helpless romantic, but LessWrong is supposed to have a better status quo.
Yeah, totally agreed. The point of LessWrong, to me at least, is to improve the status quo, and keep improving.
Deep wisdom.
I can't speak for other people, of course, but he never looked much like a manipulator. He looks like a guy who has no clue. He doesn't understand marketing (or propaganda), the fine-tuned practice of manipulating people's minds for fun and profit. He decided he needs to go downmarket to save the souls drowning in ignorance, but all he succeeded in doing -- and it's actually quite impressive, I don't think I'm capable of it -- is learning to write texts which cause visceral disgust.
Notice the terms in which people speak of his attempts. It's not "has a lot of rough edges", it's slime and spiders in human skin and "painful" and all that. Gleb's writing does reach System I, but the effect has the wrong sign.
Ah, perhaps I misunderstood the negative perception. It sounds like you see him as incompetent, and since he's working with a subject that you care about that registers as disgusting?
I can understand cringing at the content. Some of it registers that way to me, too. I think Gleb's admitted that he's still working to improve. I won't bother copy-pasting the argument that's been made elsewhere on the thread that the target audience has different tastes. It may be the case that InIn's content is garbage.
I guess I just wanted to step in and second jsteinhardt's comment that Gleb is a very growth-oriented and positive, regardless of whether his writing is good enough.