Out of curiosity: Which individuals and which views? (If you fear retaliation, feel free to answer by PM rather than here.)

It's a lesson in how quickly good intentions (rational discussion and questioning authority) can lead to the evaporative cooling effect and the adoption of extreme sociological/political views while pretending that this is not taking place.

Which time period do you have in mind, here? Because "quickly" seems inaccurate. LW is old, and the decline has taken a long time.

If anything, the interesting thing with LW's decline is how slow it was, and how much attention the site continues to receive despite the lack of content. There was no major crisis that split things apart; it just got more and more stale, mostly as people graduated to more impressive and important things without replacements growing up here in the same way.

The LW community is in rapid decline and people have been leaving in large numbers for years. LW is probably in the terminal stage of decline now, not in the initial or even middle stage. If you think this isn't true you are in denial - all the poll data and post/comment data shows this to be true.

I used to be an active member of this group. This is my first comment in months. I don't know why other people left; I can only speculate and offer the reasons why I left. The reason I left was because I perceived (maybe incorrectly, I don't know) that discourse was being dominated by a handful of individuals who had very little interest in actual rational unbiased discussion and were more interested in forcing their views on everyone under the pretense of rationality.

I guess it's a lesson and a set of things to learn for the next LW-like site. It's a lesson in how quickly good intentions (rational discussion and questioning authority) can lead to the evaporative cooling effect and the adoption of extreme sociological/political views while pretending that this is not taking place.

Obvious in hindsight: one cause of massive bee death turned out to be neonicotinoids. In other words, newsflash: insecticides kill insects.

Was there any way this could have been anticipated?

Information coupled with suprise this week:

the chance of transmission during any single episode of unprotected vaginal sex is estimated at a 1 in 2,000. Thus, the odds you were infected are 0.05 x 0.0005 = 0.000025, i.e. 1 in 40,000. That's less than your lifetime risk of getting killed by lightning (if you live in the US) and less than the chance you will die in the coming week in some sort of accident. As for other STDs, the lack of symptoms is a strong indicator that you didn't catch anything.

-Medhelp

A less authoritative but more nuanced relevant analysis is hosted here

Asset prices around the world are extremely high relative to historic norms. Across all asset classes and most parts of the world, the returns on offer are measly. But most investors buying these assets are not doing so with greed as their driving emotion, rather with a sense of reluctant resignation that they need to do something more with their cash.

-Forager

Indeed, this is why I named it a crazy ideas suggestion thread. I agree with you completely and was never even trying to hide the fact that I invited only guessing and speculation, just like a lot of topics in the other "crazy ideas" threads are.

It seems to me that a pre-requisite of talking about ISIS' motivations would be actually visiting the region and being involved with them first-hand, or else basing your opinion on information gathered from direct, reputable sources.

Right now most of the discussion on the internet - especially including this post - fail to meet this criterion. They are simply opinions based on opinions repeated by other uninformed persons which also repeat opinions from other uninformed persons. If I am wrong, then provide links to your sources.

In fact you could argue that the major factor in the West's seeming inability to deal with ISIS is the failure of intelligence gathering. The CIA and other agencies have admitted they have a hard time gathering intelligence about them (this may be misdirection on part of the CIA, however).

Try unprotected sex for the first time

Do you already know what partner you'll have for this? This is literally a life-or-death situation. You can never be too paranoid.

Use RAID on ZFS. RAID is not a backup solution, but with the proper RAIDZ6 configuration will protect you against common hard drive failure scenarios. Put all your files on ZFS. I use a dedicated FreeNAS file server for my home storage. Once everything you have is on ZFS, turn on snapshotting. I have my NAS configured to take a snapshot every hour during the day (set to expire in a week), and one snapshot on Monday which lasts 18 months. The short lived snapshots lets me quickly recover from brain snafus like overwriting a file.

Long lived snapshotting is amazing. Once you have filesystem snapshots, incremental backups become trivial. I have two portable hard drives, one onsite and one offsite. I plug in the hard drive, issue one command, and a few minutes later, I've copied the incremental snapshot to my offline drive. My backup hard drives become append only logs of my state. ZFS also lets you configure a drive so that it stores copies of data twice, so I have that turned on just to protect against the remote chance of random bitflips on the drive.

I do this monthly, and it only burns about 10 minutes a month. However, this isn't automated. If you're willing to trust the cloud, you could improve this and make it entirely automated with something like rsync.net's ZFS snapshot support. I think other cloud providers also offer snapshotting now, too.

How to handle feeling low status? I mean the feeling that people don't respect you, and don't consider what you're doing or saying important or worthy. When I was young, I used to feel this way all the time. Now there are groups in which I don't feel this, but I still feel it occasionally, especially if I'm in new social situations. This is the worst feeling for me, and usually the number one reason why I sometimes lose motivation to do things.

The simple solution is to acquire more status, but I'm not really asking about that because you have to be able handle being low status before you can become high-status. Easiest way I've found for acquiring status in groups is this:

1. Pick a group
2. Become accustomed to the norms of that group
3. Signal knowledge, experience, and talent in the areas of interest of that group. Have the right opinions and interests and follow fashion as those interests and popular opinions change. Make the right lifestyle choices. Do impressive things based on those norms. It's not good to be too obvious about these things because explicitly seeking approval signals low status in many groups. There's room for freedom in most of these areas because of countersignaling reasons.

Then there are generally impressive things like having a Ph.D, a high-paying job, or being really skilled in some area which are high status in many groups.

I've noticed that some people who are very intelligent, and especially those who are socially intelligent, can often make people respect them even in new groups because they always find interesting and relevant things to say. I'm not that kind of person.