I have an old list of halfbaked post ideas. At some point I lost sight of what things were “rationality things” and what things were just “things, that I happened to want to talk about with rationalists, because those are the cool people”; and in the presence of this confusion I defaulted to categorizing everything as the latter—because it was easy; I live here now; I can go weeks without interacting with anybody who isn’t at least sort of rationalist-adjacent. If I want to talk to rationalists about a thing I can just bring it up the next time I’m at a party, or when my roommates come downstairs; I don’t have to write an essay and subject it to increasingly noisy judgment about whether it is in the correct section/website/universe.
I think “things that you happen to want to talk about with rationalists” is a legit category to want an outlet for and having an explicit place for that (which has virtues like “is not literally Tumblr”) would be nice. Useful norms might include: one-paragraph OPs normalized, tongue-in-cheek “Rational [Household Object / Unrelated Hobby / Basic Life Skill]” titles allowed/encouraged, granting OP some veto power about what sorts of comments and commenters are allowed under their post, aggressively encouraged and standard-formatted tagging system.
I think “things that you happen to want to talk about with rationalists” is a legit category to want an outlet for and having an explicit place for that (which has virtues like “is not literally Tumblr”) would be nice
I have an old list of halfbaked post ideas. At some point I lost sight of what things were “rationality things” and what things were just “things, that I happened to want to talk about with rationalists, because those are the cool people”; and in the presence of this confusion I defaulted to categorizing everything as the latter—because it was easy; I live here now; I can go weeks without interacting with anybody who isn’t at least sort of rationalist-adjacent. If I want to talk to rationalists about a thing I can just bring it up the next time I’m at a party, or when my roommates come downstairs; I don’t have to write an essay and subject it to increasingly noisy judgment about whether it is in the correct section/website/universe.
I think “things that you happen to want to talk about with rationalists” is a legit category to want an outlet for and having an explicit place for that (which has virtues like “is not literally Tumblr”) would be nice. Useful norms might include: one-paragraph OPs normalized, tongue-in-cheek “Rational [Household Object / Unrelated Hobby / Basic Life Skill]” titles allowed/encouraged, granting OP some veto power about what sorts of comments and commenters are allowed under their post, aggressively encouraged and standard-formatted tagging system.
Um, exactly.