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https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-missing

“I don’t have kids yet, but even now I’m scared that my future kid might be an Internet addict. Or wander into the wrong part of social media and become alt-right, or dirtbag left, or one of those people who quote-tweet Vox articles with the comment “This”. I laughed at my parents for having these kinds of fears, and my parents’ fears ended up completely wrong, and now I have those same dumb fears in turn.”

Sure Scott, your mother turned out completely wrong…

Or wander into the wrong part of social media and become alt-right, or dirtbag left, or one of those people who quote-tweet Vox articles with the comment “This”

Seems pretty weird to equate two groups of people who are largely just annoying on the Internet, with a group of people who have been actively and openly racist, violent and were recently involved with an attempt to overthrow the government. Unless, of course, you’re interested in polishing up the reputation of the latter group as just “another set of people with some wacky opinions!”

*extremely Scooter voice* Unlike all of you, I never project onto others.

There’s nobody more vulnerable than someone who believes themselves to be invincible.

All humans are equally vulnerable to being frozen by liquid nitrogen in their moment of triumph.

You know, it’d be interesting to get Mama Siskind’s take on this topic. Did she fear Scott would become a the kind of weirdo that he is? And, while the reporter is there, it might be interesting to know her views on other exciting rationality topics like cranium caliper measurements, eternal torture AI gods, or whether or not Scientific Racism “has some good points”.

Oh, and where she thinks Dragon House went wrong wrt doing the dishes, laundry and other household chores.

Oh man, can you link about Dragon House? I’ve got time to kill and I wanna read about that
There's a lot to share and I'm sure I'm missing most of it, but I'll try to cover the main points. There's plenty more if you want to dig for it. First, the postmortem to the whole project, as written by the organizer: https://medium.com/@ThingMaker/dragon-army-retrospective-597faf182e50 The same guy wrote up the bugnuts initial proposal for Dragon House: https://archive.is/sKbbx Of course, there were lots of fun comments here: https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/85xhsm/postmortem_on_dragon_army_barracks_suggestions/ The author even got made fun of a bit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/867xdl/dragon_army_retrospective_lesser_wrong/ As for why Dragon House failed to reach its lofty goals, I recall somebody else summed it up as "nobody did the dishes".
From the second link: > It's a high-commitment, high-standards, high-investment group house model with centralized leadership and an up-or-out participation norm It amazes me that anyone could have thought those words, arranged in that sequence, conveyed any information. > I have a unique combination of expertise that includes being a rationalist, sixth grade teacher, coach, **RA/head of a dormitory,** ringleader of a pack of hooligans, member of two honor code committees, curriculum director, obsessive sci-fi/fantasy nerd, writer, builder, martial artist, parkour guru, maker, and generalist. If anybody's intuitions and S1 models are likely to be capable of distinguishing the uncanny valley from the real deal, I posit mine are. And yet, he never foresaw that nobody would do the dishes.
Mother of God…
the only thing worse than the way rationalists never actually do anything is when they finally try to
Thanks this was great! These people are fucking nutballs.
My pleasure. The whole episode is hilarious and, I think, really drives home the idea that the rationalists, despite the highfalutin' language in their long essays, don't have a good working model for how people actually work.
They have a model that is ostensibly worse than the run of the mill “average model”. It’s wild. One would naively expect (as this one did) that if one encountered a group of people on the internet that was interested in the same topics and generally well educated, that one may find alot in common with said group. This couldn’t be further from the truth with this cult. Early on in delving into this lot, I couldn’t grasp why there was so little focus on the mass extinction event going on, the loss of biodiversity, and territory loss going on in the world today. Seems like a pretty big issue that science types would take an interest in, right? But no! Not the the rationalists! This Dragon house shit is truly bonkers, and not to cherry pick, but it really serves as a masterclass in why these people’s heads are so far up their asses, it’s surprising they have even managed to have meet ups or establish a fucking website.
Just the writing style of the postmortem is great (as in great for sneering at), it has this weird quality of not saying much at all directly and being so vague (I could sneer at the specifics, but it is like every other sentence (calling your detractors 'chicken littles' because they didn't want people to be stuck in abusive situations is bit of an eyeroll however)), it makes it impossible to know what he really means, you can only guess at it, and hope you are on the same wavelength. And just having grouphouse tryouts, without already having a house, is funny, esp as he seemed to have seen himself as the authoritarian leader of the place (of course the lesson he learns is that he wasn't authoritarian enough (but also, when random people take the lead it is also bad (white knight), And the guy noticing that what you were doing was going wrong should have been ousted sooner(red knight), people trying to push back on the cult like behavior is bad (black knight))). 'Folks we are spending to much time blogging, and not enough time at menial housework tasks, our project will fail if we spend more time blogging!' 'Ow, I will write an article on how to fix this' e: looking at this blast from the past did show me that one of the old ssc regulars is now trolling lesbian subreddits.
On re-read, it was the section about Duncan's personal qualifications in the initial proposal that got my attention the most. There's a ton to sneer at here, but above all I wonder why he thought half of these are even relevant to the position he's seeking. Most of these, I'd be embarrassed to see in the 'hobbies' section of the resume of a kid straight out of college. > I'm the least unqualified person around. Those words are chosen deliberately, for this post on "less wrong." I have a unique combination of expertise that includes being a rationalist, sixth grade teacher, coach, RA/head of a dormitory, ringleader of a pack of hooligans, member of two honor code committees, curriculum director, obsessive sci-fi/fantasy nerd, writer, builder, martial artist, parkour guru, maker, and generalist. If anybody's intuitions and S1 models are likely to be capable of distinguishing the uncanny valley from the real deal, I posit mine are.

or one of those people who quote-tweet Vox articles with the comment “This”.

Yes, there’s nothing so disgusting as people who read something that they find important and then don’t have words to add on top of those produced by a literal professional.