I really feel like Nate Silver should be more of a rationalist icon than he is.

He's an outspoken Bayesian who believes in probabilistic reasoning and does explicit calibration tests of himself. He's incredibly good at this, producing consistently well-calibrated forecasts across multiple domains. (And he's winning!)

He even exemplifies the actual primary rationalist virtue, which is pissing people off by being contrarian on the internet.

I suspect he loses points for forecasting with actual math, rather than putting a number on his intuition and muttering something about priors. Doing math in your Bayesian updates is cheating!

So I saw that ratblr was trending, and I consider myself vaguely rat-adjacent-adjacent, even if just as a lurker, so my first reaction was "Oh God what happened Now".

What happened is that tumblr is apparently very excited about pet rats today :).

I have to consciously dodge sounding like a rationalist sometimes. We probably share some ground, we both worship the effective and love analysis. But they have this certain bright-eyed optimism, a total lack of edge with a slight note of corniness. You hear them pipe up from 6 feet deep in the weeds, all nuance and pet theory, and you just think "god, I should step on that thing."

I think if tumblr people can be corny too, we at least like to think we're outrageous outsiders. Rationalists seem to allow no concept of the outrageous and they're so damn sincere about that: you need a patina of cynicism, a hint of jadedness, to pull it off.

i know i have mutuals and followers who are/were close to rationalist circles, or rationalists themselves, or who are simply anarchist trans girl hackers who seem to br broadly familiar with the subject. and tbc it really REALLY isnt for me (im vaguelu familiar with the arguments and have read about rokos basilisk and lesswrong etc and it's beffudling to me). but do you guys have any good writings or posts on how much it's influencing tech giants and in which ways? there's been a lot of sensational writings on the ftx polycule etc and how elon and co are claiming to embrace longtermism but I'd love to see stuff on what they specifically get out of it and how close their interpretation is to the og ideas and circles, and what movements and groups DO exist today and how much they oppose or embrace recent tech industry developments (from ai chat and art to crypto crashing to elon and others indicating they're fans of the whole thing)

tbc this isn't about drama or sensationalist stuff, and im not seeking intellectual arguments on why it's the right way or utter bullshit. rather im trying to understand how these ideas developed, where the movement is today, and what kind of cultural and intellectual influence they actually DO have on tech giants and tech billionaires as a whole

This promise in Jeremiah [29:13] eliminates two types of people who claim to be seekers. There is the rationalist (who only allows reason – but the true seeker needs to be a whole person not just an 'autonomous' mind). And there is the cynic (whose start point assumes there is not enough evidence available and they seem committed only to seeking confirmation for their start-point). Hence both are defective seekers.

Andrew Fellows 

on the proper piloting of flesh suits

In communities like ours, it is not uncommon to find people who identify purely with their consciousness and refer to their body as a meat cage or similar. Until recently, I was very sympathetic to this view, but on Monday the 3rd of October I started taking oestrogen (2 mg daily) and now feel Embodied, like a person made of a body and mind working together.

I am now entirely in favour of the idea that everyone should try HRT for two weeks once in their adult life. In that time frame, it should only affect your skin texture and state of mind. Permanent changes take around three months, so only taking it for two weeks is harmless.

As well as feeling more embodied, I would also say that until this week I didn't know I was trans. I was pretty sure but this has still managed to be a major update, and I'm fairly certain that if someone had given me a strip of tablets five years ago I could have skipped all the intermediate steps. Even if you don't turn out to be trans you will know for sure and can stop wondering.

So there you have it, a two-week low-effort low-risk experiment with the potential to greatly improve your quality of life and give you possibly the most important data point of your entire life. 

As to how to get hormones, https://hrt.cafe/ is a curated list of sellers, but for oestrogen and for our purposes it should be easier to just ask a trans woman. If you are reading this you are probably at least passing me familiar with one and we tend to respond well to requests like this.

I will give the LessWrongian types one bit of credit though. Before “Effective Altruism” became just code for “give the cult all your money”, it used to promote the Against Malaria Foundation, which gives out mosquito nets and tries to eradicate mosquitoes, and as someone currently covered in half a dozen itchy bites from just one of the little buzzy vampire bastards, no-one who wants to get rid of mosquitoes can be all bad.

Recent discourse reminds me of that cult indoctrination trick that's often used to weed out more difficult marks early on, where they tell you all that you aren't allowed to eat rice on Tuesdays and then if you protest they go "wow SOMEBODY likes rice a little much huh" as if you're the fucking weirdo who cares too much about how much rice is consumed between Monday and Wednesday instead of them.

And this forces you to decide whether your autonomy matters to you more than the approval of the group - while they'll still act like you're on thin ice either way, if you give in at this point they know you're theirs forever, because now they've established a foothold, you've shown a moral weakness, which they will brand you with so it can be used against you in the future ("hey RICE-addict here doesn't want help break into the city records office") to force you to double-down and isolate you further.

And if instead you do decide to push back further, after your abrupt departure from the group ("You're seriously leaving us over RICE?!? Seriously?") and subsequent ostracism, you can then be used as a demonstration to the others who were more pliable, of how the outgroup is full of people like you who are obsessed with violating the No-Tuesday-Rice rule to the point where they'll abandon all their friends, who cared so much for them, so it clearly isn't an arbitrary restriction, you're the kind of monster these rules are intended to protect them from, thus all the other wise and esoteric precepts of the charismatic leader are implied to be equally justified.

