I’ve been saying this in private for a couple of years now — any institution vulnerable to Woke takeover should probably be abandoned to it. Salvage is not possible. Build alternatives anew.
Bad Listener destruction is a power-trip drug that resists de-addiction.
Conversation
It got a lot worse for Shor, btw, beyond just losing his job. But I continue to maintain: anything you lose over something like this was never worth having in the first place. nymag.com/intelligencer/
2
2
21
Replying to
like having people treat you nicely and having a good reputation seem worth having, even they can be destroyed by this kind of thing
1
9
Replying to
I think "having people treat you nicely and having a good reputation" is now just a 50% harder skill. Social presence is simply another class of institutions to which the principle applies. I see more people who manage to thread that needle well today than 3-4 years ago.
1
5
I feel like part of the problem is that you need to build a social presence that is (pardon my Taleb) antifragile: It's very easy to have people treat you nicely and have a good reputation by people pleasing and that works great until it suddenly very majorly doesn't.
1
4
Someone who people like only as long as they never say anything wrong is doomed and doesn't know it yet.
1
6
people have different tolerances for overt conflict and self-sort into appropriate cultures/roles to the extent they can, I think that’s good
2
4
This is actually a key difference between the space you've created around yourself and rationalists... SSC kerfuffle suggests to me that rationalists actually have higher tolerance for conflict than they think they do. Postrats might just be nonviolent rationalists.
1
7
I'm probably less conflict averse than both groups, but when I spoil for a fight it's usually just fighting for the sake of fighting, like a barroom brawl for exercise. Chaotic conflict energy is like trolling in that it is oddly not as vulnerable to ideological explosiveness
I guess there's also two axes here: Conflict tolerance and conflict skill. Two are correlated but not perfectly. e.g. I'm pretty good at conflict but honestly would mostly prefer not to be and try to avoid it unless I need it for boundary setting.
1
2


