> A high-status person is someone whose favour improves your expected future, or whose disfavour worsens it. Why "Status" Is a Mess Status is everywhere in human interaction but rarely named explicitly. Instead we talk around it: confidence, charisma, privilege, oppression, clout. These words gesture at something but resist definition....
Epistemic status: fairly high confidence. Say 80%. These ideas are my own and I wrote this myself, but then polished with AI. LessWrong and its surrounding ecosystem are magnetic for a very particular kind of mind: logical, system-oriented, verbally and spatially strong, unusually comfortable with abstraction. If you’re reading this...
Epistemic status: exploratory but confident. This essay presents a general framework for identifying and analyzing ideologies based on recurring structural patterns. It draws on observation, theory, and examples from across the political spectrum. The goal is to improve mental defenses against manipulative belief systems, not to discredit all ideological thinking....