If I were designing a core curriculum off the top of my head, it might look something like this:

First year: Statistics, pure math if necessary, foundational biology, literature and history of a time and place far removed from your native culture. Classics is the traditional solution to the latter and I think it's still a pretty good one, but now that we can't assume knowledge of Greek or Latin, any other culture at a comparable remove would probably work as well. The point of this year is to lay foundations, to expose students to some things they probably haven't seen before, and to put some cognitive distance between the student and their K-12 education. Skill at reading and writing should be built through the history curriculum.

Second year: Data science, more math if necessary, evolutionary biology (perhaps with an emphasis on hominid evolution), basic philosophy (focusing on general theory rather than specific viewpoints), more literature and history. We're building on the subjects introduced in the first year, but still staying mostly theoretical.

Third year: Economics, cognitive science, philosophy (at this level, students start reading primary sources), more literature and history. At this point you'd start learning the literature and history of your native language. You're starting to specialize, and to lay the groundwork for engaging with contemporary culture on an educated level.

Fourth year: More economics, political science, recent history, cultural studies (e.g. film, contemporary literature, religion).

less people seemed be on the fence than I expected, "the distribution of opinions about neoreaction" seemed bimodal

I suspect this is the polarizing effect of politics, not something specific for LW nor specific for neoreaction. We are talking about labels, not ideas. I may agree with half of ideas of some movement, and disagree with other half of ideas, but I usually have a clear opinion about whether I want to identify with a label or not.

I understand that LessWrong consists of real people, but when I think about LessWrong, the mental image that comes to my mind is that of a place, abstract entity and not a community of people.

My mental image for LW community is more or less "people who have read the Sequences, and in general agree with them". Yes, I am aware that in recent years many people ignore this stuff, to the degree where mentioning the Sequences is a minor faux pas. (And for a while it was a major faux pas, and some people loudly insisted that telling someone to read the Sequences is a lesswrongeese for "fuck you". Not sure how much of that attitude actually came from the "Rational"Wiki.) That, in my opinion, is a bad thing, and it sometimes leads to reinventing the wheel in the debates. To put it shortly, it seems to me we have lost the ability to build new things, and became an online debate club. Still a high quality online debate club. Just not what I hoped for at the beginning.

What I am trying to say is that when I see neoreactionaries commenting on LessWrong, I do not perceive them as "them" if they talk in a manner that is close enough to LessWrong style about the topics that are LW topics.

LessWrong was built upon some ideas, and one of them was that "politics is the mindkiller" and that we strive to become more rational, instead of being merely clever arguers. At this moment, neoreactionaries are the group most visibly violating this rule. They strongly contribute to the destruction of the walled garden. Debating them over and over again is privileging a hypothesis; why not choose any other fringe political belief instead, or try creating a new one from scratch, or whatever?

And I guess that if we are to overcome biases we will have to deal with politics.

Politics is an advanced topic for a rationalist. Before going there, one should make sure they are able to handle the easier situations first. Also, there should be some kind of feedback, some way of warning people "you have strayed from the path". Otherwise we will only have clever arguers competing using their verbal skills. When a rationalist sympathetic to neoreaction reads the SSC neoreaction anti-faq, they should be deeply shocked and start questioning their own sanity. They should realize how much they have failed the art of rationality by not realizing most of that on their own. They should update about their own ability to form epistemically correct political opinions. Instead of inventing clever rationalizations for the already written bottom line.

In my opinion, Yvain is the most qualified person for the task of debating politics rationally, and the only obvious improvement would be to somehow find dozen different Yvains coming from different cultural backgrounds, and let them debate with each other. But one doesn't get there by writing their bottom line first.

I agree it would be good to find a better method to debate politics. Maybe we should have a meta-rule that anyone who starts a political debate must specify rules how the topic should be debated. (So now the burden is on the people who want to debate politics here.)

It seems to me that in political topics most of updating happens between the conversation. It's not like you say something and the other person is "oh, you totally convinced me, I am changing my mind now". Instead, you say something, the other person looks at you very suspiciously and walks away. Later they keep thinking about it, maybe google some data, maybe talk with other people, and the next time you meet them, their position is different from the last time.

For example, I have updated, from mildly pro-NR to anti-NR. I admit they have a few good points. But this is generally my experience with political movements: they are often very good at pointing out the obvious flaws of their competitors; the problem is that their own case is usually not much better, only different. I appreciate the few insights, they made me update, and I still keep thinking about some stuff. I just didn't come to the same conclusion; I separated the stuff that makes sense to me from the stuff that doesn't. Just like I try to draw good ideas e.g. from religion, without becoming religious. Instead of buying the whole package, I take a few bricks and add them to my model of the world. There are a few bricks in my model now that an outside observer could call "neoreactionary", although that would probably depend on the exact words I would use to describe them (because they are not unique for NR). The other bricks I have judged separately, and I was unimpressed. That's where I am now.

