i've been working my way through the penguin great ideas series of essays at a pace of about one a week, and i've never been more of a supreme respecter for bedrock enlightenment and classical liberal principles - these guys make such passionate and intelligent arguments for them! i wonder if some part of this fading support is just that reading a lot of these thinkers used to be standard in a high school and university education (for the elite classes at least) and this is no longer the case; people might not really know why these principles are valuable any more, just that they're fashionable. in retrospect; reading js mill on freedom of speech is what truly locked that in for me as a sacred value, way back in my early 20s.

...wait, i just re-derived the "this is why classical liberal arts education is important" argument, didn't i 😅

oh hey, didn't know you had a substack! giving it a follow :)

i think the analysis here is a reasonable assessment of one part of the elephant. here are some thoughts on another part, as an asian woman whos dated pretty broadly - my longest relationship was with a west indian, but ive also dated white and asian people.

the white person i dated was from a fairly well to do white family. the asian person was, too; they were adopted as an infant by white parents. the west indian had parents who worked prestigious jobs, grew up in one of the wealthiest and whitest toronto exurbs, and went to lego camp every summer.

all of them had a way of interfacing with the world that i'd describe as something like - without baggage? without bitterness or grievance at the world. a thing some might call "white privilege", but actually if you look under the hood you might not be surprised to find that it is actually class privilege.

when i was in high school in toronto, there was this dynamic where all the most popular kids were white. you can become pretty popular no matter what your ethnicity is, but it was more like second tier popularity, and there was always something defensive in the posture of these popular minorities. they thought of themselves as second class citizens that by some luck and hard work made it to the top, but they had to hustle for it, and it did not come naturally to them; it was not their birthright.

this was the thing that was unattractive to me, this defensive posture. but when you grow up in a poor immigrant household as a minority, and you knew what it was like to go without, it's hard not to acquire it.

the interesting thing is that this is changing. asia is becoming wealthier, and when new immigrants come, they no longer start from the very bottom. there are also more 2.5gen and 3rd gen asian kids now; asian immigration into north america didn't really exist before the 70s-80s, yeah? now there's more asian kids who come from nice middle class asian american households where they went to summer camp every summer and had like, dogs and backyards and stuff. their parents likely had that defensive posture; but they themselves will not.

i find myself in a few zoomer circles these days. the most jarring thing to me at first was that the popular non-white kids do not have that defensive posture to them at all. confidence looks great on them, every bit as great as it looks on white people. (nb: i live in a college town for a fairly prestigious university, so, selection effects there.)

in a room of ones own, virginia woolf writes about what changed after her aunt died suddenly and left her "five hundred pounds per year for ever":

No force in the world can take from me my five hundred pounds. Food, house, and clothing are mine for ever. Therefore not merely do effort and labour cease, but also hatred and bitterness. I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me. So imperceptibly I found myself adopting a new attitude towards the other half of the human race.
...
By degrees fear and bitterness modified themselves into pity and toleration; and then in a year or two, pity and toleration went, and the greatest release of all came, which is freedom to think of things in themselves. That building, for example, do I like it or not? Is that picture beautiful or not? Is that in my opinion a good book or a bad? Indeed my aunt’s legacy unveiled the sky to me.

and on reading another woman novelist, at the dawn of that being a thing that was a viable career for woman:

Considering that Mary Carmichael was no genius, but an unknown girl writing her first novel in a bed-sitting-room, without enough of those desirable things, time, money, and idleness, she did not do so badly, I thought.

Give her a room of her own and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind and leave out half that she now puts in, and she will write a better book one of these days. She will be a poet, I said, putting Life’s Adventure, by Mary Carmichael, at the end of the shelf, in another hundred years’ time.

she had this whole thing, about how women wrote too defensively, and that this came from their diminished social circumstances. and that as society became more egalitarian, as more women had a room with a door that locked and five hundred a year, she expects to see more and more interesting works by women.

non-white people of dating age historically did not come from backgrounds where they had a room of their own, and the modern equivalent of five hundred a year. this will change. and i think dating preferences will soon change along with it.

i think these facts can be consistent with a theory like, the rationalists went from being 15% right wing to 20% right wing in the last ten years?

ah, i think i misspoke by saying "the community becoming right wing" in my original post. that is a strong overstatement, I'll correct that.

i agree that rationalists are still very progressive, but i think there's also been a noticeable but small rightward shift. some examples of what ive noticed outside of reflexive allergy responses to social justice posts:

• increasing endorsement/linking of right wing figures like hanania and cremieux
• at the same time, increasing... ~culture of silence? around certain controversial left-coded topics, eg what happened with nick decker
• increased distrust in the government's capacity to do things by default, more advocacy of pro-capitalist, free market and libertarian ideals. low confidence but i feel like i can kind of assume that the median rat has libertarian sympathies now in a way that i couldn't before?
• [from another comment i made] scott's description of the grey tribe characterizes members as like, feeling vaguely annoyance that the issue of gay marriage even comes up, but because of the pronatalism it feels like re-litigation of abortion rights and gay acceptance are beginning to enter the community overton window again. to me, this feels like going further than reflexive anti-wokeism. meanwhile technological solutions seem to be somewhat sidelined^[1].

i think a lot of the above examples are quite path dependent and im even sympathetic to some of their developments. im even fine if some would like to make the claim that these are all indicators of the community becoming more well-calibrated in a certain sense. but it does kind of seem like a real rightward trend to me?

i also don't think this shift will result in significantly more rats voting republican, but that's because i think voting republican is more of a signal of red tribe belonging than it is of like, actual political belief. one of my good friends from this community is a republican who hasn't voted red in the presidential elections in ages.

