Tee hee ... allow me to recount the story of the one other person who lives in the same mental bucket in my head as Mitchell (lightly edited from a FB post from late 2021):

When I say things like "other people genuinely feel like a different species to me," it's because it would literally never occur to me to:

- Agree to meet with Person X, who had a grievance with me

- Tell Person X what things I was upset about, because Person X started off the meeting by saying "I think my job here is to listen, first."

- Listen to, accept, and thank Person X, explicitly, for their subsequent apology, which they offered without asking for any sort of symmetrical concession from me

- Maybe even cry a little, because things have been hard, and accept their clumsy attempts to offer a little comfort and empathy

- Years later, after no other substantive interactions of any kind, join in a dogpile against Person X behind their back where I besmirched their apology and insinuated that it was insufficient and rooted in an invalid motivation

- Outright lie in that dogpile, and claim that Person X had insisted that I jump through hoops that they never asked me to jump through

- Give no sign of any of this ongoing resentment in private communication initiated by Person X on that very same day

Like, there's a whole bunch of people out there for whom this is just ... business as usual, nothing to see here.

I think there are indeed enmities that call for that kind of blatantly adversarial two-facedness, but I think they take WAY more in the way of inciting incident than anything I've ever done, had done to me, or seen happen around me with my own two eyes.

Alternate title: This Is The Sort Of Thing That Makes Coordination Hard

...all of which is to say, re: "you can still provide people with data that loudly and inarguably contradicts the dark hypothesis" ... I do want to emphasize just how hard it is to create that data.  The test can't actually be run, but I would bet several hundred dollars to someone's one dollar that a panel of a dozen neutral observers watching the whole interaction described above from start to finish would have agreed that it was a clearly unpressured, sincere, caring, and genuine attempt to rebuild a bridge, but this did not stop the other party (who is a well-respected member of the social group that calls itself the rationalist community, e.g. gave multiple talks at LessOnline this past weekend) from being ... well, shitty.  Really, really, really shitty.

(This is a misread of the seventh guideline.  The seventh guideline doesn't say that you shouldn't hypothesize about what other people believe, it says that you should flag those hypotheses so that they can't possibly be mistaken for assertions of fact.  That's why the above says "my understanding" and "unless I miss him" rather than just saying "Zack doesn't think so either."  I'd be interested in a statement of what Zack-guideline the above "here's what I think he believes?" falls afoul of.)

Yeah I'm going to go back in and add links, partly due to this comment thread and partly at Zack's (reasonable, correct!) request; I should've done that in the first place and lose points for not doing so.  Apologies, Zack.

I think this is a restatement of the thesis (or at least, I intended the "some people are actually surrounded by """worse""" people" to be part of the claims of the above).

See Zack's engagement with Basics of Rationalist Discourse, and multiple subsequent essays.

As an aside, "wow, I support this way less than I otherwise would have, because your (hypothesized) straightforward diagnosis of what was going on in a large conflict over norms seems to me to be kind of petty" is contra both my norms and my understanding of Zack's preferred norms; unless I miss him entirely neither one of us wants LessWrong to be the kind of place where that sort of factor weighs very heavily in people's analysis.

(I already lost the battle, though; the fact that socially-motivated moves like the above rapidly become highly upvoted is a big chunk of why I gave up on trying to be on LessWrong generally, and why all my content goes elsewhere now.)

(DunCon was more in this direction than LessOnline, downstream of me feeling similarly, and DunConII will be substantially further, and also it's not like "wait until then" is the thing I'm saying, but like.  Hi.)

There's now a site and schedule in addition to the flyer above.

As a rough heuristic: "Everything is fuzzy; every bell curve has tails that matter."

It's important to be precise, and it's important to be nuanced, and it's important to keep the other elements in view even though the universe is overwhelmingly made of just hydrogen and helium.

But sometimes, it's also important to simply point straight at the true thing.  "Men are larger than women" is a true thing, even though many, many individual women are larger than many, many individual men, and even though the categories "men" and "women" and "larger" are themselves ill-defined and have lots and lots of weirdness around the edges.

I wrote a post that went into lots and lots of careful detail, touching on many possible objections pre-emptively, softening and hedging and accuratizing as many of its claims as I could.  I think that post was excellent, and important.

But it did not do the one thing that this post did, which was to stand up straight, raise its voice, and Just. Say. The. Thing.

It was a delight to watch the two posts race for upvotes, and it was a delight, in the end, to see the bolder one win.

It inspired me to add a line near the end, which I think should've been there in the original (so thank you):

There were two full chapters on slavery and conscription and indentured servitude, castes and patriarchy and institutional bigotry—all the various ways in which societies incorporate people into their machinery without respecting their dealbreakers, keeping them captive in roles they would not freely choose.

Er, I'm not sure why I would need a stronger statement, since the essay is describing civilization, which includes very coercive systems.

(There's an interesting sort of rhyme here with, like.  It seems to me that your first comment implies a goal of entertainingness, when the essay was not written to be entertaining (so much as informative/hopefully enlightening; entertainment helps to achieve that but isn't the primary thing to optimize for). And similarly, these later comments seem to imply a goal of describing how to achieve a good civilization, when the essay is simply trying to describe what civilization is, in practice (with the idea being that once you know what it's made of, perhaps you'll be more able to make it good).  Your comments seem to me to want to dock points for missing targets that aren't being aimed for in the first place.)