All of Torchlight_Crimson's Comments + Replies

This can be tested by estimating how much IQ screens off race/gender as a success predictor, assuming that IQ tests are not prejudiced and things like the stereotype threat don't exist or are negligible.

And assuming IQ captures everything relevant about the difference.

In which case the AI splits the transaction into 2 transactions, each just below a gazillion.

0Lumifer
I'm talking about contemporary-level-of-technology trading systems, not about future malicious AIs.

But I am confused about what this means in practice, due to arguments like "contacts are very important for business success, rich people get much more contacts than poor people, yet business success is strongly correlated with genetic parent wealth" and such.

Keep in mind that people's genes tend to correlate with their parents' genes. So even if success in wealth is determined by genetics, we would still expect wealth to correlate with your parents' wealth.

0Stuart_Armstrong
Yes, but this means that a lot of very rich people are very incorrect as to what is important for their wealth. Which is possible. But you have to posit a lot people being in error about things they should know about, for the heavy-hereditibility picture to fit.

I know, but the way it does so is bizarre (IQ seems to have a much stronger effect between countries than between individuals).

Why is this bizarre? It simply means that high IQ individuals don't capture all the value they create.

Edit: another possibility is that smart people tend to move to places that were doing well. I believe there was a thread in the comments to SSC a while back where it was discovered that the average IQ of American States correlated with a rather naively constructed measure of "favorable geography", e.g., points for being on the coast and for having navigable rivers.

6Stuart_Armstrong
Consider that if it had been the opposite - IQ was more a personal benefit than a country benefit - we'd be explaining it as "obviously smart people benefit themselves at the expense of others". Being able to explain something or its opposite isn't explaining, unless we dig deeper.

but Nazism and Soviet communism were very different things.

In what way?

Nope. E.g., if some new political movement comes out for Jew-killing, totalitarian control, military expansionism, moral traditionalism, and fostering the Master Race, I'll be very happy saying that yup, they're basically Nazis even if they don't use that term.

Ok, if a movement endorses their entire platform, it's safe to call them Nazis. Except that isn't the case for Golden Dawn, which was the movement under discussion.

Another would be that teaching from a particular perspec

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1gjm
Many ways. Here are some examples. The NSDAP had the word "socialist" in its name but didn't actually do much in the way of nationalization and communalization, whereas the Soviet communists did. The Nazis had racial purity at the centre of their rhetoric and policy, whereas the Soviet communists did not. (There was plenty of antisemitism in the USSR, but it was less explicit and less central and e.g. the USSR never made a systematic attempt to exterminate all its Jewish people.) Both were religiously oppressive but in quite different ways: the Communists tried to wipe out religion completely, whereas the Nazis tried (with limited success) to align it with their dogmas. The things I listed aren't their "entire platform" -- you may have forgotten that that was a point you were making a few comments upthread. Sure. Because the question you asked -- sorry, I mean the accusation you made -- was not about the Golden Dawn. You claimed that my use of the word "Nazi" is circular and content-free because it amounts to saying "Nazis are those who hold the positions Nazis hold", so I answered that accusation. The extent to which the teachers attempt to get the pupils to adopt that perspective, and the means used to do it. For instance, schoolteachers would make life unpleasant for children who had not joined the Hitler Youth. And here are a couple of questions taken from Nazi-era school mathematics textbooks. "A plane on take off carries 12 bombs, each weighing ten kilos. The aircraft makes for Warsaw , the centre of international Jewry. It bombs the town. On take off with all bombs on board and a fuel tank containing 1500 kilos of fuel the aircraft weighed 8 tonnes. When it returned from the crusade, there were still 230 kilos of fuel left. What is the weight of the aircraft when empty?" "The construction of a lunatic asylum costs 6 million marks. How many houses at 15,000 marks each could have been built for that amount?" It seems clear that what's going on here is th

Except then you'd have to use some other criterion to determine the "obvious" cases.

0Good_Burning_Plastic
I think Otto Wels, Ernst Thälmann and Ludwig Kaas would be the most obvious non-Nazis.

Think of it as an exercise in looking at the incentives people in various situations have. You may want to start by examening the sentence:

At least the corporations have to deliver to their customers on some level, or they go out of business.

I meant not "everyone agrees with this" but "many people with a wide variety of political positions agree with this". And I didn't intend to imply that everyone [sic] in their programme other than "kill the Jews" is in that category.

