Sure. The biggest one is that when someone has poor social skills, we treat that as a thing to tolerate rather than as a thing to fix. E.g. someone shows up to a meetup and doesn't really get how conversation flow works, when it's time to talk and when it's time to listen, how to tell the difference between someone being interested in what ze has to say and someone just being polite. We're welcoming, at least outwardly, and encourage that person to keep showing up, so ze does. And the people who are both disinclined to be ranted to and who have the social ...
2a here seems like a major issue to me. I've had an essay brewing for a couple of months, about how the range of behaviors we tolerate affects who is willing to join the community. It's much easier to see the people who join than the people who are pushed away.
I argue that the way we are currently inclusive goes beyond being a safe space for weirdness, and extends into being anti-normal in a way that frightens off anyone who already has strong mainstream social skills. And that we can and should encourage social skill development while remaining a safe space.
If there's interest, I'll finish writing the longer-form argument.
This crystallization really resonated with me. I've recently noticed a social norms divide, where some people seem to perceive requests for more information as hostile (attacking their status), rather than as a sign of interest. "I do not understand your world view, tell me more" can translate as "I like you and am interested in understanding you better", or as "you are obviously wrong, please show me some weakness so that I can show how much smarter I am." Or related, consider:
...A: I'm working on X.
B: I've heard Y about X, wh
Thanks for writing this article. If the feedback helps, I found your self-disclosure much more illustrative than "gooey."
I made a point of noting non-sadness deficiencies in my status
Did you formally track your mental state at any point? The luminosity series, among other things, has gotten me thinking about the fact that my overall historical impression of my mood status has been a pretty poor indicator of my day-to-moment mood status. I can get fuzzy snapshots by reading through my scattered past writing, but am missing a lot of data. S...
An excellent parable! The argument against the Nazism meme is quite well laid out, though Colonel Frank comes off a bit like a straw man.
Unfortunately, I think this argument misses the main difficulty the General faces. It's easy to see that it would be better to replace the movement with something more sound. But policy makers cannot simply decide whether to preserve the Nazism meme. Actually changing dominant cultural ideas is a tremendously difficult problem, especially when the belief framework includes a sense of persecution. You cannot simply ...
I may be late in the game here, but I found this chapter much less effective than the previous four, and I updated hard from "This book might resonate outside the LW community" towards "This will definitely not resonate outside the LW community." Maybe the community is the target, full stop, but that seems unnecessarily modest. The thing that most bothered me was that the conversations are full of bits that feel like Eliezer unnecessarily personalizing, which reads like bragging, e.g.:
... (read more)