Just wanted to say, Palisade is among my favorite orgs. They seem to have their eye on the ball both strategically and tactically to me.

Huh, I just re-looked over the final section after reading your comment here. The final section seems to have a fairly reasonable epistemic status, and the 3 bullets seem pretty reasonable to me. Curious to hear what you disagree about them?

The version of Ben's argument I'd make is "put some effort into the top-line of your review to somehow summarize either what your overall takeaways were, or, summarize why someone might want to read your review in full."

(We could leave the compression to the Machines but I don't think they'd do that good a job yet. It is plausible they could do a good enough job next year, but, I also kinda think LW should err on the side of not outsourcing that sort of thing.)

This is more of a review of the Concept of Wholesomeness than this post, but:

Earlier this year, I burned out. 

I spent awhile vaguely trying to be "wholesome" as a counterbalance to the various things that had led to the burnout. 

This did not really work – in practice, what I tried to do was do things that were "wholesome-coded", many of which ended up being more like "fulfilling social obligations" than pursuing things that were good for me.

In the end, I fixed this more by filling my life up with industrious side projects, which was in some sense even more monomaniacally focused on productivity (which is the sort of thing that had led to the burnout).

I don't think that is actually a mark against Wholesomeness, just a mark against applying it the particular way I was trying to apply it, and maybe chasing the "symbol" of wholesomeness over the substances. I eventually replaced or supplemented "be wholesome" with "find things I want, and am excited by, and do those."

I do nonetheless think wholesomeness is good, I just think it requires actually paying attention to what it actually means, in a given context.

Very Slightly More In-Depth feedback:

I have been thinking "someone(s) should make a 'Universal Paperclips', but a bit more realistic or framed around today's situation."

I think I would be initially somewhat confused about what's going on. (Universal Paperclips was also kinda confusing about what's going on at first, which was part of it's charm, but, there's at least one central thing which was "produce paperclips")

I'm not sure what that translates into, I also haven't gotten far enough to have an opinion about the overall arc of the game (literally just clicked a few buttons, sharing first impressions before I get back to work :P). But, that was my first ~minute worth of experience.

First nitpick but easily-fixed reaction: the text appears on the screen slowly (which is always a bit annoying for fast readers), but also reveals itself horizontally rather than vertically, so I can't even finish reading a line as it appears.

I'm actually a bit surprised these frames were new for you-in-particular, curious which bits were helpful?

Maybe I should spell out some background/inside-baseball context:

In the past year, I've been aware of some waves of effort to coordinate ~hundreds of people to donate to political candidates, that successfully raised a lot of money, generally through a mix of circulating google docs making arguments, and manually DMing thousands of people through existing social networks.

It was all pretty lowkey, for the reasons stated in this post.

This accomplished some pretty impressive stuff. When I write this post, I'm not like "it'd be cool if some magical rational/EA political arm came out of nowhere." I'm like "It'd be cool if the existing political networks that are actually pretty competent, also developed some processes for group epistemics and integrity (while handling the reality that it's operating in an adversarial environment). Here are some ideas on how to do that."

A lot of the comments here seem to be responding to this like a pie-in-the-sky ideation. I'm approaching it from a pretty brass tacks practical mindset, but it makes sense if that feels weird to most readers.

Yeah my statement as-worded is too strong. (Actually, upon reflection I am surprised I didn't trigger Oliver coming in and saying "WHAT!? Ray that is wrong!")

Yeah, posts saying "hey, here are some reasons I think this should be a norm" are extremely fine. Posts doing that while also using emotionally laden language are, like, kinda fine depending on context. Posts that are directly wielding shame and implying anyone who disagrees with the post is a bad person in ways that feel socially hard to push back against are generally not fine. 

taking the existence of a community of sane, reasonable, and mostly value-aligned participants as a given

Yeah. I'd phrase it as "reasonably sane, reasonably reasonable, and reasonably value-aligned." I don't think the LW commentariat is perfect, but, I think they are within a basin where "aiming for a sane political coalition" is a reasonble aspirational goal. (and, while I'd like to succeed at the most ambitious version of the thing, all it needs to succeed at is "be a better use of people's time/attention than other things" (given that there are pretty compelling alternatives).

I know a lot of people around here with similar-ish political goals, and similar-ish ideals of what you might hope a rationalist political bloc to look like, such that "okay, translate that into implementation details" feels like the right step.