What do you mean by a "wide variety of political positions"? Your definition of "Nazi" currently amounts to "supports the parts of the Nazi platform only Nazis support". Now obviously stated this way, it is clearly a circular, hense useless, definition. So we ar... (read more)

1gjm
Not quite. For instance, Soviet-style communism was pretty big on totalitarianism, which is certainly a distinctively Nazi trait, but Nazism and Soviet communism were very different things. Nope. E.g., if some new political movement comes out for Jew-killing, totalitarian control, military expansionism, moral traditionalism, and fostering the Master Race, I'll be very happy saying that yup, they're basically Nazis even if they don't use that term. (That's not meant to be a necessary-and-sufficient condition; just an example.) This seems to be your default assumption, to which you fall back as soon as you think you've ruled out any single alternative. It's still wrong, just as it was before. For instance: the NSDAP programme includes the abolition of unearned income -- interest, rent, etc. I think that's a terrible idea, but finding that an organization advocates the same idea wouldn't much dispose me to call it "Nazi". (Perhaps it should -- it's a rather unusual idea as well as probably a bad one. So maybe I could be persuaded. But the fact that I'd need persuading indicates that I am not using the word the way you say I am.) That word "presumably" would be one key difference. Another would be that teaching from a particular perspective is (possibly bad but) not the same thing as brainwashing.
0Jiro
That doesn't follow. You can do the comparison of obvious Nazis and obvious non-Nazis to see what the Nazis support, then use the information from that to assess whether the non-obvious cases are nazis.

Well, that's why the things that tend to get described as specifically Nazi

Where by "specifically Nazi" you mean "the parts that gjm doesn't approve off".

that have pretty wide support from all quarters.

Speak for yourself. I very much don't approve of point 20 from their program. "The state is to be responsible for a fundamental reconstruction of our whole national education program" is a nice-ish sounding way of saying, "we will ram whatever propaganda we want down all kids' thoughts and force you to pay for it".

0gjm
You keep doing this. You keep being wrong. You should stop it. I fear you misunderstand me (and someone else seems to have misunderstood the same way, so presumably I should have been clearer). I meant not "everyone agrees with this" but "many people with a wide variety of political positions agree with this". And I didn't intend to imply that everyone in their programme other than "kill the Jews" is in that category. "The state is to be responsible for a fundamental reconstruction of our whole national education program" could, in isolation, mean anything from "we're going to build a lot of new schools and fund a lot of new teachers" to "we're going to close down the education system entirely" via "we're going to turn the schools into brainwashing units" and "we're going to change the schools from brainwashing units to places of actual education". In the Nazis' case, it turned out to be the brainwashing one, and no reasonable person would support that. And, lo, I think "brainwash all the children to agree with the State's position" would generally be regarded as a characteristically Nazi policy, though of course totalitarians of all stripes do that -- and this is consistent with both Lumifer's analysis (something qualifies to be thought of as characteristically Nazi iff the Nazis did it and it was really bad) and mine (something qualifies to be thought of as characteristically Nazi iff the Nazis did it and most others didn't). Actually I think both Lumifer's analysis and mine are right; something is easier to pigeonhole as Nazi if (1) you see it done often by people who aren't Nazis and (2) you feel positively about it. I'll add another: once Nazism is associated in everyone's mind mostly with nationalism, Jew-killing, and war-making, any given other thing is going to be easier to think of as "Nazi" if it feels like it resembles those.
8Glen
The closest thing to rationality content I can pull from this is "just because a thing looks good, doesn't mean it is good". However, the source page lists a grand total of one corrupt non-profit. You can find one bad version of anything, no matter how good or bad the whole group is. You could probably even find a hundred such examples, just from population size and base rate alone. Vox doesn't attempt to check if he is right, he doesn't even list a few examples. He just lists a single instance of a probably corrupt non-profit and, pleased with his own cynicism and insight, declares he they has found a pattern. This is a good example of what not to do, and an important failure mode to watch out for, but you are presenting it as though it were rational rather than a cautionary tale.

Scholars and media have described it as neo-Nazi[4][13][14] and fascist,[5][15][16]

Well, everyone to the right of Stalin has been described as neo-Nazi by scholars.

though the group rejects these labels.[17]

I guess there goes your "explicitly endorse Nazism" claim.

I know that 'Nazi' may be overused, but you surely must see that in this specific instance, that is what the Golden Dawn are.

Weren't people saying the same thing about the National Front ~20 years ago?