Rationalist Philosophers Tutorial - YouTube

In this video, I explained about Rationalist philosophers- Descartes, Spinoza and Leibnitz, their theories of Substance, God and Rationalism.

Eliezer Yudkowsky in 2009 on the coordination problem in effective altruist / rationalist communities.

Our culture puts all the emphasis on heroic disagreement and heroic defiance, and none on heroic agreement or heroic group consensus.  We signal our superior intelligence and our membership in the nonconformist community by inventing clever objections to others' arguments.  Perhaps that is why the atheist/libertarian/technophile/sf-fan/Silicon-Valley/programmer/early-adopter crowd stays marginalized, losing battles with less nonconformist factions in larger society.  No, we're not losing because we're so superior, we're losing because our exclusively individualist traditions sabotage our ability to cooperate.

The other major component that I think sabotages group efforts in the atheist/libertarian/technophile/etcetera community, is being ashamed of strong feelings. We still have the Spock archetype of rationality stuck in our heads, rationality as dispassion.  Or perhaps a related mistake, rationality as cynicism—trying to signal your superior world-weary sophistication by showing that you care less than others.  Being careful to ostentatiously, publicly look down on those so naive as to show they care strongly about anything.

We should aspire to feel the emotions that fit the facts, not aspire to feel no emotion.  If an emotion can be destroyed by truth, we should relinquish it.  But if a cause is worth striving for, then let us by all means feel fully its importance.

I've heard it argued that the taboo against emotional language in, say, science papers, is an important part of letting the facts fight it out without distraction.  That doesn't mean the taboo should apply everywhere.  I think that there are parts of life where we should learn to applaud strong emotional language, eloquence, and poetry.  When there's something that needs doing, poetic appeals help get it done, and, therefore, are themselves to be applauded.

You need both sides of it—

the willingness to turn away from counterproductive causes, and the willingness to praise productive ones; 

the strength to be unswayed by ungrounded appeals, and the strength to be swayed by grounded ones.

1. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7FzD7pNm9X68Gp5ZC/why-our-kind-can-t-cooperate

And the only way to rein in corruptible politicians, these rationalists believed, was by balancing them against other politicians.

"Humankind: A Hopeful History" - Rutger Bregman

Sensual Henessy gets the rod She takes a dildo good in her dark pussy Veruca James and Charlotte Sartre in lesbo scene Fingered Big Tit Japanese Exotic (mixed Asian) teen with big natural boobs Cuckolding babe bukkaked Hot teens mouth spunky Pussy Smoking Cigarette Punjabi take bbc sexy Argentinian Anna with amazing natural tits

Kong Shangren, the guy who became popular at the early Qing court for writing a play that was (in part) about how sad it was that the Qing had taken over, was alive at the time glasses came to Qing via the Portuguese. He wrote this poem:

White glass from across the Western Seas Is imported through Macao: Fashioned into lenses big as coins, They encompass the eyes in a double frame. I put them on—it suddenly becomes clear; I can see the very tips of things! And read fine print by the dim-lit window Just like in my youth.

ngl, I kind of teared up.

There is something about this dynamic and I want more XD

The opposite of conspiracy theories isn't "rational thinking" its just "coincidence theories"

something that always bothered me about the worm fanfic scene is that they always try to cram everyone together. There's always the scene where taylor meets lisa in a coffee shop or whatever. I get it, it's a fanfic, you can't just make up a character for her to meet.

But one of the things i always liked about worm was that it stayed away from the comic trope of making everyone connected. Like, if Worm was a comic book, Armsmaster would be her teacher, She'd end up being friends with Kid Win, Cherie would attend Winslow, Annette would end up being still alive and a secret agent for Cauldron but with amnesia or something, over-the-top soap opera shit, right?

What I always liked was that in Worm, Taylor's just some girl. She only knows one hero out of costume, and it's the girl who ruined her life. Her dad's just the head of hiring for the union. Her mom was just a college professor. If you asked the mayor about Danny Hebert, he'd say "who?" A lot of fanfics have him be like seinfeldian rivals with the mayor, but like he just writes petitions. If you asked Lustrum about Annette Hebert, she'd have no clue who you're talking about, because Annette was just like a member of her organization.

What I'm trying to stress, is that in superhero comics, everything's connected. Everyone knows everyone. Everyone's a super genius, or met at The Science Expo, or their dad was a famous crime fighter. Comics have all these sorts of big dramatic irony reveals. In comic books, there is never a character who's just some guy.

This sort of thing is great for making everything feel connected, and it's good for keeping out extraneous exposition.

But Worm doesn't do that. It's all just like. They're just regular ass people. Of course they don't know each other. They live in a city with 300 thousand people, none of them would have ever met each other if it weren't for capeshit.

And, I mean, it does remove a lot of the potential for shenanigans but it really does a lot to make everything feel more real.

There's also something there about capeshit being a metaphor for shared trauma where like these people would not know each-other were it not for shared trauma.

The undersiders, the great team, the bestest friend team, they don't meet if not for capeshit. They have no connection to eachother outside this. These are kids who would have never met, they would never have come within 20 degrees of separation were it not for the fact they have powers. This is integral to worm's worldbuilding. It's maybe the closest you ever get to a positive aspect of gaining powers, and yet for so many capes there is no undersiders, just the fighting and loneliness and eventual violent death.