Comment author: witness 18 August 2015 12:35:48AM 2 points [-]

http://psychology.about.com/od/behavioralpsychology/a/schedules.htm

You cannot impose a reward schedule on yourself...

Comment author: Lumifer 11 June 2015 09:02:53PM *  2 points [-]

Alicorn again is a perfect of example of someone who clearly wanted to be socialized.

And notice how she's mostly absent on LW preferring instead to plan and arrange her dinner parties... :-P

Comment author: witness 11 June 2015 10:42:06PM 0 points [-]

If you say so, I barely come on here much. Today is the most active I've been in months.

Comment author: Vaniver 09 June 2015 03:06:11PM *  3 points [-]

This is undiplomatically expressed but may contain an important seed of useful information for anyone who would like to recentralize rationalism: meeting people's normal, boring, apey social needs is important for retention, especially at scale when it seems more tempting to split off with your favorite small percentage of the group and not put in the effort with the rest.

Indeed. Especially if the point of LW is to socialize newcomers to rationality, well, socializing newcomers is hard and not particularly glamorous work, and we're (to some extent) selecting for people who don't want to be socialized!

Comment author: witness 11 June 2015 08:59:33PM -1 points [-]

That's clearly not true. Alicorn again is a perfect of example of someone who clearly wanted to be socialized. I mean... dinner parties. Yes, I cannot get over the whole dinner party thing, get over it.

More on point though, centralization is the ultimate bug bear of the left/progressive/radicals/w.e. Look at the internecine wars of feminism or socialism or atheism. Furthermore everyone wants to address their local personal issues first and also divides who is allowed to interfere in problems among demographic or identity lines.

The success of a revolutionary movement, various religions being examples, requires both that it be more correct than what came before and that it be either equally or more satisfying. One should be careful though of copying the old systems too closely. Ethical Humanist solstice parties? Good lord what a terrible idea.

Comment author: Alicorn 08 June 2015 07:27:28PM *  22 points [-]

I think this post misses a lot of the scope and timing of the Less Wrong diaspora. A lot of us are on Tumblr now; I've made a few blog posts at the much more open group blog Carcinisation, there's a presence on Twitter, and a lot of us just have made social friendships with enough other rationalists that the urge to post for strangers has a pressure release valve in the form of discussing whatever ideas with the contents of one's living room or one's Facebook friends.

The suggestions you list amount to "ask Scott to give up his private resource for a public good, even though if what he wanted to do was post on a group blog he still has a LW handle", "somehow by magic increase readership of the EA forum", and "restructure LW to entice the old guard back, even though past attempts have disintegrated into bikeshedding and a low level of technical assistance from the people behind the website's actual specs". These aren't really "solutions".

Comment author: witness 09 June 2015 02:49:03AM 0 points [-]

I rarely bother to comment on this site but this is important meta information. Many outsider groups and rationalists in particular seem to dissolve the moment their exclusion from standard social systems is removed. The most dumbed down example I have, and I specifically desire to post as low brow and example as possible, is the episode of Malcom In The Middle titled "Morp." Its prom backwards in case you missed that. The outsider group starts an anti-prom where they do everything ironically, and amusingly have all the same status bullshit problems over who is in charge or what should even be done as the normal kids prom. Then when some random dumb popular girls come down, feel upper class girl pity, and invite them to real prom everyone but Malcolm goes.

Less Wrong and its specific section of the rationalist community has approached this same singularity. It was all about getting enough like-minded and conveniently located people to form your own samesy, dull, cookie cutter clique just like normal people. Alicorn is a prime example of posts that expose this issue, although that whole cuddle pile bullshit is a more general example.

Much like say Atheism+, the OB/LW community has exploded into a million uncoordinated fragments merely seeking to satisfy their standard social needs. Meanwhile each of these shards has the same number of useless, weird, counterproductive group beliefs as mainstream Christians. And they've accomplished almost nothing except maybe funding the useless MIRI, if one even considers that an accomplishment. EA people even came and said MIRI doesn't qualify for GiveWell.

Indeed I feel my comparison to A+ is quite apt. So much bullshit spewed about improving stuff, raising the sanity waterline vs inclusive atheism but each group did essentially the opposite of their goal.

As per my title and associated duties I here mark the collapse of "internet rationalists" as a cohesive, viable, or at all productive group. Scott has a popular blog, Elie has a full time job wasting his life but gets paid good money, and Alicorn can now throw "interesting" "dinner parties." Also innumerable Tumblr related bullshit storms. Well, some movements accomplished less.

Adieu.

Comment author: advancedatheist 20 April 2015 02:11:49AM *  9 points [-]

The big cryonics story of the week, about the Thai toddler Matheryn Naovaratpong:

The Girl Who Would Live Forever

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-girl-who-would-live-forever

Two-year-old cryogenically frozen by parents

http://www.cnet.com/news/two-year-old-cryogenically-frozen-by-parents/

The girl who could come back from the dead: Toddler who died from a brain tumour is FROZEN by parents who hope she can one day be revived by medical advances

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-3043272/The-girl-come-dead-Toddler-died-brain-tumour-FROZEN-parents-hope-one-day-revived-medical-advances.html#ixzz3XoNKDW00

PZ Myers weighs in. I guess he got bored with inflicting damage on communion wafers and accusing Michael Shermer of sexually assaulting women, and now he wants to pick on cryonicists:

How to live forever

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/04/16/how-to-live-forever/

Comment author: witness 21 April 2015 01:59:47AM -2 points [-]

You know what he does for a living don't you?

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