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lsusr
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I can easily picture how this community could put brakes on one person and, at the same time, totally remove them for someone else.
Ouch. Your comment hits close to home.
Anxiety. Lack of slack. Natural amphetamines.
If the natural amphetamines correlation is true then that gets us a whole basket of correlations including low appetite, skipping meals, high energy, high NEAT (non-exercise automatic thermogenesis) and difficulty sleeping.
Re: Competent Elites
Fixed. Thanks.
What is the typo?
I take it as a given that it is beneficial for each human being to develop and enrich their own voice, and ask: dear reader, are you growing and nurturing your own voice?
Besides regular exercise and meaningful projects, I think one of the most important pillars of happiness is speaking your mind.
[NORMAL] I agree that I have created a filter for high agency. My intention is to increase agency from high to higher. It seems to me like the way to get the best people is to filter and then train.
[NORMAL]
Scalable? Maybe not. But this model has significant advantages over grad school.
Many of the mentors here do not work at academic institutions.
This system is less formal, which reduces overhead for all parties.
Grad school is a physical institution. Not everyone can get a visa to every country.
It’s unclear to me why you would make such an accusation without bringing any examples of what uninformed things about non-white non-Western ciswomen are supposedly said on LessWrong.
The phrase “I don’t see people in terms of race” is such an example. I have not detected racial insensitivity to that degree on Less Wrong. (Whether or not less intensive racial insensitivity exists on Less Wrong is beyond the scope of this discussion.)
Google currently gives me: No results found for site:lesswrong.com “I don’t see people in terms of race”.
I haven’t heard any rationalist say it
This is true. I hope the original letter was written by someone from an exceptionally awful sub-community which is not representative of most of us.
It sounds like we are on similar pages. I am unaware of any rationalists engaging in old-school blatant racism[1] (what you call stereotype accuracy). The problem isn’t rationalists saying “s suck”. It’s the premature transhumanist idea that “whether you are an doesn’t matter”. A world without racism would be nice. But we live in a world with racism. Therefore pretending race doesn’t matter exacerbates racial inequity and brings us further away from actually bringing about a transhumanist utopia.
I spoke both about what I heard in person (and I have hung out with a lot of rationalists in the last 7 years) and online.
I haven’t run into this particular type of bigotry in my own meatspace rationalist social circle. Meatspace rationalist communities are geographically-distributed. I expect there is a diversity of in the degree of different circles’ cultural sensitivity. I hope the letter referred to an exceptionally bad circle[2] and that most of our community is better than this sort of thing.
I’m not saying old-school racism doesn’t happen in the rationalist community. Every community large enough has bad eggs. But that is not the topic of my post. ↩︎
Sampling bias predicts that the author of the original letter is more likely to have come from a rationalist circle at the awful end of our distribution. ↩︎
I wish I had someone like you to mentor me back when I was in high school. Those topics are so cool.
Inconsistent spelling drives me nuts. I do not consider it nitpicky at all. Thank you for the correction. I have fixed the spelling.
Corollary: If you want to invent an at-least-human-level AI then it needs to have a mechanism for internal information cascades.
Which subcultures are these? It’s okay if you don’t want to answer.
Meta: Someone strong downvoted alexgieg’s comment. I’m curious why. I read his comment as a costly contribution of hard observational data.
I want to acknowledge that this is an interesting subject and that your comment is well-written. You are obviously well-researched in this field. You approach the subject openmindedly while also drawing from personal experience.
It is not about pretending as if your membership in particular groups has no consequences whatsoever.
This is the core point I was trying to get across. It sounds like you understand it perfectly.
Fixed. Thanks.