Post Ideas Journal

Magical Expectations - In alchemy, buddhism, asian martial arts, nootropics, Bayesian Statistics, and rationalism itself there is a narrative trick where at some point expectations of benefit based off the territory are transmuted into expectations of benefit that are wholly unrealistic. These magical expectations persist even when there is no real evidence to suggest their existence over a relatively long timespan.

Post Ideas:

Guerilla Issues - Issues that are illegible and very difficult to prove as a concrete trend, even though to any human observer they would be quite extant on the ground.

In Advocacy Of Work On Mundane Issues - Mundane issues are more tractable, easier to explain to people, easier to measure progress on, and the esoteric issues are being made much much harder by the presence of societal mismanagement.

Trapped In Amber: The Doctrine Of Rationality - Training materials are the most important documents your movement or organization has. They determine what 'level' your trainees start at. Because everyone starts with The Sequences, which haven't been updated since 2010, new 'rationalists' are essentially starting where we were in 2009. In order to progress as a community the core training materials need to update on evidence so the community can update on evidence. (Review of concepts from Learning To Eat Soup With A Knife in general.)