Put a Num on It

I wouldn't characterize the rationalists as just a loose knit online community with a common interest in rational thinking that happen to overlap with some other unusual interests- but as a real life community and culture - centered around a particular group of people mostly in the Northern California "East Bay Area" with a very unusual lifestyle and social norms they've collectively invented within the movement, that includes all of what I mentioned as central aspects. It's a broad social experiment of trying to reinvent everything "rationally" instead of just doing what their culture or parents taught them.

See for example: https://putanumonit.com/2019/10/16/polyamory-is-rational/ "The Rationalist community isn’t just a sex cult, they do other great things too!"

I find that post hilarious, because the polling your friends and doing statistics on it thing is even more stereotypically rationalist than polyamory itself, but they conclude from poll data that most of the rationalists came to polyamory from within the movement itself, not from an existing or outside interest in it.

There is a larger international group of people that participate remotely and don't relocate or adopt the full lifestyle, but it would be a mistake to think of that as something that exists entirely separately, or would exist at all without that core community.

> Sooner than most and the media.

This is a very low bar to jump over!

Anyway I read through that article. There's a lot of guff about Newcomb's paradox and Eliezer, and a single paragraph referencing COVID, with two links supporting your statement. I've clicked through those links and have come out unimpressed.

The first link is used to supported the claim that "The rationalist community was well ahead of the public": https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/14/a-failure-but-not-of-prediction/ .

Scott rightly highlights how the media and institutions got things wrong, but conversely gives only a few examples of "generic smart people on Twitter" getting some things right in the early days of the outbreak. He confesses that he himself did not predict the seriousness of COVID.

The second link is used to support the claim "the wider tech community, were using masks and stocking up on essential goods, even as others were saying to worry about the flu instead": https://putanumonit.com/2020/02/27/seeing-the-smoke/ .

The linked article was written at the end of February, when panic-buying had already firmly set in across the US.

There is nothing here about the reasoning or predictive abilities of the rationalist or EA community specifically. Nor is there any compelling comparison of its response compared to the wider public.

This reminds me of this post: https://putanumonit.com/2021/09/10/rules-for-noobs/

I don't think the guy is any sort of "certified expert" but it rings true to me. And occasionally I've tried to give people related advice but found I couldn't. For example: How do you know when you you're close enough with someone that you tease them in a way that they'll take well vs badly? I'm pretty good at knowing it, but I'll be damned if I can explain it.

tl;dr of the article is that when people are learning then explicit rules and guidelines are helpful. Once you get better at it, they are unnecessary and even harmful. People in the latter stage tend to give crappy advice like "just be yourself" because it works for them now, they don't really exactly know what they're doing (ie, the knowledge is implicit) and they've forgotten what it's like to be totally incompetent.

Anyway, perhaps the point is that while it's difficult to externalize how to "not be awkward" (and indeed it would likely be different for every social group) you can probably use rules to get along well enough, for long enough, to figure it out the hard way.

I've read through the comments related to relationships here and a lot of the same arguments were made. One that stood out was "Women are selectors and men take what they can get" (paraphrased) and a few similar statements.

This isn't a bad thing. [1][2][3][4] If you as a straight man are putting some effort into being a decent human being and better dating prospect, in the long term you're far more likely to have a good outcome than a woman of "equal" "value" (subjective concepts).

[1] https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/why-women-lose-the-dating-game-20120421-1xdn0.html

[2] https://putanumonit.com/2016/02/03/015-dating_1/

[3] https://putanumonit.com/2016/02/10/017-dating_2/

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem