Good! I'm pleased to see an example of LW going meta on itself in this vein.

As an extension, note that there's a well-established pattern by which people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder tend to attract (and be attracted to) people with Borderline Personality Disorder. An evocative line from The Last Psychiatrist:

The narcissist creates an identity, then tries to force everyone else to buy into it. The borderline waits to meet someone, and then constructs a personality suitable to that person....

The narcissist thrives with the borderline because she provides for him the validation that he is, in fact, the lead; the borderline thrives with the narcissist because he defines her. And, as she will tell you every single time, without fail: "you don't know him like I do." Everyone else judges his behavior; but the borderline is judging his version of himself that she has accepted."

I'd invite folks to consider what it would look like if a few "intellectual narcissists" attracted a following of "intellectual borderlines," in particular what the individuals' personalities would look like in Near, and what the memetics of that community would look like.

I am learning HTML/JS and frontend development more generally, initially using Bootstrap as my tutor. I'm starting with a generic familiarity with Natlab/Python but no prior web dev experience.

Einstein was a physicist. He probably had more sense about politics than random inattentive person who votes on the basis of emotion, but I'm going to hope that people who actually know something about politics get influence by writing and/or politicking. Their influence isn't limited to their vote.

Thank you for your work, Aureliem.

This is actually a terrible example of Washington Monument Syndrome.

" Hi, Server admin here... We cost money as does our infrastructure, I imagine a site that large costs a very good deal, we aren't talking five bucks on bluehost here.

I am private sector, but if I were to be furloughed for an indeterminate amount of time you really have two options. Leave things on autopilot until the servers inevitably break or the site crashes at which point parts or all of it will be left broken without notice or explanation. Or put up a splash page and spin down 99% of my infrastructure (That splash page can run on a five dollar bluehost account) and then leave. I won't be able to come in while furloughed to put it up after it crashes.

If you really think web apps keep themselves running 24/7 without intervention we really have been doing a great job with that illusion and I guess the sleepless nights have been worth it to be successfully taken for-granted."

Daenerys Targaryen (books): Though initially motivated solely by revenge and personal survival, she stops long enough to overturn several existing social orders in order to improve the average quality of life.

Nearly all of which turn out terribly if I recall correctly. Her freeing of the slaves for example on a utilitarian scale is somewhere between a particularly bad natural disaster and The 30 years war, especially since it seems unlikely to last.

Besides being basically at the head of a marauding horde that is a menace to settled civilization there are further reasons to doubt she has made a positive impact so far. My girlfriend recently had an interesting fired monologue on the subject, she hates the character and sees her as behaving like the worst possible stereotype of Western (in particular American) doogooderism and interventionism. And yes I did say stereotype so I'm not saying what follows is an accurate description of real world affairs.

1. Encounter stable working society
2. Deem noticeable features of it immoral
3. Not bothering to study the society use violence to enforce your morality
4. Notice things becoming complicated and incredibly messed up, like obvious great suffering and people dying in huge numbers because of your actions
5. Leave.
6. Encounter stable working society...

In ASoIaF I see Tywin Lannister being nearest to a paragon of good rulership that brings about utilitarian gains. Note how the Spider actually kills his similarly tempered brother because he finds it plausible he will do as good a job as Tywin and would get the kingdom's act together enough to repulse the coming Targaryen invasion.

If we could identify things that were high status and useless, how easy would it be to lower their status and thereby optimize society's status budget?

The question is how correlated signalling is with actually valuable activities. Healthy societies have institutions that try to correlate social rewards with pro-social behavior; capitalism and academia are both examples of institutions that try to tie value-creation with changes in social status. However, no linkage is perfect and all signalling behaviors can be hacked to some degree. So you end up with an academia where grant-finagling and publication, in at least some fields, are largely divorced from producing meritorious work. Likewise PUA is an attempt to hack both social-skills modules and cultural rules that award status based on behavioral traits. Much of the inefficiencies around healthcare can be seen as an attempt to hack the current regulations and payment systems rather than address the preventing and curing of disease that the systems were intended to incentivize.

Yet despite this, some institutions succeed fairly well at making the linkage stick. Capitalism seems to have done it pretty well, although it certainly does fray at the edges. Informal reputation-tracking works pretty well in maintaining small-group prosociality, at least compared to anonymity. In fact examine pretty much anywhere where useful work gets done, and you'll see mechanisms to tie status-seeking to virtue and productivity (however defined).

Where possible, when people notice the divergence between signalling and the "true purpose" of institutions, they tend to optimize for signalling. The health of a culture or institution, and the value of a signalling norm, is how well they can tie selfish signalling interests with the goals (prosocial or otherwise) of the institution.

Note: it's helpful to actually have a shared notion of what-should-be-valued and an intuition that some institutions and customs are preferable than others; else it's not even possible to have that conversation.

Thank you for trying to impart useful, compounding knowledge, even when selling opium is almost certainly more lucrative in a middle-class neighborhood.

How do you reconcile this view with the way questions of tone have become entangled with gender issues in the very thread?

When the difference IS the topic, that tends to amplify the relevance of the differences.