It might be that I have gotten to cynic but if you measure 6 variables it's more likely that one of them get a statistical significant result then if you first turn those 6 variables into 2 variables via PCA.

My project gives a proof of concept for what I'm talking about in the context of social psychology. I've never seen such an application. So no, it's not just the realization that it could be applied, it's also giving a proof of concept: that's why it took ~1500 hours rather than ~10 hours.

That probably where there's something I don't understand. I don't understand why the analysis took ~1500 hours. Spending that much time with a dataset also instinctively triggers "fishing expedition" in my head. I don't know to what extend that's warranted.

I'm not sure that you have shown that it makes more sense to interpret that factor individual preference is about intelligence and sincerity than that it's about the value of fun.

As far as I can see it could also be that fun&physical attractiveness is simply more valued.

So I'd strongly encourage you to pursue your ideas more. I've been looking some at the General Social Survey data, where I haven't yet found something highly nontrivial (maybe I'm looking at the data the wrong way, or maybe it's just not a good dataset for this). I'd be happy to share my code with you / a cleaned form of the data, if you're interested in exploring factors for political labels.

In the case of the spending effort on the GSS I can't envision what success looks like. It's straightforward to find PCR factors but I don't know how to put them to good use.

A more interesting project would be to explore LW's ideological landscape. It would be very interested in how various rationalist beliefs interact with each other. Does seeing yourself as an "aspiring rationalist" correlates to beliefs on UFAI risk?

Having a project that searches where the main dimensions of disagreement in this community would be valuable. Maybe 300 questions that are answered on a Likert scale. Maybe 150 rationality questions, 100 big 5 questions and 50 autism questions.

Quite frankly, I find the norms in academia very creepy: I've seen a lot of people develop serious mental health problems in connection with their experiences in academia. It's hard to see it from the inside: I was disturbed by what I saw, but I didn't realize that math academia is actually functioning as a cult, based on retrospective impressions, and in fact by implicit consensus of the best mathematicians of the world (I can give references if you'd like) .

I've only been in CS academia, and wouldn't call that a cult. I would call it, like most of the rest of academia, a deeply dysfunctional industry in which to work, but that's the fault of the academic career and funding structure. CS is even relatively healthy by comparison to much of the rest.

How much of our impression of mathematics as a creepy, mental-health-harming cult comes from pure stereotyping?

The links you give are extremely interesting, but, unless I am missing something, it seems that they fall short of justifying your earlier statement that math academia functions as a cult. I wonder if you would be willing to elaborate further on that?

I think in this case we have to taboo the term "LWers" ;-). This community has many pieces in it, and two large parts of the original core are "techno-libertarian Overcoming Bias readers with many very non-mainstream beliefs that they claim are much more rational than anyone else's beliefs" and "the SL4 mailing list wearing suits and trying to act professional enough that they might actually accomplish their Shock Level Four dreams."

On the other hand, in the process of the site's growth, it has eventually come to encompass those two demographics plus, to some limited extent, almost everyone who's willing to assent that science, statistical reasoning, and the neuro/cognitive sciences actually really work and should be taken seriously. With special emphasis on statistical reasoning and cognitive sciences.

So the core demographic consists of Very Unusual People, but the periphery demographics, who now make up most of the community, consist of only Mildly Unusual People.

In my experience there's an issue of Less Wrongers being unusually emotionally damaged (e.g. relative to academics) and this gives rise to a lot of problems in the community.

I think you're just projecting.

Thank you for all these interesting references. I enjoyed reading all of them, and rereading in Thurston's case.

Do people pathologize Grothendieck as having gone crazy? I mostly think people think of him as being a little bit strange. The story I heard was that because of philosophical disagreements with military funding and personal conflicts with other mathematicians he left the community and was more or less refusing to speak to anyone about mathematics, and people were sad about this and wished he would come back.

I don't really understand what you mean about math academia. Those references would be appreciated.

There are other people involved in the community who you might find even more credible. For example: (a) Paul Christiano who was an international math olympiad medalist, wrote a 50 page paper on quantum computational complexity with Scott Aaronson as an undergraduate at MIT, and is a theoretical CS grad student at Berkeley. (b) Jacob Steinhardt, a Hertz graduate fellow who does machine learning research under Percy Liang at Stanford.

Of course, Christiano tends to issue disclaimers with his MIRI-branded AGI safety work, explicitly stating that he does not believe in alarmist UFAI scenarios. Which is fine, in itself, but it does show how people expect someone associated with these communities to sound.

And Jacob Steinhardt hasn't exactly endorsed any "Twilight Zone" community norms or propaganda views. Errr, is there a term for "things everyone in a group thinks everyone else believes, whether or not they actually do"?

Thanks for the detailed response! I'll respond to a handful of points:

Previously "ignorant" people feel the community has opened a new world to them, they lived in darkness before, but now they found the "Way" ("Bayescraft") and all this stuff is becoming an identity for them.

I certainly agree that there are people here who match that description, but it's also worth pointing out that there are actual experts too.

the general public, who are just irrational automata still living in the dark.

One of the things I find most charming about LW, compared to places like RationalWiki, is how much emphasis there is on self-improvement and your mistakes, not mistakes made by other people because they're dumb.

It seems that people try to prove they know some concept by using the jargon and including links to them. Instead, I'd prefer authors who actively try to minimize the need for links and jargon.

I'm not sure this is avoidable, and in full irony I'll link to the wiki page that explains why.

In general, there are lots of concepts that seem useful, but the only way we have to refer to concepts is either to refer to a label or to explain the concept. A number of people read through the sequences and say "but the conclusions are just common sense!", to which the response is, "yes, but how easy is it to communicate common sense?" It's one thing to be able to recognize that there's some vague problem, and another thing to be able to say "the problem here is inferential distance; knowledge takes many steps to explain, and attempts to explain it in fewer steps simply won't work, and the justification for this potentially surprising claim is in Appendix A." It is one thing to be able to recognize a concept as worthwhile; it is another thing to be able to recreate that concept when a need arises.

Now, I agree with you that having different labels to refer to the same concept, or conceptual boundaries or definitions that are drawn slightly differently, is a giant pain. When possible, I try to bring the wider community's terminology to LW, but this requires being in both communities, which limits how much any individual person can do.

I also don't get why the rationality stuff is intermixed with friendly AI and cryonics and transhumanism.

Part of that is just seeding effects--if you start a rationality site with a bunch of people interested in transhumanism, the site will remain disproportionately linked to transhumanism because people who aren't transhumanists will be more likely to leave and people who are transhumanists will be more likely to find and join the site.

Part of it is that those are the cluster of ideas that seem weird but 'hold up' under investigation--most of the reasons to believe that the economy of fifty years from now will look like the economy of today are just confused, and if a community has good tools for dissolving confusions you should expect them to converge on the un-confused answer.

A final part seems to be availability; people who are convinced by the case for cryonics tend to be louder than the people who are unconvinced. The annual surveys show the perception of LW one gets from just reading posts (or posts and comments) is skewed from the perception of LW one gets from the survey results.

Those are indeed impressive things you did. I agree very much with your post from 2010. But the fact that many people have this initial impression shows that something is wrong. What makes it look like a "twilight zone"? Why don't I feel the same symptoms for example on Scott Alexander's Slate Star Codex blog?

Another thing I could pinpoint is that I don't want to identify as a "rationalist", I don't want to be any -ist. It seems like a tactic to make people identify with a group and swallow "the whole package". (I also don't think people should identify as atheist either.)