drethelin comments on [LINK] Why I'm not on the Rationalist Masterlist - Less Wrong Discussion
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I like Less Wrong-- there are courtesy rules here which keep it from going wrong in ways which are common in SJ circles. People get credit for learning rather than being expected to get everything right, and it's at least somewhat unusual to attack people for having bad motivations.
This being said, there are squicky features here, and I'm not just talking about claims that women are different from men-- oddly enough, it generally (always?) seems to be to women's disadvantage, even though there's some evidence that women are more trustworthy at running banks and investment funds.
I tolerate posts like this, but LW would seem like a friendlier place (to me) and possibly even be more rational if articles about gender issues would take utility for men and women equally seriously.
Reactionaries had something of a home here-- less so after the formation of More Right, I think. I haven't seen evidence of anything especially extreme on the egalitarian side, though there might be as good a rationalist case to be made for thorough reparations. Now that I think about it, I haven't even seen a case made for strong economic support for intelligent poor children.
Trolley problems..... I keep getting an impression that the point is that people don't have enough inhibitions against killing for the greater good. (By the way, how easy do you think it would be to move an unwilling person who weighs a good bit more than you do?)
And torture seems to be taken too lightly. It's a real world problem, not just a token to be passed around in arguments.
What the original post made me realize is that what I consider most certain to be valuable at LW is the instrumental rationality material, and it would be a good thing for there to also be an online site for instrumental rationality without the "let's do low-empathy discussions to prove how rational we are" angle.
I think a lot of the focus on trolley problems is they're sort of a platonic model of making hard decisions about tradeoffs, with the idea being that if you can convince people it's right to make tradeoffs in the most obvious situation, they should consider the tradeoffs in much more complicated policy decisions also. EG people who propose Basic Income want people to be willing to trade "some of your money" for "greater happiness for many people". This is also what a lot of Effective Altruism movement is based on, making GOOD tradeoffs rather than bad ones.