I suppose it could be so. It doesn't matter really, since the end result is the same. Still, I doubt it because Lesswrong is overwhelmingly left wing (and continues to be according to the polls - the right wing and NRx voices belong to just a few very prolific accounts.) And pretty much all the founding members of Lesswrong and, going back further, transhumanism in general, were of a certain sort which I hesitate to call "left" or "liberal" but... - socialists, libertarians, anarchists, all those were represented, and certainly many early users were hostile to social justice's extremeties, which is to be expected among smart people who are exposed to leftie stupidity much more often than other kinds of stupidity... but those were differences in implementation. We all essentially agreed on the core principles of egalitarianism and not hurting people, and agreed that prejudice against race and gender expression is bad (which was an entirely separate topic from whether they're equal in aptitude), and that conservatives, nationalists, and those sort of people were fundamentally wrongheaded in some way. It wasn't controversial, just taken for granted that anyone who had penetrated this far into the dialogue believed that these things to be true.... in the same sense that we continue to take for granted that no one here believes in a literal theist God. (And right now, I know many former users have retreated into other more obscure spin off forums, and everything I said here pretty much remains true in those forums and blogs.)

But I'm less interested in who broke the walled garden / started eternal september / whatever you want to call it (after all, I'm not mad that they came here, I got to learn about an interesting philosophy) and more interested in the meta-level principle: per my understanding of Neoreactionary philosophy, when one finds oneself in the powerful majority, one aught to just go ahead and exert that power and not worry about the underdog (which I still don't agree with but I'm not sure why). And, homogeneity is often more valuable than diversity in many cases, that's something I've actually kind of accepted.

Right, but you're not literally disregarding the consequences - Krishna was very much in favor of consequentialism over deontological constraints (In this scenario, the deontological constraint was "thou shalt not murder" and Krishna said "except for the greater good") ... at least within that particular dialogue. The consequences are all that matter.

What you're doing is not being attached to the consequences. To put it in effective altruist terms, disregarding the ego makes you favor utility over warm fuzzies: Warm fuzzies appeal to your ego, which is tied to the visceral sensation that helping has on you, rather than the actual external objective measures of helping.

(Ultimately, of course, squeezing philosophy out of thousand year old texts is a little like reading tea leaves, and the chosen interpretation generally says more about the reader than the writer. It's not a coincidence that my interpretation happens to line up with what I think anyway.)

The cultural meme for non-violence for vedics is pretty strong. As far as I know, it's the only culture for which vegetarianism is a traditional moral value (though I suppose the availability of lentils might have contributed to making that a more feasible option.)

Sure! But I think theism is irrelevant in this case. And this isn't mine, just the standard folksy Hinduism, the sort of wisdom you might get from a religious old lady. (And non-Abrahamic religions often do not map well to "atheism/theism" dichotomies. You won't really capture the way Indians think about differences in beliefs by using those terms, it's often not an important distinction to them.)

Now, keep in mind that a lot of what I'm saying is modern hindu exegenesis of the Gita. As in, this is what the Gita means to many Hindus - I can't speak to whether this interpretation actually reflects what people in ~5 BC would have read in it.

In the story Arjun doesn't want to kill his cousins (they're at war over who will rule) because he loves them and violence is wrong. We have to assume for the sake of argument that Arjun should kill his cousins.

Post-Upanishads and spread of Buddhism, a recurring theme in Vedic religion is duty vs. detachment..

Arjun first argues that he's emotionally attached to his cousins and therefore can't fight, and Krishna shoots it down with all the usual arguments against attachment that you're likely quite familiar with.

Then Arjun argues that it's his duty not to kill, that it would be a sin. Krishna replies with some arguments which could fairly be called consequentialist.

Finally Arjun argues that he's detached from the world and therefore he has no need to do bloody things, because he doesn't care about the outcome of the stupid war in the first place. To that, Krishna says "You do your duty without being attached to the consequences."

That bolded phrase is taken as the central, abstract principle of the Gita...it's the part people cherry pick, and we like to ignore or minimize the fact that it was originally spoken in support of violence. If you are feeling sad about a failure, an elderly person might come and try to console you with this aphorism. That idea has a life bigger than the Gita itself, growing up I heard it from people who've never read the Gita. (Just like many Christians don't actually read the bible, but have various notions about what it says).

