Good call. I haven’t been reading Less Wrong in enough detail for a while to pull this up usefully. My impression comes from in-person conversations plus Twitter interactions. The thickest use of my encountering these terms in rationality circles was admittedly about a decade ago. But I’m not sure how much of that is due to my not spending as much time in rationality circles versus discourse norms moving on. I still encounter it almost solely from folk tied to LW-style rationality.
I don’t recall hearing you use the terms in ways that bothered me this way, FWIW.
I think “NPC” in that sense is more used by the conspiracy theory community than rationalists.
With the idea being that only the person using the term is smart enough to realize that e.g. the Government is controlled by lizards from outer space, and everyone else just believes the media.
The fundamental problem with the term is that you might actually be wrong about e.g. the lizards from outer space, and you might not be as smart as you think.
Good call. I haven’t been reading Less Wrong in enough detail for a while to pull this up usefully. My impression comes from in-person conversations plus Twitter interactions. The thickest use of my encountering these terms in rationality circles was admittedly about a decade ago. But I’m not sure how much of that is due to my not spending as much time in rationality circles versus discourse norms moving on. I still encounter it almost solely from folk tied to LW-style rationality.
I don’t recall hearing you use the terms in ways that bothered me this way, FWIW.
I think “NPC” in that sense is more used by the conspiracy theory community than rationalists.
With the idea being that only the person using the term is smart enough to realize that e.g. the Government is controlled by lizards from outer space, and everyone else just believes the media.
The fundamental problem with the term is that you might actually be wrong about e.g. the lizards from outer space, and you might not be as smart as you think.