Now I feel like every group that tries to do something faces a trilemma:

1) Deny your weakness. Leads to irrationality.

2) Admit your weakness. Leads to low status, and then opposition from outsiders.

3) Deny your weakness publicly, only admit them among trusted members. Leads to cultishness.

For some reason this reminds me of a scene from Game of Thrones, where one person says "knowledge is power", and the other person responds by threatening their life, and they saying "no, power is power". (Unspecific to avoid spoilers.)

The point is, some kinds of power depends on context, some don't. Generally, respecting people for their intellectual or artist skills is context-dependent. You don't get status by being good at maths among people who consider maths low status. You don't get status for writing good fan fiction among people who consider fan fiction low status. You don't get status for being able to debate rationality among people who consider rational debating low status. -- More universal sources of status are money, and ability to harm people. Because almost everyone is afraid of harm, and almost everyone needs money.

When dealing with journalists, it is useful to realize that journalists have this kind of destructive power. Dealing with a journalist is like meeting a thug in a dark street. You don't want to make him angry. If you get out alive, you should consider it a success, and not complain about small inconveniences. In a long term, if you live on that dark street, you should try to "befriend" the thug, so that he will not attack you, and may even agree to attack people you don't like.

How specifically to "befriend" journalists? Well, this is exactly what PR is about. You treat them with respect, invite them on conferences when you give them free food, and offer help with writing articles. Because they usually have small salaries and have to write a lot of articles, so by giving them free food and making part of their work for them, you make them happy. If you keep them hungry and unrespected, they may randomly attack you.

Eliezer seems to be really really bad at acquiring or maintaining status. I don't know how aware of this fault he is, since part of the problem is that he consistently communicates as if he's super high status.

Scott Alexander seems to be libertarian too, or at least he seems to like libertarianism more than any other political ideology.

Scott Alexander as in Anti-Libertarian FAQ Scott Alexander?

He's a liberal. You probably think he's a libertarian because there aren't many liberals anymore -- most of the parts of their demographic that ever show up on the internet have gone over to Tumblr totalitarianism instead.

(There's probably a lesson in here about the Dark Arts: don't call up what you can't put down. You summon Jon Stewart, you'll get Julius Streicher within a decade.)

This will not work, to briefly explain why I think so:

For the intended audience of the article, Libertarianism is unusual, Liberalism is normative. If the community was completely liberal, its liberalism would not have more than one mention or so in the article, certainly it would not make the title.

The prevalence of Liberals and Socialists, no matter how emphasized, can not lead to a rebranding as long as there is a presence of Libertarians in a fraction greater than expected. Indeed even if Libertarians were precisely at the expected fraction, whatever that would be, they might still get picked up by people searching for weird, potentially bad things about this weird, potentially bad "rationality movement".

As evidence of this note no journalist so far considers the eeire near total absence of normal conservatives who make up half of the population of the United States, the country most strongly represented, to be an unusual feature of the community. And furthermore if they somehow made up half of the community or some other "representative" fraction, this would be seen as a very strange, unusual perhaps even worrying feature of the community.

Hypothetically the opposite effect should be seen as well, if somehow this place was 100% liberal, yet still in the weird, potentially bad mental bin of journalists, its weirdness and badness would lead to its liberalism not being mentioned. For an example of this consider if you associate the Jim Jones' Family, the mass suicide of which gave rise to the phrase "drinking the cool aid", with liberalism or socialism.

The only way to inoculate would be to loudly denounce and perhaps even purge libertarians. Perhaps a few self-eviscerating heartfelt admissions of "how rationality cured my libertarianism" for good measure. This wouldn't actually result in no Libertarians being present of course, though it would dent their numbers, but it would provide a giant sign of "it doesn't make sense to use this fact about the community". This doesn't always work, since denouncing the prominence of witches or making official statements about how they are unwelcome has been read as evidence for the presence of witchcraft by journalists in the past as well.

Beyond the question of if it would work, I would like to more generally disapprove of this approach, since it would rapidly hasten the ongoing politicization of the rationality community, badly harming the art in the process. To make a step beyond that I will also say that I think many libertarian rationalists carry interesting insight, precisely because of their ideology.

Predictionbook has been linked to and discussed here before. I'm one of the (few) active users, and I'm curious why more people who are regulars here don't use it or don't use it frequently. People who don't use Predictionbook, why don't you? Part of why I am curious is that if there are interface or similar issues then now might be a good time to speak up since Jayson Virissimo is working on a similar service here.

