I grew up in Russia, not in Silicon Valley, so I didn’t know the other “people in our cluster”, and unfortunately I didn’t like to read, so I’m not familiar with many of the obvious background facts. 5 years ago I read HPMoR, but unfortunately not sequences, I read them only a couple of years ago and then only the part that was translated into Russian, in English I could not read fluently enough, but then I noticed that Google Translate began to cope with a much better translation than before, and in most cases produces a readable text from English into Russian, so that I could finally read the “Sequences” to the end and generally begin to read and write in Lesswrong.
Now I write here in “Short Forms” any thoughts that I have not seen anyone else express, but since I have not read many books, many concepts are probably expressed somewhere else by someone before me, I just do not saw, in that case it would be desirable to add a link there in the comments. Unfortunately, I have many thoughts that I wrote down even before lessvrong, but rather than re-reading and editing them, it’s easier for me to write again, so many such thoughts lie unpublished, and since even at least I wrote down my thoughts far from births, then even more of them are not even recorded anywhere except in my head, however, again, if I stumble upon them again, I will try to write them down and publish them.
I am from Russia, it will be quite problematic to find specific fragments, but this is not hidden or denied by them themselves. Russian government media does not just create an average effect, they directly say that everyone is lying, you will never know the truth, so it does not matter, look for who benefits, there is only your homeland propaganda and propaganda from foreign agents funded by the State Department. And many of my relatives (not just old people or those who do not have access to the Internet) really think so.