1. ^{^}

   sidelined in the discourse. individual people and organizations loosely affiliated with rationality are doing really cool things around reproductive tech, and this is of course much more important.

i don't actually see strawmanny sjw takes either. my claim is that the default algorithms on large social media sites tends to expose most people to anti-sjw content.

step one is providing evidence that we are now more right-wing than e.g 10 years ago

honestly this is a pretty reasonable take.

my own experience is that it has, but this could have been for pretty idiosyncratic reasons. scott in his description of the grey tribe characterizes members as like, feeling vaguely annoyance that the issue of gay marriage even comes up, right? but because of the pronatalism it feels like fundamental rights to things like abortion and gay acceptance are being re-litigated in the community now (more specifically, the re-litigation has entered the overton window, not that it's an active and ongoing debate), meanwhile technological solutions seem to be sidelined, and this has been quite dismaying for me.

huh, yeah, I think this is a pretty reasonable alternate hypothesis.

i do notice that there's starting to be promising intellectual stuff coming from a right wing perspective again. i think this trend will continue and eventually there will be some enterprising zoomer publication that cracks the nut and gains genuine mainstream respectability as some sort of darling heterodox publication.

this would mean that even if the outgroup/fargroup distinction is the dominant force at play, it doesn't indicate a permanent spiral towards right wing ideals in the community, as long as there continues to be new blood. it's still all downstream of what's going on in mainstream culture, yeah?

a theory about why the rationalist community has trended a bit more right wing over time that ive considered for a while now, though i doubt im the first one to have this thought.

a lot of the community in the late 00s/early 2010s were drawn from internet atheist circles, like me. but the thing that was selected for there wasn't nonbelief in god, or even skepticism qua skepticism, but something like, unsual amounts of irritation when one sees the dominant culture endorse a take that is obviously bad. at the time, the obviously bad but endorsed takes were things like "homosexuality is a sin and therefore bad", "intelligent design", and when christians refused to actually follow the teachings of jesus in terms of things like turning the other cheek and loving thy neighbours and not caring about the logs in their own eyes.

there will always be people who experience unusual amounts of irritation when they see the culture endorse (or passively accept) a take that is obviously bad, and this is great, because those people are great. but internet christians don't really exist anymore? instead the obviously wrong things that most internet goers see by default are terrible strawmanny sjw takes: "IQ is a fake white supremacist notion", "there are no biological differences between men and women", "indigenous people get to do the blood and soil thing but no one else gets to do that for unexplained reasons". so the people who show up now tend to be kinda mad about the sjws.

i am not saying that the sjw takes are unusually bad^[1]; lots of other popular communities have even worse takes. but bad social justice takes are unusually endorsed by cultural gatekeepers, the way e.g. k-pop stans aren't, and that's the thing that lots of protorationalists really can't stand.

after coming up with this theory, i became a lot less sad about the community becoming [edit: more] right wing. because it makes it a lot easier to believe that the new people are still my people in the most important ways. and it doesn't seem unlikely to me that the bright eyed youngsters finding the community in 2030 would be irritated by and unusually fixiated on disproving an entirely different set of popular beliefs trendy in the culture by then.

1. ^{^}

   actually, i think that the non-strawman versions of the sjw takes listed are all actually geninely really interesting and merit at least some consideration. ive been reading up on local indigenous history recently and it's the most fascinating topic i've rabbit holed in on in ages.

Do you feel comfortable sharing what notes Claude has for itself? Does it generally pass on things about how to best respond to you, or other things?

Good post. Re:

No one says “I figured out what phrasing most affects Claude's behavior, then used those to shape my system prompt".

Claude (via claude.ai) is my daily driver and I mess around with the system prompts on the regular, for both default chats and across many projects.

These are the magical sentences that I've found to be the most important:

Engage directly with complex ideas without excessive caveats. Minimize reassurance and permission-seeking.

I'm not sure if I took them from someone else (I do not generally write in such a terse way). While most tweaks generate pretty amorphous "maybe this does something?" vibes, these terms are the only ones I've seen explicitly reflected in the extended thinking on the regular, popping up more when I'm discussing controversial topics. And then I get results that are much more useful as a result.

From a recent chat for ex:

It kicks ass. No amount of asking it to act smarter, etc, has done anything remotely as effective.