0[anonymous]
I am to the right of Stalin. Which scholars have described me as neo-Nazis?
0skeptical_lurker
I said if "significant members explicitly endorse Nazism", and in this case it seems at least one elected official does, even if the group doesn't. Perhaps. I'm not an expert on the history of European politics.
2skeptical_lurker
Try the entire wikipedia page on them! Take these bits for instance: Now, I'm not endorsing the other factions, some of whom may well be Stalinists or terrorists. It is possible for there to be extremists on both the left and the right. I know that 'Nazi' may be overused, but you surely must see that in this specific instance, that is what the Golden Dawn are. Unless the entire wikipedia page and the sources are all fraudulent...

What you describe is the winding-down days of communism, during it's hayday the arrests and torture didn't happen in the middle of the night, but in broad daylight, to cheering crowds. This phenomenon, not limited to communist states, works as follows:

The official line is not that everybody is happy and everything is perfect, but that everything would be perfect if it wasn't for the rightists/heretics/sexists/racists/etc. (depending on the society). The insidious thing about this is that anybody who has a different opinion and debates it can be charged w... (read more)

The Civ 5 AI does cheat insofar as it doesn't have to deal with the fog of war, IIRC.

Not just that, especially on higher difficulty levels.

Of course, society normally finds it easy to recognize and ostracize such blatantly dishonest Nazism.

What do you mean by "normally" and can you find any examples of society that actually operated like you describe? Keep in mind the word "Nazi" was already being applied to anything and everything the speaker disliked as early as 1942.

(the theory is that on a subconcious level they think 'if I'm a Nazi, maybe Nazism isn't so bad).

Or the more straightforward, if anyone proposing sensible immigration policy gets called a Nazi, eventually people conclude that "Nazi" means someone in favor of sensible immigration policy.

3skeptical_lurker
I agree, and I am trying to use words in a precise manner. Trump is not a Nazi. The Golden Dawn are.

That's why I said "AI that could give the human a challenge" not "AI that would demolish a human". Better yet, have the game difficulty setting actually control the intelligence of the AI, rather than how much the AI cheats.

I don't expect to see highly sophisticated AI in games (at least adversarial, battle-it-out games) because there is no point. Games have to be fun which means that the goal of the AI is to gracefully lose to the human player after making him exert some effort.

I'm not sure about that. A common complaint about these kinds of games is that the AI's blatantly cheat, especially on higher difficulty levels. I could very well see a market for an AI that could give the human a challenge without cheating.

3Vaniver
Several years ago, Backgammon AI was at the point where it could absolutely demolish humans without cheating. My impression is that people hated it, and even if they rolled the dice for the AI and input the results themselves they were pretty sure that it had to be cheating somehow.
-5Lumifer

Can't the perception/probability estimate module just be treated as an interchangeable black box, regardless of whether it is a DNN, or MCTS Solomov induction approximation, or Bayes nets or anything else?

Not necessarily. If the goal component what's to respect human preferences, it will be vital that the perception component isn't going to correctly identify what constitutes a "human".

2skeptical_lurker
This doesn't seem like a major problem, or one which is exclusive to friendliness - computers can already recognise pictures of humans, and any AGI is going to have to be able to identify and categorise things.
2skeptical_lurker
The flag looks almost exactly like a swastica. Also, see hairyfigment's comment and read the wikipedia page. There is plenty more evidence. They wouldn't have chosen that flag unless they were neo-nazis. If they really wanted that symbol, it could have been against a different color background.

Pretty much everyone is under the impression that he or she is conscious, and yet we can't really empirically test for consciousness.

If contentiousness doesn't exist how can we empirically test for anything? Empiricism is based on using past observations to predict future observations, it becomes meaningless if there's nothing there to do the observing.

would support religion but not Christianity because that inevitably leads to progressivism

Depending on which neoreactionary. The neoreactionaries I'm familiar with, admittedly a tiny subset, are pro-traditional, i.e., non-progressive Christianity.

I also don't know an example of a real country without elections where I would be tempted to move.

How many real countries do you know without elections, period? I here the UAE is rather nice.

To avoid sucker problems, substitute the abstract "government" with "bureaucrats/politicians" & "science" with "scientists/journal editors".

