Thank you for the kind reply, I love that we are able to see each other as human beings. I agree with a lot of that, such as this: >"stacked with ideas and social norms that permit odious behaviours to flourish" That is very true, unfortunately, that's also a necessary evil. Our belief-system implies having to listen and evaluate any idea, as long as it's polite and well-reasoned. I admit that we could do better at protecting against the political brigading that comes as soon as someone says "hey, alt-right, this space is safe for you!" I don't know how to correct that without also risking that, maybe, some unfashionable idea that is good would be filtered out. I even have the same issue personally, where I find some toxic transphobic theory (e.g. Blanchardism) that makes me feel terrible but can't quite ignore it without doing my due diligence to check if it might be right (FYI, it's not, but that's a whole another essay). Understand, this is for good purposes. I could list many, but here's one: For all the infowarriors and concern trolls, there are also many people who have no idea they said something wrong, when they were just trying to politely ask about some fact, and be totally confused when they're being shamed or banned, often due to being young or inexperienced or autistic or foreign-raised or whatnot. And if you don't explain that to them, someone else will, and that someone else will be the guy in the corner in the brown shirt going "Shh, want to hear what these SJWs don't want you to know?" I will say this: most of the people saying odious things in our comments are not rationalists, probably have never even read most of what we write, and just heard that this is a good place to get listened to. And we do want it to be a good space to get listened to, but not disproportionately for these kinds, because that would scare away others... I think Scott mentioned setting higher civility standards for right-wing comments because he had a problem with that too. I think that with the amount of right-wing bigots being driven out of other places, we have a refugee crisis that we don't know how to cope with without compromising our values of intellectual openness. Our hope is that most of these kind won't have the civility to pass our standards of debate and can be summarily banned for that reason. --- I see that you're familiar with philosophy as well, that's awesome - FYI, I noticed that a lot of the concepts from Yudkowsky's [A Human's Guide to Words](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb) (IMO, one of the best things he ever wrote) are based on the works of [Eleanor Rosch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_Rosch), so if you've ever read her you'll know the gist of it. --- >Fact is, as I see it anyway, too many of the quote unquote “thought-leaders” in the rationalist community are basically just creeps, and I can’t countenance that sort of thing. Too many close friends of mine have been abused (sometimes serially) for me to have any quarter on that, which might seem like a selfish motivation I guess. That sounds terrible... Definitely not something I or any of my friends would endorse. Do you know which ones (if you wish to name them) so I can avoid them? Should go without saying but fuck abusers. --- >unless they’re e.g. racist Oh, absolutely never. There is a small minority of people in rationalist spaces which talk about "HBD" or other forms of racialism. They say they're just arguing facts, and on that point I will modify a quote from Yudkowsky: > The problem was that [HBD] seemed near in idea-space to a large class of potential hazards, all of which, regardless of their plausibility, had the property that they presented no potential benefit to anyone. They were pure infohazards. The only thing they could possibly do was be detrimental to brains that represented them, [and the non-white people in their community]. As far as I see it, "race science" is a pure infohazard. Kinda like a technique on how to make a radioactive dirty bomb in your home - which can't be used to make a nuclear reactor that can bring some use, just a bomb that will poison everyone in the city. When smart people discover something that can *only* be used to do harm, they're usually smart enough to keep their mouth shut about it. I know a couple things like that (my ex-bf is an epidemiologist), and I'm not posting them online and never will. What matters is not whether it's a fact (and it's probably not), it's "what sort of hatred for humanity makes you want to bring it to the public's attention so desperately?" And once again, thank you for being so understanding and showing me that even typically-enemies can see each other as human beings :)