Thanks for sharing. You summed it up well: The community feels like a hidden gem when you first discover it. It feels like there's an energy of intelligence buzzing about interesting topics and sharing new findings.
Then you start encountering the weirder parts. For me, it was the group think and hero worship. I just wanted to read interesting takes on new topics, but if you deviated from the popular narrative associated with the heroes (Scott Alexander, Yudkowski, Cowen, Aaronson, etc.) it felt like the community's immune system identified you as an intruder and started attacking.
I think a lot of people get drawn into the idea of it being a community where they finally belong. Especially on Twitter (where the latest iteration is "TPOT") it's extraordinarily clique-ish and defensive. It feels like high school level social dynamics at play, except the players are equipped with deep reserves of rhetoric and seemingly endless free time to dunk on people and send their followers after people who disagree. It's a very weird contrast to the ideals claimed by the community.
Well nobody sent me; instead I had the strange experience of waking up this morning, seeing an interesting post about Scott Aaronson identifying as a rationalist, and when I check the discussion it's like half of HN has decided it's a good opportunity to espouse everything they dislike about this group of people.
Since when is that what we do here? If he'd written that he'd decided to become vegetarian, would we all be out here talking about how vegetarians are so annoying and one of them even spat on my hamburger one time?
And then of these uncalled-for takedowns, several -- including yours -- don't even seem to be engaging in good-faith discourse, and seem happy to pile on to attacks even when they're completely at odds with their own arguments.
I'm sorry to say it but the one who decided to use their free time to leer at people un-provoked over the internet seems to be you.
Seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to discuss in the comments on this article, and I don't know which other "takedowns" you're referring to, but this person's comments on it have not been in bad faith at all.
(Indeed, I think it's in worse faith to try to guilt trip people who are just expressing critical opinions. It's fine - good, even! - to disagree with those people, but this particular comment has a very "how dare you criticize something!" tone that I don't think is constructive.)
Then you start encountering the weirder parts. For me, it was the group think and hero worship. I just wanted to read interesting takes on new topics, but if you deviated from the popular narrative associated with the heroes (Scott Alexander, Yudkowski, Cowen, Aaronson, etc.) it felt like the community's immune system identified you as an intruder and started attacking.
I think a lot of people get drawn into the idea of it being a community where they finally belong. Especially on Twitter (where the latest iteration is "TPOT") it's extraordinarily clique-ish and defensive. It feels like high school level social dynamics at play, except the players are equipped with deep reserves of rhetoric and seemingly endless free time to dunk on people and send their followers after people who disagree. It's a very weird contrast to the ideals claimed by the community.