I like this post, but I think that it underestimates a bit the strength of filter bubbles. Even if a trait is present in 1% of the general population, it doesn’t automatically follow that literally everyone has someone in their social circle with that trait.
If you walk around aggressively signaling the equivalent of “What!?? There ain’t no faggots in this town,” then it should be no surprise to you that your lived experience is that none of the people around you are gay (even though base rates imply that quite a few of them are).
I consider myself liberal enough to not project an anti-trans aura, but I still never meet trans people in person, like Scott Alexander never meet conservatives. Base rates seem to imply that there should be dozens of trans people in my town, but I’ve never seen one, and I don’t know of anyone who has. My best guess is that when they decide to change sex, they also relocate to a more queer-friendly place. Taking SF as an extreme case, in the Bay you can find companies entirely run by trans women, a thing that I’m pretty sure never happens in other towns.
Greetings, LWers!
I’ve finally
found the timemade up my mind to write this, so here I am.I’ve noticed that many new members have stumbled upon the rationalist community because of HPMOR. As I never read fanfiction sites (or sites talking about fanfiction sites), my case was quite different. For some reason I distinctly remember the ridiculously long chain of links that brought me here, so I’ll post the whole list just to give an idea of how long it can take to realize the existence of a site like LessWrong:
Search for insights about the P=NP conjecture during my PhD.
Find the P-versus-NP page, a very good summary that also links to this excellent post by Scott Aaronson.
Start reading Scott Aaronson’s blog.
Scott Aaronson mentions Unsong (in this post).
Start reading Unsong.
Return reading Scott Aaronson’s blog.
Scott Aaronson dedicate this post to the infamous NYT article about Scott Alexander.
Fail to realize that Scott Alexander is the author of Unsong.
Scott Aaronson directly quote I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup (in this post).
Follow the link and read my first SSC post.
Start reading SSC from some top posts.
Still fail to realize that Scott Alexander is the author of Unsong.
Finally notice the “Scott also writes Unsong” note in the about page.
Continue reading SSC.
SSC mentions LessWrong.
Finally land on LW frontpage.
Start reading the Sequences.
Start reading the Codex.
Start reading HPMOR (directly from LW).
Finally sign up (after several months of lurking).
I’m not sure about which conclusion we can draw from this. Maybe that wondering about P=NP has a small chance of making you a better rationalist. Maybe that you can spend more than one year following a computer scientist professor who declares himself on the fringes of the “rationalist movement” without realizing that a rationalist movement even exists (in my defense, I started reading Shtetl-Optimized in mid-2019, and I didn’t exactly dig through the older posts… still, it took me more than one year to finally land on LW). In hindsight, many posts from Scott Aaronson are quite obviously related to rationalist concepts. For example, I first learned about the classical paperclip maximizer from Shtetl-Optimized (here), but even googling “paperclip maximizer” I didn’t land on the rationalist blogosphere. I just learned the paperclip maximizer classical description. It may be worth mentions that after reading the relevant Wikipedia entry, my first thought was “an amoral paperclip maximizer can fit perfectly into my Planescape campaign”, which indicates that maybe I’m a bit too much addicted to D&D.