Which is how it relates to our discussion - You can be very driven and truth+outcome oriented without actually tying your ego to the outcome. Loss of ego need not imply loss of drive.

We have very similar threads running parallel right now. We both converged on the important thing being that ego is tied to something outside of oneself, rather than self-referential self conception. I called it "truth+outcome orientation" and you called it "external". Do you have thoughts on my conceptualization of it?

Unlike yours, I think ego size is irrelevant. A person with a small ego cares not what others think, nor do they really care what they think of themselves and thus live free from pain and guilt but also pride... however, they can still care about underlying reality a lot in a consequentialist sense.

Whereas, a person with a very large ego might have virtue-ethics style self perceptions tied to how they behaved in a certain scenario, which comes out to the same thing if they're philosophically consequentialists. Essentially rendering ego size irrelevant except as a personality difference which will manifest in social presentation and emotions.

Your external vs internal dichotomy means "self opinion vs. others opinions".

But truth+outcome orientation with low ego means "focusing primarily on the effect you have on reality, disregarding both the opinions of others and your self perceptions."

and truth+outcome orientation with high ego means "tying your self perception to the effect you have on reality, disregarding the opinions of others, and not trying to trick your own self perception but still being emotionally driven by it."

Hmm....yes, guilt and shame distinction does get close to what I mean.

But you must also add to this mix, the meta-cognitive skill of not fooling yourself to avoid guilt, to get the truth orientation I'm talking about. (Even the shameless who are perfectly happy displeasing others will get defensive and rationalize to fool themselves if you imply they are guilty by their own standards.)

Those with shame hide away from the judgement of others. Most people with guilt orientations will look for ways to justify to themselves, pull out all the arguments to avoid being ashamed in front of the their own mind rather than other people. In truth orientation, you don't worry about whether you feel guilty, you worry about whether you are and you additionally have the cognitive toolkit to avoid accidentally misrepresenting reality to spare your own feelings.

(Assuming large egos. A truth+outcome oriented person with a small ego isn't obsessing about guilt or non-guilt in the first place, they just notice the feeling of guilt as a useful indicator (of truth) and then act (for the preferred outcome). But the end result is the same regardless of the size of ones ego. (Whereas a person with a small ego who isn't truth+outcome oriented will just placidly dismiss the feeling of guilt but never really act.))

This is getting very Gita-esque isn't it. Which is interesting, because in many ways the Gita is intended as a rebuttle to the contemporary rapidly spreading Buddhism...

Honestly, for me personally it's not that I have a small ego - It's that my ego would be more offended if I was stuck in the sort of backwaters where I was the smartest person. I want to be the very best, not feel like the very best. To end up the stereotypical tragic genius who complains about how no one they know really understands or thinks like them, while everyone around them quietly smirks at how self important and arrogant those words sound, is not only sub-optimal but also a sort of failure, a blow to my ego.

Lesswrong (the name less wrong is relevant), transhumanism, all that is about being perfect, in a sense. We're striving to eliminate the minor imperfections in our thinking, so that we can actually be right all the time.

I don't think it has to do with "ego" so much as orientation towards truth and outcomes. The ego is attached to actually being right and actually being successful. Some people find it easy to admit to being wrong because it offends their ego more to be wrong than it does to admit to being wrong. The ego is still firmly in place, it's just less able to deceive itself due to the sort of mind it is piloting.

I guess what I'm saying is that ego, and the arrogance/humility spectrum in general, isn't a good model to describe the difference. You can be humble or arrogant to various degrees, but your orientation towards truth is a separate dimension.

For example, an extremely arrogant person might feel bad when faced with someone better than them, but if they have the truth orientation they can't take that feeling away by shunning that person because their ego cares about truth and won't let itself be tricked that way. So instead they hungrily observe that person and eat up their good qualities. And an extremely humble person with a truth orientation will do the exact same thing, simply because they do care about truth and outcomes.

And when these two people, humble and arrogant people with truth orientations meet, they hopefully understand each other and see that the differences in each other's arrogance/humility related mannerisms is just a superficial personality trait, and not that important.