I strongly disagree, and I’m curious why you think this? I have known a number of rationalists who got into SSC/ACX more than LessWrong or rather than LessWrong, and I’ve found them to generally be extremely sidetracked into constantly debating social justice issues / nerdsniped by interesting politics—often to the point where I would strongly prefer not to attend meetups that are marketed as “Lesswrong + ACX” rather than just “LessWrong”, because I don’t want to be exposed to that.
That’s a fair point, different directions have different landmines. Culture war issues are tempting and most people seem to have strong yet poorly informed opinions that are not obviously poorly informed. I think that the original collection by Rob Bensinger The Library of Scott Alexandria is really good to start with, it is very light on political and culture war topics and grasps the essence of rational thinking, without going into the esoteric and irrelevant topics like quantum mechanics.
I strongly disagree, and I’m curious why you think this? I have known a number of rationalists who got into SSC/ACX more than LessWrong or rather than LessWrong, and I’ve found them to generally be extremely sidetracked into constantly debating social justice issues / nerdsniped by interesting politics—often to the point where I would strongly prefer not to attend meetups that are marketed as “Lesswrong + ACX” rather than just “LessWrong”, because I don’t want to be exposed to that.
That’s a fair point, different directions have different landmines. Culture war issues are tempting and most people seem to have strong yet poorly informed opinions that are not obviously poorly informed. I think that the original collection by Rob Bensinger The Library of Scott Alexandria is really good to start with, it is very light on political and culture war topics and grasps the essence of rational thinking, without going into the esoteric and irrelevant topics like quantum mechanics.