You might as well say, "if everyone could just get along, everyone would be able to get along." Everyone has different preferences, and sometimes they are competing preferences. You can put this all in a big matrix, and compute the eigenvectors to find the cliques. Naturally, if my preference is for you to do well, and your preference is for me to do well, we'll want to collude. Naturally, if everyone preferred for everyone to do well—or at the very least were neutral on others' wellbeing—the eigenvectors would be nonnegative and there would be no reason to collude at the expense of others. But there are negative entries among eigenvectors (e.g. the murderers in prison), so there are groups colluding at the expense of others.

Also, I don't think your social collusion problem is as bad as you might think. If your reputation is negatively affected by association, and you no longer like the association, why have you not broken off from it? People do not punish others for a history of association—especially when done in ignorance—very much, especially if you publicly denounce or expose them.

I haven't been able to find the spin-1/6 anyon's partition function, so mine could be wrong.

A couple things to add that don't deserve to be in the main text:

1. The Taylor series for the $Z_6$ partition function is $1+x-x^3-x^4+O\left(x^5\right)$, which means it actively learns "not this" the second, and third times around. This is why we see a dip ($1+x$) when $x<1$, followed by a steep rise in loss ($-x^2-x^3$) as $x>1$, and then a tapering out.

2. The $Z_1$ and $Z_2$ partition functions correspond to bosons (e.g. photons) and fermions (e.g. electrons) in physics. Perhaps $Z_6$ corresponds to an exotic particle the theorists have yet to classify.

I've only have it happen with one person... but it happens every time with that particular person. I've mostly stopped debating with them.

What about when they say, "you're strawmanning me!" and slightly change their argument? You believe their argument from two minutes ago was wrong, and that they are now intentionally misleading you so they can maintain their position and eternally shift the burden of disproof back onto you.

Debbie is actually red-blue colorblind, so she thinks her graph looks normal.

I might sound a bit daft here, but do theoretical physicists actually understand what they're talking about? My main concern when trying to learn is it feels like every term is defined with ten other terms, and when you finally get to the root of it the foundations seem pretty shaky. For example, the spin-statistics theorem says particles with half-integer spins are fermions, and full-integer spins are bosons, and is proved starting from a few key postulates:

1. Positive energy
2. Unique vacuum state
3. Lorentz invariance
4. "Locality/Causality" (all fields commute or anti-commute).

The fractional quantum Hall effect breaks Lorentz invariance (1+1D universe instead of Lorentz' 3+1D), which is why we see anyons, so obviously the spin-statistics theorem doesn't always hold. However, the fourth postulate shows up everywhere in theoretical physics and the only justification really given is that, "all the particles we see seem to commute or anti-commute"... which is the entire point the spin-statistics theorem is trying to prove.

As I like to say, ignorance does not excuse a sin, it makes two sins: the original, and the fact you didn't put in the effort to know better. So, if you really do just possess a better method of communication—for example, you prefer talking disagreements out over killing each other—you're completely justified in flexing superior on the clueless outsiders. This doesn't mean it will always be effective, just that you're not breaking the "cooperate unless defected against" strategy, and the rest of rational society shouldn't punish you for it.

The current education system focuses almost exclusively on the bottom 20%. If we're expecting a tyranny of the majority, we should see the top and bottom losing out. Also, note that very few children actually have an 80% chance of ending up in the middle 80%, so you would really expect class warfare not a veil of ignorance if people are optimising specifically for their own future children's education.

Yeah, I don't see why either. LessWrong allegedly has a utilitarian culture, and simply from the utilitarian "minimize abuse" perspective, you're spot on. Even if home-schooling has similar or mildly lower rates of abuse, the weight of that abuse is higher.