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.

Curious what (in your own case, and your best estimation of other people's case) motivated the move to Tumblr?

I think this post misses a lot of the scope and timing of the Less Wrong diaspora. A lot of us are on Tumblr now; I've made a few blog posts at the much more open group blog Carcinisation, there's a presence on Twitter, and a lot of us just have made social friendships with enough other rationalists that the urge to post for strangers has a pressure release valve in the form of discussing whatever ideas with the contents of one's living room or one's Facebook friends.

The suggestions you list amount to "ask Scott to give up his private resource for a public good, even though if what he wanted to do was post on a group blog he still has a LW handle", "somehow by magic increase readership of the EA forum", and "restructure LW to entice the old guard back, even though past attempts have disintegrated into bikeshedding and a low level of technical assistance from the people behind the website's actual specs". These aren't really "solutions".

You are probably not cynical enough if you think you could beat seven billion people at cynicism.

--Alicorn? (I'm not sure exactly how authorship of these pages works)

What's the deal with laundry detergent packaging? For instance, take a look at this http://news.pg.com/sites/pg.newshq.businesswire.com/files/image/image/Tide_Liquid_Detergent.jpg Nowhere on the package does it actually say it's detergent! I guess they're just relying on people knowing that Tide is a brand of detergent? Except that Tide also makes other products, such as fabric softener. And it's not just Tide. http://www.freestufffinder.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/all-laundry.jpg http://dgc.imageg.net/graphics/product_images/pDGC1-10603813v380.jpg http://dgc.imageg.net/graphics/product_images/pDGC1-10603814v380.jpg http://dgc.imageg.net/graphics/product_images/pDGC1-12184807v380.jpg

Doing a google search, the only image that I came across of a bottle that actually says "detergent" is this: http://dovsbythecase.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/allhefreeclear1.jpg If you zoom in, way at the bottom, in tiny print, it says "detergent". Maybe the other ones also say it, but they weren't zoomable.

I am a prominent LW poster; this is a through-away account because my girlfriend also uses LW.

I would like to propose to my girlfriend in the near future. For this I would like to use a diamond ring. I have never bought one before, so would appreciate any advice. The main things I would like help with:

• Not paying extra due to ignorance
• Ensuring she never has cause to regret the choice of stone/ring.
• Anything else you think I should know.

Some background in case it helps:

• I live in NYC, so have access to the diamond district.
• I am leaning towards an artificial diamond, as it seems hard to guarantee conflict-free otherwise (which does not seem romantic!) and we are both pretty pro-science.
• My price range is orgjrra bar naq gra gubhfnaq qbyynef, ohg V jbhyq cersre gbjneqf gur ybjre raq bs gur enatr
• My girlfreind is neither unusually fat nor unusually skinny for an American of marriageable age. She is white.
• She does not wear much jewelry. The stuff she has is mainly (fake?) yellow gold and silver, mainly gifts.
• I am probably looking for a relatively simple design, round stone.

I spent about a month a couple years ago having migraines, which I had never had before and inexplicably stopped having afterwards. I was prescribed a generic version of Fiorecet; you don't mention it or its unusual ingredient (butalbital; it also contains caffeine and acetaminophen). This worked almost completely if I managed to take the pill during my prodomal symptoms (weird visual aura, in my case; I don't know if you get this warning). However, even unmedicated my headaches did not last as long as it sounds like yours do. Apparently Fiorecet isn't customary for migraines, so you may not have tried it.

I also pestered my significant others for neck massages. I do this anyway but it was especially important when I had just had a migraine.

Wow, I'm so glad I stumbled onto slatestarcodex, and from there, here!!! You guys are all like smarter, cooler versions of me! It's great to have a label for the way my brain is naturally wired and know there other people in the world besides Peter Singer who think similarly. I'm really excited, so my "intro" might get a little long...

Part 1-Look at me, I'm just like you!

I'm Ellen, a 22 year old Spanish major and world traveling nanny from Wisconsin, so maybe not your typical LWer, but actually quite typical in other, more important ways. :)

I grew up in a Christian home/bubble, was super religious (Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod), truly respected/admired the Christians in my life, but even while believing, never liked what I believed. I actually just shared my story plus some interesting studies on correlations between personality, intelligence, and religiosity, if anyone is interested: http://magicalbananatree.blogspot.com/2015/02/christian-friends-do-you-ever-feel.html The post is based almost entirely on what I've come to learn is called "consequentialism" which I'm happy to see is pretty popular over here. I subscribe to this line of thinking so much that I used to pray for a calamity to strengthen my faith. I chose a small Lutheran school despite having great credentials to get into an Ivy, because with an eye on eternity, I wanted to avoid any environment that would foster doubt. My friends suggested I become a missionary, but to me, it made far more sense to become a high profile lawyer and donate 90% of my salary to fund a dozen other missionaries. (A Christian version of effective altruism?) No one ever understood!

Some people might deconvert because they can't believe in miracles, or they can't get over the problem of evil. These are bad reasons, I think, and based on the presupposition that God doesn't exist. Personally, the hardest thing for me was believing that God was all-powerful. Like, if God were portrayed as good, but weak, struggling against an evil god and just doing the best he could to make a just universe and make his existence known, I probably would never have left the faith. It took me long enough as it is!

Part 2-A noob atheist's plea for help

Anyway, now I've "cleared my mind" of all that and am starting fresh, but my friends have a lot of questions for me that I'm not able to answer yet, and I have a lot of my own, too. I'm starting by reading about science (not once had I even been exposed to evolution!) but have a lot of other concerns on the back burner, and maybe you guys can point me in the right direction:

Who was the historical Jesus? As a history source, why is the Bible unreliable?

