While the framing of treating lack of social grace as a virtue captures something true, it's too incomplete and imo can't support its strong conclusion. The way I would put it is that you have correctly observed that, whatever the benefits of social grace are, it comes at a cost, and sometimes this cost is not worth paying. So in a discussion, if you decline to pay the cost of social grace, you can afford to buy other virtues instead.^[1]

For example, it is socially graceful not to tell the Emperor Who Wears No Clothes that he wears no clothes. Whereas someone who lacks social grace is more likely to tell the emperor the truth.

But first of all, I disagree with the frame that lack of social grace is itself a virtue. In the case of the emperor, for example, the virtues are rather legibility and non-deception, traded off against whichever virtues the socially graceful response would've gotten.

And secondly, often the virtues you can buy with social grace are worth far more than whatever you could gain by declining to be socially graceful. For example, when discussing politics with someone of an opposing ideology, you could decline to be socially graceful and tell your interlocutor to their face that you hate them and everything they stand for. This would be virtuously legible and non-deceptive, at the cost of immediately ending the conversation and thus forfeiting any chance of e.g. gains from trade, coming to a compromise, etc.

One way I've seen this cost manifest on LW is that some authors complain that there's a style of commenting here that makes it unenjoyable to post here as an author. As a result, those authors are incentivized to post less, or to post elsewhere.^[2]

And as a final aside, I'm skeptical of treating Feynman as socially graceless. Maybe he was less deferential towards authority figures, but if he had told nothing but the truth to all the authority figures (who likely included some naked emperors) throughout his life, his career would've presumably ended long before he could've gotten his Nobel Prize. And b), IIRC the man's physics lectures are just really fun to watch, and I'm pretty confident that a sufficiently socially graceless person would not make for a good teacher. For example, it is socially graceful not to belittle fledgling students as intellectual inferiors, even though they in some ways are just that.

1. ^{^}

   Related: I wrote this comment and this follow-up where I wished that Brevity was considered a rationalist virtue. Because if there's no counterbalancing virtue to trade off against other virtues like legibility and truth-seeking, then supposedly virtuous discussions are incentivized to become arbitrarily long.

2. ^{^}

   The moderation log of users banned by other users is a decent proxy for the question of which authors have considered which commenters to be too costly to interact with, whether due to lack of social grace of something else.

I found that event online, but not the claim that this was what motivated the shift in policy.

immigration is very good for economic growth

This is certainly true for US-style immigration, where immigrants are higher-skilled and likely to speak English. But surely the effect is comparatively worse for European-style immigration, where immigrants tend to be much poorer, often refugees from religious third-world countries, and have a low chance of speaking the native language. All of which complicates integration and increases anti-immigration sentiment.

If I remember right Merkel's decision was due to her experience of being asked by a young struggling and fearful refugee whether Merkel thought it was right for her to be deported.

I don't see why I'd believe any career politician when they claim that a particular one-off event (that seems well-suited for journalistic reports) fundamentally changed their mind about a topic. And in the first place, did she even claim this to be the reason?

The attitude of modern parties towards immigration policy is pretty insane. I understand that politicians, being cultural elites, tend to be much more cosmopolitan than the population average. But repeatedly overriding your own constituents' preferences inevitably invites backlash, and ultimately sets back the very cause you wanted to champion. On this topic, I liked David Frum's 2019 article, If Liberals Won’t Enforce Borders, Fascists Will.

Because in this model, kindness to kin evolved because we share a significant fraction of our genes with our close kin (1/2 for children, siblings, and parents; 1/4 for grandchildren, grandparents, uncles/aunts/nieces/nephews; etc.). If there's instead an ant queen, then all ants in this particular colony are siblings, but genetic relatedness to other hives is very low. Then you don't get kindness to kin but something else, like kindness to hive or self-sacrifice for hive.

EDIT: I think the above holds, but the justification in EY's Twitter thread is different, namely that "Human bands and tribes are the right size for us to need to trade favors with people we're not related to" but scaled-up ant colonies are not.

The weirdest event of the week was America and China both self-sabotaging on chips. America is trying to sell Nvidia H20s to China and looks open to selling the vastly superior B20As to China as well despite this being an obviously crazy thing to do, and China is feeling insulted by Howard Lutnick and telling companies not to buy the H20s and maybe not even the B20As, and even looking into banning using foreign chips for inference.

We truly are in a dumb timeline.

Sites like Reddit and Substack and Youtube all have similar problems. And they're surely aware of it, but none of them have fixed it. I wonder why?

If a powerful antagonist is dumb or shortsighted enough, anyone can kill them, but what stories go out of their way to claim that their Big Bad is dumb? That's usually the role of side characters or mooks, not of the Big Bad.

Plus it takes a certain kind of survival instinct to survive for 1000 years in the first place.

I agree with the tradeoff of safety vs. convenience, but there are many types of preparation that require a one-off investment, rather than an ongoing inconvenience. Cost, though, should not matter to most antagonists, since they typically far exceed the protagonists' resources.

I also criticized HPMOR's Final Exam at the time, though for reasons of story consistency, rather than narrative.

That said, I don't think the particular kind of satisfying conclusion you wanted to see works for rationalist fiction like HPMOR. After all, the premise is that all characters, protagonists and antagonists alike, have their own spark of optimization, genre savvy, and so on. So they know how these stories are supposed to go (the Hero wins, the Dark Lord loses, etc.), imagine how they could be defeated, and preempt those scenarios as best they can.

So in a rationalist version of that game finale, the elder vampire takes precautions against having his precious box stolen; protects his coffin from tampering; has overcome his weakness to garlic, or found a workaround (like a gust of wind spell or something), or faked having the weakness in the first place; etc. etc.

The most likely way for a prepared adversary to lose in such a situation is through a surprise, an out-of-sample error. That may not be as narratively satisfying, but it makes a lot more sense than for an elder vampire to die because an average human learned about his weaknesses. As if the vampire wasn't aware of those weaknesses himself and didn't have ample time to compensate for them.