Editing Essays into Solstice Speeches: Standing offer: if you have a speech to give at Solstice or other rationalist event, message me and I'll look at your script and/or video call you to critique your performance and help

It's not broad cynicism, it's a particular view of how corrupted hardware works, borne out by small-group politics everywhere. This says that it is strongly favored to believe yourself to be type 2 while actually being type 3, sufficiently so that to a first approximation anyone who believes themselves to be type 2 is incorrect, and that no one can ever verify that they, let alone anyone else, are genuinely type 2, and so must assume that if they appear to be, they are actually type 3.

It does not say that about type 4. The strong incentives/forces there don't apply, because it's a more complicated move much harder to do implicitly. It is very difficult to be making a move specifically to grab status by pretending to be something else and not notice you're doing it, which type 4 requires and type 2 does not. Type 4 is possible in a way type 3 is not; there is no strong force pushing away from it. But there is a moderate force pushing away from that to 'type 5': people able to disentangle their reasoning from status concerns and favoring status concerns anyway.

Even if #2 is extremely rare it's still the best of both worlds and something that we all should aspire too, isn't it?

No, I don't think it is. Even if everyone could do #2 reliably, that would be a local optimum but globally wasteful.

Person #2 effectively doesn't exist. That's what it feels like to be person #3; you think you're person #2, and for 95% of people, you're wrong. I'm skeptical of #4, too; that's not what that kind of social-move-maker typically feels like internally either.

Basically all the ways LessWrong is different from Reddit are structured, very explicitly, to move it away from the pole of blunt honesty and not taking offense back toward the general population. I think the only feature LW has introduced since LW 2.0 that pushes in favor of either of those things is the introduction of agreement karma distinct from overall karma, and that's a fairly weak push.

A good culture is somewhere in between, but closer to A than B. Forum B encourages people to equivocate and utter half-truths and forget what it means to tell the truth or to lie. Much better to have confrontations, edit older comments when you've changed your mind, and have your faced rubbed into your current internal contradictions; then you will at least notice them, and that's the necessary prerequisite to correcting them, or if you won't/can't, observing they make you unreliable at reasoning in whatever matter presents itself.

Ironic, considering Duncan's one of the first three names that come to mind as perpetrators. Fortunately his attempts to push boundaries resulted in him being pushed off LW rather than successfully destroying its norms.

Though my perception is that they did considerable damage to norms I care about that were already very vulnerable. I was only paying close attention to the dispute with Said_Achmiz but I observed a larger pattern of decreasing honesty and forthrightness beyond that, with Duncan as one of the main vocal champions of the change. For reasons that sounded plausibly good which I think he believes in. But which I have never been confident are his true rejection, or that of others.

Absolutely not. From my experience, not at all. I have turned down sex with someone I'd been on a date with, found attractive, and was generally interested in because they were, that day, boring me enough that the attraction couldn't stick.

Other things like kinks and fantasies can get more flexible far easier than the appeal of a partner. Conversely, an intellectually appealing partner makes everything else more flexible, including beauty standards and what seems hot.

I guess that disqualifies him as an intellectual? But when he does the same thing on purpose that the people he's accusing do by accident - ignore any subtleties or higher-order effects and just go with the simple idea - I submit that it makes him part of the category he's described. If you don't want to be grouped with the people you're insulting, stay well clear of behaving like them.

As someone with plenty of experience being full of contempt for just about everyone and (mostly) not being a bastard about it, I kind of think the most helpful lens is less philosophical per se and more practical and ~political. Namely, libertarianism and the knowledge problem.

The world is full of idiots. The country is full of idiots. The government is full of idiots. The corporations are full of idiots. The charities, the social media feeds, the buses and trains, they're all full of idiots. Some of those are more true than they were twenty years ago but they were all true then too.

But they still know their own lives better than us. They do things that are objectively kind of terrible like get payday loans and buy tons of lottery tickets, but almost always it's because the better options are blocked off to them or not as good as they look, even if it's not possible to explain why to an outsider like us even if we were to poke our nose in and ask. (And they wanted to answer for some ungodly reason.)

Libertarianism mostly likes to talk about how the government should butt out and let people live their lives. And this is true, it should. But the same argument also applies to elitists. Yes, they're doing a bunch of dumb shit, and probably if they were smarter they would change some of it and make their lives better, but you can't just drop yourself into their lives and 'fix' things and expect it to work out. Some of it would make things worse, some of it would theoretically make things better but only if you changed their entire social sphere at once too, and some of it you wouldn't notice you'd fucked up for years. And mostly that's still true if "drop yourself into their lives" is replaced with "give insistent well-meaning advice" or "ruminate on how they're idiots and if they just listened to you, the superior person, they'd be better". (Okay, the practical issues prohibiting getting any positive impact from ruminating are mostly more obvious than this. But this too.)

Calibrating appropriately is hard. You do, sometimes, want to give advice once or twice. If you figure out when to do that and when to back off, tell me, please. What advice I could try to give there is neither specific nor wonderfully effective so I won't bother.

But I think this is generally pretty effective at being, technically, contemptuous of most strangers you interact with but mostly keeping it from being something they notice or one of the top three things you notice when having a conversation with them, and that's pretty good at not encouraging behaving contemptuously, and that's pretty good at avoiding steeping in contempt until your standards for lack of contempt rise, and then apply to precisely seven people in the world none of whom is you. (Which I think is a risk here.) And that's, I suspect, at least what you need short-term.