The weirdest aspect is that the general mood is more useful to me than the list of methods. I constantly feel like given encouragement to have the courage to not repeat tribal-membership-signalling truths but try to find out real ones. I constantly feel like being encouraged to have the courage to not think like "I must say X because Y people already dislike me and I need the support of X people" but "come out of the closet" as an independent thinker without allegiances.

A very good place to practice is https://www.reddit.com/r/purplepilldebate/ the whole color coding is encouraging people to don a tribal jersey and say things like "I as a bluepiller think..." "you redpiller guys think that..." injecting a "no-pill" attitude into this takes quite some courage, is useful for exercising and growing this kind of courage-muscle, and with LW I feel I have a non-tribe tribe at my back who understands what I am trying to do and useful to lean back to when I feel like redpillers think I am bluepill, bluepillers think I am redpill and both distrust me. (I am not using this nickname there.)

And another useful thing is that I feel I am being encouraged to not simply adopt a lofty "I am above both" attitude which is very, very tempting but fruitless and narcissistically smug, as feeling superior to mud-wrestling tribes is a textbook classy intellectual move but totally vacuous, rather I feel encouraged to go down into the mud, and fish truths out of it, some red, some blue.

How has lesswrong changed your life?

by mstevens 1 min read31st Mar 201557 comments


I've been wondering what effect joining lesswrong and reading the sequences has on people.

How has lesswrong changed your life?

What have you done differently?

What have you done?