Nassim Taleb

4gjm
It seems to me that there's a useful distinction between what government does and what politicians and bureaucrats do; likewise for science (and, e.g., between what the private sector does and what CEOs do; between what religion does and what clergy do; etc.). CEOs play (at least according to caricature) a lot of golf, but the business world does not play golf. Politicians kiss babies; the government does not kiss babies. Science advances (among other ways) by the death of scientists whose ideas fail to match more recent evidence; individual scientists don't.

Strict rules can be harsh. So can the whim and bias that tend to creep in when one relaxes the rules.

Nick Szabo

Those who have never tried electronic communication may not be aware of what a "social skill" really is. One social skill that must be learned, is that other people have points of view that are not only different, but threatening, to your own. In turn, your opinions may be threatening to others. There is nothing wrong with this. Your beliefs need not be hidden behind a facade, as happens with face-to-face conversation. Not everybody in the world is a bosom buddy, but you can still have a meaningful conversation with them. The person who cannot do this lacks in social skills.

Nick Szabo

Possibly, I suppose that depends on how one would classify the "butterfly-collecting" aspect of science.

Do people who are genuine dissenters predict that more people will dissent than people who genuinely conform?

Genuine dissenters generally predict that most people will conform, largely because it's a lot easier to notice people conforming when you disagree with the thing they're conforming to.

4Sable
Is there any evidence to support this in general? Also, a dissenter in one area (religion, for example) might be a conformer in another. I think it's worth looking at whether someone who actively protests racial discrimination (in a non-conforming way, so maybe someone from the early civil rights movement) would dissent in Asch's experiment. Does willingness to dissent in one area of your life transfer over to a larger willingness to dissent in other areas of your life?

The relevant distinction:

science is about accumulating (edit: and systematizing) knowledge;

engineering is about building things, possibly but not necessarily using the knowledge accumulated by science.

2ChristianKl
Then the accumlation of knowledge that a YCombinator startup does when it goes out and interviews users of their product is science?

It was I, not you, who made the more-heat-than-light metaphor in this case, and you don't get to tell me what I meant by it.

Yes, I have a habit of assuming the most sensible interpretation of what my interlocutor says, it appears to be a bad habit with some people.

I meant "rudeness and crossness and people getting upset at one another".

Ok, plugging that definition into your argument, and removing the metaphor, your argument appears to come down to "arguing 'NRx-type' positions gets makes my side upset therefore the 'NRx' side should stop doing it".

0gjm
That is pretty much the reverse of what you have been doing. I think your actual habit is of assuming the interpretation that makes most sense to you. Unfortunately that isn't the same, and in particular it gives very wrong results when your mental model of your interlocutors is very inaccurate. Not quite. (Though, as entirelyuseless says, that wouldn't in fact be such a bad argument.) Here's a link to where I came in; as you can see, I was explaining how having NRx discussions tend to proliferate could be a problem. My answer was that I didn't know whether it actually is, but it could be so in a situation where (1) there are very few NRx's (but vocal enough to have a lot of impact) and (2) most of the other people aren't interested in NRx discussions. And then we got into a lengthy discussion of why #2 might be; rudeness-and-crossness was one of many possibilities. So the argument is: in this hypothetical situation that may or may not be actual, most LWers don't want to have a lot of NRx discussions. One of the many possible reasons is (as you put it) that these arguments get their side upset. Since (in this hypothetical situation) most LWers don't want these discussions, and very few actively do want them, LWers as a whole would be happier without them. (Although I've adopted your spin-laden language in the paragraph above, I would like to point out that it's actually quite far from what I meant. My hypothetical person-who-doesn't-want-to-talk-about-NRx is concerned not only that his allies might get upset, but also that his opponents might; and that the result of all this getting-upset on both sides is likely to be that no one learns much from anyone else. That's why the metaphor is "more heat than light" and not just "lots of heat".)
0entirelyuseless
Assuming that was his argument, it seems like a pretty good one. You do not persuade people by making them upset. You make them more convinced than ever of their original position.

The best approach would be to taboo "neoreaction"

Um, you were the one who first brought up that term in this discussion. In fact, the only reason we're having this meta-debate is because a bunch of people didn't want to have an object-level discussion about Donald Trump.

Consider the following parallel. I am making plans concerning the next 10 years of my life -- whether to take a new job, move house, get married or divorced, etc. It is highly relevant to my deliberations whether some time in the next few years a vengeful god is going to step in and put an end to the world as we know it.

This is an example of these beliefs lying outside the range they find credible, which I addressed in the next point.