Further thoughts on Imaginary Expertise...

I'm currently studying a final-year undergrad course in the mathematical underpinnings of statistics. This course has three prerequisite courses, all of which have the word "statistics" or "statistical" in the title. While the term has obviously come up beforehand, it was only a couple of chapters ago that we were given a formal definition for what a "statistic" is, (in the context of parameter sufficiency).

It occurred to me that if someone was ignorantly mouthing off about statistics, and you wanted to shut them up, you could do a lot worse than to ask "so, what exactly is a statistic?"

I've noticed beforehand that "so what exactly is money?" has a similar effect for economics pseudo-blowhards, and "so what exactly are numbers?" for maths. It's worth noting that these questions aren't even the central questions of those disciplines, (insofar as such broad categories have central questions), and they don't necessarily have canonical answers, but completely blanking on them seems indicative of immature understanding.

I've now taken to coming up with variants of these for different disciplines I think I know about.

Good futurology is different from storytelling in that it tries to make as few assumptions as possible. How many assumptions do we need to allow cryonics to work? Well, a lot.

• The true point of no return has to be indeed much later than we believe it to be now. (Besides does it even exist at all? Maybe a super-advanced civilization can collect enough information to backtrack every single process in the universe down to the point of one's death. Or maybe not)

• Our vitrification technology is not a secure erase procedure. Pharaohs also thought that their mummification technology is not a secure erase procedure. Even though we have orders of magnitude more evidence to believe we're not mistaken this time, ultimately, it's the experiment that judges.

• Timeless identity is correct, and it's you rather than your copy that wakes up.

• We will figure brain scanning.

• We will figure brain simulation.

• Alternatively, we will figure nanites, and a way to make them work through the ice.

• We will figure all that sooner than the expected time of the brain being destroyed by: slow crystal formation; power outages; earthquakes; terrorist attacks; meteor strikes; going bankrupt; economy collapse; nuclear war; unfriendly AI, etc. That's similar to the longevity escape velocity, although slower: to survive, you don't just have to advance technologies, you have to advance them fast enough.

All that combined, the probability of working out is really darn low. Yes, it is much better than zero, but still low. If I were to play Russian roulette, I would be happy to learn that instead of six bullets I'm playing with five. However, this relief would not stop me from being extremely motivated to remove even more bullets from the cylinder.

The reason why the belief in afterlife is not just neutral but harmful for modern people is that it demotivates them from doing immortality research. Dying is sure scary, we won't truly die, so problem solved, let's do something else. And I'm worried about cryonics becoming this kind of a comforting story for transhumanists. Yes, actually removing one bullet from the cylinder is much much better than hoping that Superman will appear in the last moment, and stop the bullet. But stopping after removing just one bullet isn't a good idea either. Some amount of resources are devoted to the conventional longevity research, but as far as I understand, we're not hoping to achieve the longevity escape velocity for currently living people, especially adults. Cryonics appear to be our only chance to avoid death, and I would be extremely motivated to try to make our only chance as high as we can possibly make it. And I don't think we're trying hard.

I haven't seen anything quite as drastic as the events in the article, but as a current college student, it definitely feels familiar. To me it feels like there is a very strict divide between people who have "bought into" the social justice / PC memeplex and people who have not. I don't necessarily mean that these groups don't intermingle. I mean simply that I could pretty much label my friends' alignments on these issues on a binary scale. Non-PC people will usually be okay with e.g. someone using the word "gay" as a general term of dislike. It also seems like there is very little meaningful dialogue between these groups. When a PC person talks about these issues, they will typically use words like "privilege" and "oppression" which will make it clear what side they are on. A non-PC person will usually not use these terms or verbally surround them with scare quotes. Once people see that a person is on the opposite side as them, they will see them as the enemy and not really make an effort to find common ground, writing them off as "just another one of those PC people" or "just an ignorant privileged person". Of course, within the classroom, PC rules.

The other day I witnessed a big fight within my friend-group on social media because someone referred to a gay friend of ours (not privy to the conversation) as having a "gay voice". Someone said this was offensive, someone told that person to stop being so politically correct, and a vocal argument ensued.

Why choose one? If you aren't sure which is worse, maybe you should assume that they are about equal. Then you should reduce total consumption. Is eliminating one option going to help you do that? Or will the other grow to fill the void?