Let’s do the impossible and think the unthinkable! I must know what those secrets are, no matter how much sleep and comfort I might lose.
Smart people often think social institutions are basically arbitrary and that they can engineer better ways using their mighty brains. Because these institutions aren’t actually arbitrary, their tinkering is generally harmful and sometimes causes social dysfunction, suffering, and death on a massive scale. Less Wrong is unusually bad in this regard, and that is a serious indictment of “rationality” as practiced by LessWrongers.
A case of this especially relevant to Less Wrong is “Evangelical Polyamory”.
Atheists assume that self-identified atheists are representative of non-religious people and use flattering data about self-identified atheists to draw (likely) false conclusions about the world being better without religion. The expected value of arguing for atheism is small and quite possibly negative.
Ceteris paribus dictatorships work better than democracies.
Nerd culture is increasingly hyper-permissive and basically juvenile and stultifying. Nerds were better off when they had to struggle to meet society’s expectations for normal behavior.
I would also like to endorse GLaDOS’s excellent list.
I think it’s worth noting that we are (yet again) having a self-criticism session because a leftist (someone so far to the left that they consider liberal egalitarian Yvain to be beyond the pale of tolerability) complained that people who disagree with them are occasionally tolerated on LW.
Come on. Politics is rarely discussed here to begin with and something like 65*% of LWers are liberals/socialists. If the occasional non-leftist thought that slips through the cracks of karma-hiding and (more importantly) self-censorship is enough to drive you away, you probably have very little to offer.
*I originally said 80%, but I checked the survey and it’s closer to 65%. I think my point still stands. Only 3% of LWers surveyed described themselves as conservatives.