How can I have morality?? Do I just have to rely on intuition? If the whole world relied on reason alone to make decisions, couldn't we rationalize a LOT of things that we intuit as wrong?

Does atheism necessarily lead to nihilism? (I think so, in the grand scheme of things? But the world/our species means something to us, and that's enough, right?)

What about all the really smart people I know and respect, like my sister and Grandma, who have had their share of doubts but ultimately credit their faith to having experienced extraordinary, miraculous answers to prayer? Like obviously, their experiences don't convince ME to believe, but I hate to dismiss them as delusional and call it a wild coincidence...

Are rationalists just as guilty of circular reasoning as Christians are? (Why do I trust human reason? My human reason tells me it's great. Why do Christians trust God? The Bible tells them he's great.)

Part 3-Embarrassingly enthusiastic fan mail

Yay curiosity! Yay strategic thinking! Yay honesty! Yay open-mindedness! Yay opportunity cost analyses! Yay common sense! Yay tolerance of ambiguity! Yay utilitarianism! Yay acknowledging inconsistency in following utilitarianism! Yay intelligence! Yay every single slatestarcodex post! Yay self-improvement! Yay others-improvement! Yay effective altruism!

Ahhh this is all so cool! You guys are so cool. I can't wait to read the sequences and more posts around this site! Maybe someday I'll even meet a real life rationalist or two, it seems like the Bay Area has a lot. :)

So, several years ago I was moved by my primary dissatisfaction with HPMoR and my enjoyment of MLP to start a rationalist MLP fanfic. (There are at least two others, that occupied very different spheres, which I will get to in a bit.)

My main dissatisfaction with HPMoR was that Harry is almost always the teacher, not the student; relatedly, his cleverness far outstrips his wisdom. It is only at the very end, after he nearly loses everything, that he starts to realize how difficult it is to get things right, and even then he does not fully get it. Harry is the sort of character that the careful reader can learn from, but not the sort of character one should try to emulate.

MLP's protagonist, Twilight Sparkle, is in many ways the opposite character: instead of being overconfident and arrogant, she is anxious and (generally) humble. Where Harry has difficulty seeing others as equals or useful, Twilight genuinely relies on her friends. Most of Harry's positive characteristics, though, Twilight shares--or could plausibly share with little modification. (In HP terms, she's basically what would have happen if bookish Hermione had been the Girl-Who-Lived, with the accompanying leadership potential, and Harry Potter, the athletic Gryffindor seeker, was just one of her friends.)

So I had the clever idea to write a series of five scenes where Twilight learned a rationality lesson from each of the other five primary characters (yes, even Pinkie Pie, and that one actually wasn't hard to write). And then once I was thinking of a rationalist Twilight, an overall story formed around those scenes. I also wanted to write a story which had more of a Hansonian growth curve--yes, things are growing and a clever protagonist is constantly improving things around herself, but she's not the only PC in the world, and doesn't necessarily stand out as particularly effective. She might get a nice palace and lead a growing and exciting startup, but she's not going to become the Singleton, and she's more likely to have a bunch of exciting and energetic friends than be a lonely genius. (The primary two rationalist MLP fanfics that I'm aware of--not including any of PhilGoetz's stuff--are one in which a pony-flavored Singleton dominates the real world, and one in which a HPMoR-esque protagonist drops into the MLP world and does HPMoR-esque things.)

But, since I'm not celebrating finishing that story, obviously things went wrong. The primary ones:

1. My first project was not something temporary. This is the advice they give for any physical craft--don't make your first set of bookshelves for yourself, or your first scarf, or so on. You're going to muck something up, and to this day my primary scarf has a bit of a trapezoidal slant at the end of it because I didn't quite have the hang of how to crochet the end of a row. If I had made a dishrag to make my rookie mistakes on and then a scarf to wear, the scarf would have been fine. The application to fiction is obvious. Not only does it have deep problems, it isn't even done. (I do have a finished, joke story written in response to one of Eliezer's Facebook posts, which isn't any better but is at least a complete work.)
2. As the above suggests, I'm not very good at writing fiction. Like most people who DMed at some point, I did a fair bit of it when I was younger--but it never ascended to full hobby status. Arguing and forum-posting did, but that's a fairly different skill.
3. Continuing the trend, I don't find writing fiction all that rewarding. PhilGoetz, at some point, described himself as having to write. Perhaps the same is true of me, but I find that urge adequately satisfied by nonfiction, and I suspect the world is better off with another book review or an introductory causality lesson plan / textbook than it is with another piece of rationalist fiction (conditioned on me writing it, at least).

But with HPMoR finished, I feel the itch again. Especially in the light of the Final Exam and its resolution. (As Sun Tzu put it, "Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.") But just diving into it again because the itch has returned does not a plan for success make. Here are the things I'm thinking about (and please, feel free to suggest other things to think about):

1. Finish the original idea--the five chapters where Twilight learns a lesson from each of her friends--and publish it as its own work. (This is mostly done, and would just need some editing.) Gradually build out the full story as a separate thing when you have the time and interest.
2. Seek more serious help from other writers--not just editing, but possibly full coauthorship, or sliding further down the scale towards commissions. (I haven't fully sorted out my priorities here, but I think I care enough to use some units of caring on this.)
3. Drop this idea as less valuable than other projects. I don't have the introspection ability to be sure about energy/motivation, but I suspect this would draw from the same motivation budget as nonfiction writing projects, and it certainly would draw from the same time budget.

(By the way, here is the link to it; I last updated it about a year ago.)

Whoever downvoted this, I would appreciate knowing why. I don't imagine you're going to stick around long enough to do so, but figured I'd request anyway.