The problem is that it will not work outside the distribution.

Of course, but neither would anything else so far discovered...

More generally, we can think of wokeness as a consensus of power under which it was common knowledge that leaders would give in to demands made by left-wing activists.

Not quite right. Demands for outright communism are still not taken seriously, and I don't expect this to change any time soon. Wokeness is the particular fusion of the "social justice" brand of feminism and BLM, which Dem leaders embraced because it served the moral/ideological function while not fundamentally threatening hard power structures.

A very relevant Scott Alexander's post that you didn't mention here is New Atheism: The Godlessness That Failed, in which he claimed that New Atheism was a "failed hamartiology":

We watched the US population elect George W Bush and act like this was a remotely reasonable thing to do. We saw people destroying the environment, leaving the poor to starve, and denying gay people their right to live as normal members of society. We saw people endorsing weird ideas and conspiracy theories, from homeopathy and creationism to the Clintons murdering their enemies. We were always vaguely aware from reading the newspapers that some of these people existed. But now we were seeing and conversing with them every day.

And so we asked ourselves: what the hell is wrong with these people?

And New Atheism had an answer: religion.

That was it. It was beautiful, it was simple, it was perfect. We were the “reality-based community”. [...]

Gradually the Blue Tribe got a little bit more self-awareness and realized this was not a great idea. Their coalition contained too many Catholic Latinos, too many Muslim Arabs, too many Baptist African-Americans. [...]

Between 2008 and 2016, two things happened. First, Barack Obama replaced George W. Bush as president. Second, Ferguson. The Blue Tribe kept posing its same identity question: “Who am I? What defines me?”, and now Black Lives Matter gave them an answer they liked better “You are the people who aren’t blinded by sexism and racism.”

Again, it was beautiful, simple, and perfect. We were “the reality-based community”. They were ignoring Reason and basing all of their opinions on blind hatred and prejudice. There was nothing confusing or unsettling at all about the situation, and we did not need to question any of our own beliefs. It was just that some people had been brainwashed by white supremacy and an all-consuming desire to protect their own privilege, and so they did. Sin began with the apple tree in Eden; conservatism began with the cotton plant in Jamestown. Language separates us from the apes; not being blinded by bigotry separates us from the Republicans.

The right wing in the West still hasn't come up with a memetically competitive (but not suicidal) replacement for its own failed hamartiology. Nietzsche observed that God died almost a century and a half ago. Clearly, it's not easy for conservatives to rebuild their ideology from scratch without that centerpiece. MAGA seems to be the right at its most successful currently, and as far as I can tell, it's pretty much the "reversed stupidity" of wokeness, so your warning that "there’s no guarantee that the same forces won’t drive them equally crazy" is too coy/belated.

What this suggests is that we need liberalism 2.0: an ideological paradigm robust enough to rein in the excesses of the consensus of culture, but non-coercive enough that it can spread without sparking another culture war.

The more pessimistic among us fear that without a Thirty Years' War-tier disaster this idea won't be able to catch on. But, of course, an AI-driven omnicide/rapture/??? could come first... All in all, interesting times.

When I consider the bloggers I actually subscribe to versus those I just occasionally read

It's amusing that it couldn't help itself prefacing a reasonable take with an obvious lie, almost as if to make the point better.

Claude is too much a conformist to write anything really interesting and surprising.

Well, so is much of the mainstream media, and yet people seem happy enough to consume that stuff.

what about humans who would do the same thing?

Presumably, this happens: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/12/might-people-on-the-internet-sometimes-lie/

I do often notice how the top upvoted reddit comment in big subs is confidently wrong, with a more correct/nuanced take sitting much lower.

Insofar as it’s required for you to pretend that people are nicer than they are to be kind to them, I think you should do that. But your impact will be better if you at least note it if that’s what you’re doing

Unlikely to work for Mr. Portman. Living the life of systematic lies and pretension is difficult and cognitively demanding. Being pro-socially self-deceived to some degree is a much simpler strategy, which is probably why evolution converged on it (paired with some amount of psychopathy to balance/exploit excesses).

policy analysis

Most people obviously aren't cut out for that, and are happier for it, if they live in a reasonably high-trust society.

I bet the person says “no”.

I agree, but I think it's important to mention issues like social desirability bias and strategic self-deception here, coupled with the fact that most people just aren't particularly good at introspection.

it’s conflicting desires, not conflicting values

It's both, our minds employ desires in service of pursuing our (often conflicting) values.

Insofar as different values are conflicting, that conflict has already long ago been resolved, and the resolution is: the action which best accords with the person’s values, in this instance, is to get up.

I'd rather put it as a routine conflict eventually getting resolved in a predictable way.

Another example: if someone says “I want to act in accordance with my values” or “I don’t always act in accordance with my values”, we recognize these as two substantive claims. The first is not a tautology, and the second is not a self-contradiction.

Indeed, but I claim that those statements actually mean "I want my value conflicts to resolve in the way I endorse" and "I don’t always endorse the way my value conflicts resolve".

the feeling of my head remaining on the pillow is motivating, but the self-reflective idea of myself being in bed is demotivating

This seems to be an example of conflicting values, and its preferred resolution, not a difference between a value and a non-value. Suppose you'd find your pillow replaced by a wooden log - I'd imagine that the self-reflective idea of yourself remedying this state of affairs would be pretty motivating!

For at least six months now, we’ve had software assistants that can roughly double the productivity of software development.

Is this the consensus view? I've seen people saying that those assistants give 10% productivity improvement, at best.

In the last few months, there’s been a perceptible increase in the speed of releases of better models.

On the other hand, the schedules for headline releases (GPT-5, Claude 3.5 Opus) continue to slip, and there are anonymous reports of diminishing returns from scaling. The current moment is interesting in that there are two essentially opposite prevalent narratives barely interacting with each other.

the principles of EA imply that

The principles of Christianity not only imply that, they clearly spell it out: "If you want to be perfect, then go and sell your possessions and give the money to the poor", and yet Christianity was uncontroversial in the West for centuries, and the current secular "common sense" morality hasn't diverged particularly far. EAs just take ostensibly common sense principles far too seriously compared to the unspoken social consensus, in a way that's cringe for normal people. Critics don't really have a principled response to the core EA ideas either, but they don't want to appear morally delinquent, so they generally try to dismiss EAs without seriously engaging.

When circling was first discussed here, there was a comment that led to a lengthy discussion about boundaries, but nobody seemed to dispute its other main claim, that "it is highly unlikely that [somebody] would have 3-11 people they reasonably trusted enough to have [group] sex with". Do you agree with that statement, and if so, do you think that the circling/sex analogy is invalid?