There is also this irritating fact that NRs keep associating themselves with LW. I consider that a huge dishonesty and in a way an attack on this community. If people are impressed by LW, this can make them more open towards NR. If people are disgusted by NR, this can make them dislike LW by association. They gain, we lose. It never goes the other way round; no one is going to debate overcoming their cognitive biases just because they fell in love with NR. To put it bluntly, we are used as a recruitment tool for some guy's cult, and all his shit falls on our heads. Why should we tolerate that? (This, especially #1 should be a required reading for every nerd.) That alone makes me completely unwilling to debate with them, because such debates are then used as further evidence that "LW supports NR". (As an analogy, imagine how much would you want to have a polite debate with a politician you dislike, if you know that the reason he debates with you is that he can take a photo of you two having a conversation, put it on his personal webpage, and claim that you are one of his supporters, to impress people who know you.) I refuse to ignore this context, because I am strongly convinced that NRs are fully aware of what they are doing here.

So even if we try having rational debates about politics, I would prefer to try them on some other political topics.

One aspect of neoreactionary thought is that it relies on historical narratives instead of focusing on specific claims that could be true or false in a way that can be determined by evidence.

To quote Moldbug:

Classifying traditions by their cladistic ancestry is a fine example. The statement that Universalism exists, that it is a descendant of Christianity, and that it is not a descendant of Confucianism, can only be interpreted intuitively. It is not a logical proposition in any sense. It has no objective truth-value. It is a pattern that strikes me as, given certain facts, self-evident. In order to convince you of this proposition, I repeat these facts and arrange them in the pattern I see in my head. Either you see the same pattern, or another pattern, or no pattern at all.

Given such an idea of how reasoning works, it's not clear that there an easy solution that allows for agreeing on a social norm to discuss politics.

Articles. Not only there are none in Russian, but there is nothing that serves their function.

Happens all the time:

-- I just put my towel to laundry.

-- Okay.

-- But I just realised that I need towel again. Could you go fetch towel for me?

-- Here, I brought you towel.

-- This is another towel.

-- Oh, so you needed that very towel that you put into laundry?

-- Oh. (switching to English) I wanted to say "I need the towel", not "I need a towel"!

Next, Russian often requires you to specify a lot of extra info, compared to English. Example:

-- Why is that thing a fish?

-- It isn't. (because it's a dolphin)

"It is a fish" = "Это рыба" (it fish). No 'is' in this sentence in Russian. So, instead of "it isn't" you must say "it isn't a fish". There is no easy way to say this sentence without using the word "fish" or some extra clumsy wording like "not the thing you are asking about". That makes it very hard to make stuff like chatbots in Russian, or write generic lines for RPG games where the same line can be used in different circumstances.

Same thing with grammatical genders. When you say "X does Y", you must specify gender of X in Y's form. A lot of media was botched in translation, when one character thinks that another character is a girl when he's actually a guy (and is not trying to deliberately deceive). In Russian, it is hard to say more than a couple of sentences without revealing your gender in the process.

Is that enough? There is more where that came from.

I think this "rabbit hole" is basically reality. In other words "there is a physical world which we see and hear etc" is a theory which is extremely well supported by our observations. Berkeley's explanation that there is no physical world, but God exists and is directly causing all of our sensations is an alternate theory, although a rather unlikely one.

Alfred Korzybyski

So, long ago I was rather put off Korzybyski and General Semantics by the brief discussion of them in Martin Gardner's "Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science". A few sample quotations:

Neither movement [sc. general semantics and psychodrama, which Gardner happens to put in the same chapter -- gjm], it should be stated, approaches the absurdity of the two previously considered cults [sc. orgonomy and dianetics -- gjm]. For this reason, general semantics and psychodrama must be regarded as controversial, borderline examples, which may or may not have considerable scientific merit.

[Science and Sanity] is a poorly organized, verbose, philosophically naive, repetitious mish-mash of sound ideas borrowed from abler scientists and philosophers, mixed with neologisms, confused ideas, unconscious metaphysics, and highly dubious speculations and neurology and psychiatric therapy.

Korzybyski's explanation of why non-Aristotelian thinking has therapeutic body effects was bound up with a theory now discarded by his followers as neurologically unsound. It concerned the cortex and the thalamus. [...]

The simple reason is that Korzybyski made no contributions of significance to any of the fields about which he wrote with such seeming erudition. Most of the Count's followers admit this, but insist that the value of his work lies in the fact that it was the first great synthesis of modern scientific philosophy and psychiatry.

The impression I get from Gardner is that "the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good". So, e.g., Korzybyski is of course right to say that black-and-white dichotomous thinking is harmful, and that it's useful to distinguish between a thing and a description of that thing, and that "is" can be a treacherous word. But we didn't need Korzybyski to tell us that. And much of what's distinctive in Korzybyski (again, I'm describing the impression I get from people like Gardner) is just plain wrong.

Is that all wrong? Is there substantially more to Korzybyski and "General Semantics"? Has present-day GS filtered out all the pseudoscience while preserving (or, better, newly finding) a lot of insight? Are there insights there that are unique to GS?

But it's not obvious that they were more egalitarian when it comes to political power or ability to do violence.

When the most powerful weapon is a mounted knight in full plate mail, its easy for a small minority to dominate. When the most powerful weapon is the pointed stick...

Yes. Because both of those have actual data, and are thus useful - your reasoning can be tested against reality.

We just really don't know very much about the roman economy, and are unlikely to find out much more than we currently do. Generalizing from one example isn't good .. science, logic or argument. But it's better than generalizing from the fog of history. Not a lot better - Economics only very barely qualifies as a science on a good day, but Krugman is completely correct to call people out for going in this direction because doing so just outright reduces it to storytelling.

What cause would an NRx EA donate to?