I think disdain for the state of the world is an interesting rationalist vice, as something that is healthy in moderation and destructive in extremis.
However I don't currently see it as happening as much as the ones above, or as damagingly. One might think of the foolish Zizians, but I think their hatred for the world comes more from leftist philosophy / animal rights background, than from rationalist vices. Their rationalist vices look more like their endless and inaccurate writing about hemispheres.
I don't agree on book reviews FWIW. I think the counterfactual is that most people don't read a book, and that a book review is, if done well, a successful 80/20 of the book. I think of book reviews as positive way that rationalists en-masse engage with parts of the world outside of their worldview.
In case you don't know, it is a widespread meme (originating here) that rationalists are like quokkas and often unable to notice that people want to harm them or are taking a conflict theory stance.
It is not true in full generality of course, but I think it is a common pattern that someone writes something intended as an attack on the status of rationalists, and rationalists falsely read it as a friend inviting them to argue, and then keep talking, to the annoyance and confusion of the original person.
1I think it is sad to move straight to a ban. I don't believe that one always needs to put in a lot of effort before being able to accurately come to the conclusion that a commenter's bad behavior is not going to get better, and you don't owe every commenter (say) a dozen hours of advice and mediation, but I think that for long-time users who have made lots of good contributions, a second chance is a good idea, along with giving a warning with a comment pointer to what they thought was bad.
1Yeah. For my taste your paragraph is still written on a slightly higher level abstraction than what is helpful for people who have never actually done any marketing of things before (i.e. says "The normal context of marketing is to pay someone to get information about your product out to potential buyers" but doesn't follow up with "For instance, how big your product is, or what shops they can buy it in"). But it is just a matter of taste.
I think it would be helpful to list information that you can spread via marketing that isn't about credit-wrothiness.
- What problem your product is trying to solve
- How much your product costs
- What your product looks like
- Who your product is for
These are all different from
- The company is trustworthy and reliable
The initial thread had a lot of miscommunication, then Wei Dai’s shortform seemed to me at least like both sides continued to mostly get negative value (though not marginal miscommunication), and now an IMO good attempt via blogpost to communicate further has still left one party believing they’re totally misrepresented.
Yeah. I’m saying the interaction has been net negative, and we shouldn’t bet on it not continuing to be :(
I don’t think 7 is neutral. But also I predict it will go up by the end of the cohort; we were still ramping up interactions with contributing writers when the form was sent out. Plus Scott Aaronson arrives in half an hour to do a gauntlet of 1-1s, Zvi Mowshowitz on Monday for similar, and Dynomight arrived after the form, so I think more value will be gained.
This is a great suggestion. However I tried for a while and found it difficult. How does one display the opposite of contrarianism? In a virtue-of-silence kind of way, by believing (and sometimes stating) simple and boring truths when relevant. The very act of putting emphasis on this is to also make it contrarian ("I am so bold as to believe the obvious and good things"); I am reminded of Hitchens' article on Salman Rushdie, which ends "And, complex though it all is, it has elements of simplicity too. One must side with Salman Rushdie not because he is an underdog but because there is no other side to be on."
Open to hearing recommendations!