Yup. But one wouldn't necessarily expect them to do it. (If I'm talking about the likely state of the world economy 5 y

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1gjm
Sure. I was just making the point that you can't get from "X could be relevant to Y, which Z finds important" to "Z should be interested in X". I don't know about actual literal Cthulhu-worshippers, if any there be, but the preachers of pending apocalypse have arguments for their beliefs too. And, again, I think you may be misunderstanding the point I was making, which is simply that you can't get from "Z has good arguments against X" to "Z will present arguments against X whenever someone comes along proclaiming X", and therefore you can't get from "X came up and Z blew it off without presenting counterarguments" to "Z doesn't have good arguments against X". This is far from the first time that you have claimed to know my motives. I'm sorry to inform you that your track record on getting them right appears to me to be very poor. It was I, not you, who made the more-heat-than-light metaphor in this case, and you don't get to tell me what I meant by it. I did not, in fact, mean "bad arguments or no arguments at all"; I meant "rudeness and crossness and people getting upset at one another". As for taking it too literally: no, I am observing that the metaphor happens to correspond to reality in a possibly-unexpected way. "Heat" in an argument really does come from "friction" between people, from them "rubbing one another up the wrong way". (Incidentally, it feels very odd to be criticized for doing that by an admirer of Chesterton, who did the same thing all the time. (More stylishly than me, no doubt, but if writing as well as Chesterton were a requirement for participation here it would be a quiet place indeed.) I think the problem many people have isn't that it's "brought up at all" but that some of those who want to talk about NRx and HBD seem to want to talk about those things all the time. That may mean that the only actually-achievable options are (1) a strict "no talking about this stuff" policy and (2) having every discussion to which race, gender, drawb

No, Russia started providing it's bombers with fighter escorts with orders to shoot in self-defense. This is a situation that can easily escalate the next time one of these planes passes through Turkish airspace.

I agree that Turkey is interesting, too, but nothing "big" happened there recently and were were talking about events.

Um, shooting down a Russian plane.

2Lumifer
And... nothing happened.

Interesting theories, let's see how they square with the evidence.

•They are just not very interested in the things neoreactionaries get excited about (race, gender, political structures -- though it occurs to me that LW's small but vocal NRx contingent appears to be much more interested in race and gender than in any of the other things theoretically characteristic of NRx).

On the other hand they are interested in questions where where race, gender, and political structures are relevant to the answers.

•They have already given the matter plenty of tho

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1gjm
Maybe, though in some cases their opinion as to that relevance may reasonably differ from yours. But that doesn't in any way mean that they should be interested in NRx. Consider the following parallel. I am making plans concerning the next 10 years of my life -- whether to take a new job, move house, get married or divorced, etc. It is highly relevant to my deliberations whether some time in the next few years a vengeful god is going to step in and put an end to the world as we know it. That doesn't mean that I shouldn't be annoyed when my attempts to discuss the next few years are repeatedly interrupted by people wanting to warn me about the coming apocalypse. Yup. But one wouldn't necessarily expect them to do it. (If I'm talking about the likely state of the world economy 5 years from now and some guy bursts in to tell me excitedly about how Cthulhu will have risen from the depths by then and started eating everyone, I am not going to waste my time telling him exactly why I don't think Cthulhu is real and why I wouldn't expect him to start eating people so soon even if he were.) Heat arises from friction. It takes two to generate the friction. I'm not terribly interested deciding which of the sticks getting rubbed together is responsible for the flames. No, they're not. Your hypothesis is that these people want to avoid becoming like the NRx people; mine is that they want to avoid having to interact with the NRx people. (There might be some overlap. If someone thinks NRx people are unpleasant, they might avoid being convinced lest they become unpleasant themselves or find themselves spending more time around unpleasant people.) I'm not, for the avoidance of doubt, claiming that your hypotheses are never correct. Just that they're a very long way from exhausting the possibilities for why someone might not want to engage in a lot of argument about NRx, which is one reason why it is wrong to take the general statement I made and "explain" it as the more specific

How about the various welfare states around the world finally starting to run out of other people's money. The biggest manifestations of this so far have been the financial crisis in the EU, and the various pension crises in US local governments.

Heck, in my more conspiratorial moods I'm inclined to suspect that these migrant crises are an excuse to import a bunch of convenient scapegoats who can than be blamed for the collapse of popular entitlement programs.

0Lumifer
That's not one of the events "that have transpired mostly in the last 6 months" :-) But yes, I'm watching Japan with great interest :-D

Golden Dawn in Greece are genuine neo-nazis.

