As an aside; the use of "Org" (i.e. Rationality Org) seems really unusual and immediately makes me think of Scientology (Sea Org); am I unusual in having this reaction?

So, I have a few questions:

1. What are the most egregious examples of SI's arrogance?

Since you explicitly ask a question phrased thus, I feel obligated to mention that last April I witnessed a certain email incident that I thought was somewhat extremely bad in some ways.

I do believe that lessons have been learned since then, though. Probably there's no need to bring the matter up again, and I only mention it since according to my ethics it's the required thing to do when asked such an explicit question as above.

(Some readers may wonder why I'm not providing details here. That's because after some thought, I for my part decided against making the incident public, since I expect it might subsequently get misrepresented to look worse than what's fair. (There might be value in showing records of the incident to new SIAI employees as an example of how not to do things, though.))

Hmm, I for one don't share the negative reactions that several other commenters seem to feel now. I felt very glad upon reading this "leveling up" post.

I was especially thinking that this is a very cool first LW article for people to bump into (and therefore shared this on some social networks). In this vein, I very much like the criticized-by-some feature that every other word is a link to a previous article. It's useful for those new people who might be inspired to check this stuff out in more detail.

I actually assumed I was riffing off the joke exactly the way you intended. Didn't mean to poke fun.

Long ago, far away, ever so long ago... Aleksei_Riikonen said that this was a pretty awesome idea.

One thing I am slightly concerned about is having this be someone's first introduction to Less Wrong. I did spend a while trying to write this in such a way that it wouldn't be too ridiculous sounding to a newcomer. I actually set a pretty high bar for myself - I wanted my mother to be able to read this.

But I don't think I succeeded at that quite yet. At first I tried to explain why the things we believe aren't so ridiculous, and then I realized there's a good reason Eliezer took 2 years and a quarter-million pages to do so. So I went ahead and left that section more directly targeted to the Less Wrong audience.

Which is to say, I think this is a good thing to link to, but it also might be a good idea to include some kind of disclaimer about it being for people already familiar with Less Wrong. I don't really know. Depends on who's on your social network.

Me too. Awesome. Thanks.

I am so glad you did this, and that you are sharing.

They just see meat to eat with their eyes, not a person.

Typical mind fallacy, perhaps?

I don't know about you, but if I happen to be watching someone stripping it's much more about the meeting of the eyes than the eyeing of the meat.

Even prostitutes are probably respected a lot more on average than strippers, since it's more common that people at least talk to prostitutes

Well, if you go by the HBO specials they did about both groups, it's actually the other way around. Though really, people formed long-term relationships with their service providers in both groups.

All three of these are low status in many audiencies/societies. I think that for each, however, there exists an audience that accords them high status.