Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

This doesn't mean that decoupling is bad! Just that it's a bad look for Rationalists to both have decoupled conversations on touchy subjects and also pretend that we're persecuted victims. I broadly agree and think that we should double down on the former.

I think you dramatically underestimate how much social (and sexual) trauma the modal SSCer has suffered. High decoupling isn’t an artifact of safety, it was often the thing that left us beat up, ridiculed, lonely, and raped in our formative years.

It's a hat tip to the idea that the weird nerds are our blind creepy overlords, rather than a disproportionately abused and isolated group that would be completely invisible at the edges of society were they not also disproportionately generative and talented at high skill work.

My disagreement with this is more normative than substantial. I think it's a good idea to disarm weapons used to bully nerds (e.g. "read the room") but not to focus too much on nerd oppression. That's playing into the oppression Olympics — itself a tool for bullying nerds.

My issue with the quoted claim is that it's false, and I don't really believe that anyone who'd claim otherwise is speaking in good faith if they've actually spent time with the people they're talking about.

Yes, the quoted claim was certainly the part of the article I liked the least. "Those who have largely escaped discrimination" is a cringe thing to write about anyone, let alone a group you're not part of.

Aspiring community winning at stuff and has-trauma are synergistic narratives. But the narrative that we’ve had safe charmed lives is a blinking sign to psychopaths saying “Bullying these people is punching up, ackshually” both false and eg Arthur Chu’s explicit position.