Depending no who you listen to, so's the National Front, Putin, anti-Putin, Trump, mainstream Republicans, insufficiently left-wing Democrats, etc.

Ok, so what's your reason for believing Golden Dawn are actually neo-nazi? (Edit: and what do you mean by "actual neo-nazi" anyway?)

2hairyfigment
Glad you asked, Eugine: Of course, society normally finds it easy to recognize and ostracize such blatantly dishonest Nazism. It doesn't create any actual confusion - unless people have gone out of their way to weaken society's immune system, eg by deliberately signalling Nazism when the reality is more obscure.
4skeptical_lurker
Just look at their flag: https://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/17/Meandros_flag.svg/150px-Meandros_flag.svg.png&imgrefurl=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dawn_(political_party)&h=100&w=150&tbnid=CDly4gAodIMPcM:&tbnh=80&tbnw=120&docid=g-53Bx9BWHOy2M&usg=__gcjSL8sDC3eM9-5mVj4vERTCyW8=&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi-oezK-bfLAhVpQpoKHY3fANQQ9QEIITAA) It looks just like a swastika. Sure, Putin and Trump and anyone who is nationalistic can be compared to Nazis, but this cheapens the term 'Nazi' or 'fascist'. By "actual neo-nazi" I mean a group which has significant use of Nazi imagery and when significant members explicitly endorse Nazism.

No. Not in the sense that Merkel, etc. are unimportant, but in the sense that a systemic crisis is not reducible to the importance of whoever happens to be in the office at the moment.

Even if she did greatly exacerbate it by doing something really stupid?

0Lumifer
Yes, even, because there are reasons she did that and those reasons don't have much to do with her personally. It wasn't like she buckled the entire German consensus.
4Good_Burning_Plastic
Hello back, Eugine.
5Viliam
No, it's an umbrella term for things including "not mass-downvoting people because they disagreed with you once", etc.

suppose LW has few but very vocal neoreactionaries[1] and that most of the non-neoreactionaries are not very interested in talking about neoreaction[2].

What do you mean by that? Do you mean that they're not interested in becoming lesswrong about the issue or that they only want to become lesswrong to the extent it doesn't involve being similar to those weird NRx's?

7gjm
Obviously I mean neither (btw: hi, Eugine!). I mean what I say: for whatever reason they are not very interested in talking about NRx here. Possible reasons other than your maximally-uncharitable ones: * They are just not very interested in the things neoreactionaries get excited about (race, gender, political structures -- though it occurs to me that LW's small but vocal NRx contingent appears to be much more interested in race and gender than in any of the other things theoretically characteristic of NRx). * Is that the same as "not interested in becoming less wrong"? No, it's broader and typically indicative of a different state of mind. Contrast a hyperzealously closed-minded Christian missionary, who is extremely interested in his religion and not at all interested in becoming less wrong about it, with an apathetic agnostic, who just doesn't give a damn about religion. Neither will be very interested in a presentation of the merits of Hinduism, but their attitudes are quite different. (It's not clear that one is better than the other.) * They have already given the matter plenty of thought and done their best to get less wrong about it. At this point they find little value in going over it again and again. * They are interested in becoming less wrong about political structures, gender, race, etc., but NRx positions on these lie outside the range they find credible. * Is that the same as "only to the extent it doesn't involve being similar to those weird NRx's"? No, it's about finding the ideas implausible rather than finding the people offputting. (Though of course the two may go together. If you find people offputting you may dismiss their ideas; if you find an idea repellent or crazy you may think ill of people who hold it.) * They have observed some discussions of NRx, seen that they consistently generate much more heat than light, and decided that whatever the facts of the matter an internet debate about it is likely to do more harm than good. *
3Viliam
So, being "less wrong" is measured by "how much time one spends debating neoreaction"? If you refuse to keep endlessly debating neoreaction, you are closed-minded. Don't worry about evidence; the signalling is cool!

I don't want LW to be a recruitment place for a political cult.

What do you mean by "cult"? Many people would consider the founding purpose of LW to be a recruitment place for a cult. Or do you mean you don't want anything that might convert people to a political position different from yours?

-1buybuydandavis
We are not a phyg! We are not a phyg! We are not a phyg! Because nothing says "we are not a phyg!" quite like having to rot13 the Unholy Word.

In this case, I didn't want people to actually act on the lie

Unfortunately, if your lie is successful people will act on it anyway.