I recently made a forum thread warning people against drugs, especially brain-affecting, addictive drugs, including caffeine.

https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/caffeine-drugs-food-additives-and-inadequate-civilizations/1390

I've got a few things to say about it:

Do you know what caffeine does to you?

It's not very hard to look up information or read a book.

https://adrenalfatiguesolution.com/caffeine-adrenal-glands/

Each time you drink a cup of coffee, neurons send messages to your pituitary gland which in turn alerts your adrenals to pump out adrenaline and cortisol. In short; caffeine instantly puts you into fight or flight mode. If you’re drinking several cups a day, it’s likely your whole nervous system is on constant red alert without you even knowing it.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1356551/

Caffeine is the most widely consumed central-nervous-system stimulant. ... decreases ... cerebral blood flow ... Caffeine activates noradrenaline neurons and seems to affect the local release of dopamine. Many of the alerting effects of caffeine may be related to the action of the methylxanthine on serotonin neurons. ... The effects of caffeine on learning, memory, performance and coordination are rather related to the methylxanthine action on arousal, vigilance and fatigue. Caffeine exerts obvious effects on anxiety and sleep ... The central nervous system does not seem to develop a great tolerance to the effects of caffeine although dependence and withdrawal symptoms are reported.

Caffeine screws with your body a lot, including specifically your brain. Why would it be good? What knowledge-creating process would have designed it so those effects were beneficial?

And basically every other drug is problematic and should be avoided without having a compelling reason to use it. Why would caffeine be the exception?

You guys know that all the pain killer drugs are harmful, right? If you're in pain it's fine to take some, but they're bad for you and taking them chronically is dangerous. They have downsides.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK202225/

Caffeine is a psychostimulant with the same central effects as the classical nervous system psychostimulants cocaine and amphetamine

You think cocaine and amphetamine are bad, so why are you taking caffeine?

https://wellbeingpole.com/caffeine/

Among [caffeine's] most frequent adverse effects we can find:

• Irritability
• Acidity
• Nervousness
• Nausea and vomiting
• Increased blood pressure
• Headache
• Confusion
• Palpitations
• Tremors in the limbs
• Increased urination
• Diarrhea
• Muscle pain
• Insomnia
• Sleep disorders

But people take lots of it without concern or research?

Caffeine and adenosine have a similar molecular structure. So when caffeine is present in the brain, it competes with adenosine to bind to the same receptors. Normally, adenosine would cause drowsiness and slow neuronal activity, but since caffeine blocks the receptors that generally work with adenosine, the effect is the opposite, causing neurons to be stimulated and more active than usual.

It's a bad idea to disrupt your normal, evolved brain functioning unless you have a really good idea of what you're doing (which you don't) or a huge problem that makes it worth the risk (e.g. brain surgery is worth the risk if the alternative is dying).

According to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), approximately 90 percent of the world’s population ingests some form of caffeine.

It's not that hard to look up coffee/caffeine being bad if you ignore the propaganda in favor of it and read what it actually does. I haven't paid much attention to it because I don't drink coffee and don't have a lot of exposure to people who do. Apparently like 80+% of Americans are addicted to caffeine though!? Estimates vary. This estimate says 90% of the world. jeez.

You might claim a lot of caffeine usage is tradition dating back before modern science. Maybe that accounts for a fair amount of that world wide usage. I don't know what caffeine usage is like in China or India today. Some traditional usages might be OK or only mildly bad; I don't know; but I bet they involve a lot less caffeine. I'm pretty confident, with no research, that drinking several cups of coffee a day is not a 1000+ year old tradition. They've been destroying the rain forests to mass produce this coffee. It's a huge, fairly modern industry that has put a ton of work into mass producing this drug and selling it to you in order to make money. Part of the industry is a product of modern wealth. Traditionally, people could not afford Starbucks; that's a post-industrial-revolution thing that has come along with mass-produced factory food in general (which I broadly think has some problems, btw).

Do you think the people running the coffee industry are more ethical than the people making mobile games with predatory monetization? Are they more ethical than the people who run cigarette companies? Don't trust them and their biased, self-serving propaganda aimed at getting people addicted in order to get their money.

Brain-Affecting Drugs and Philosophy

People try to learn philosophy. They get stuck. I try to brainstorm how/why they're stuck and how to help. They sometimes try or pretend to try to brainstorm what's going on too.

Meanwhile they're on drugs and they aren't disclosing that!? Maybe that's why they're stuck!

I know drinking coffee is widespread and normal, so that'd be a reason not to mention it. But brainstorming for why you're struggling with unconventional philosophy should include some conventional, normal things. Part of the idea, which my fans (even stuck ones) are well aware of, is that some normal stuff is actually bad.

Plus I did tell everyone 5 years ago that I think coffee is bad. So not disclosing coffee drinking after that is problematic.

Should I have known how popular coffee is? Partly I'm isolated and not around much coffee drinking by others. I've heard of it but I don't drink coffee, I rarely visit coffee shops, and I don't go to the office in the morning to see most of my coworkers drinking coffee. I talk with people online but many of them seem to hide information about their personal lives as a general policy, which includes their coffee drinking. So it's partly not just an accident – not mentioning coffee can be part of a broader attempt to hide information about what they might be doing wrong. If some would-be students had hours of screencast video of their attempts at learning activities with webcam, or even without cam, it might have revealed a bunch of coffee drinking for at least one person which could have led to the issue being raised more prominently so everyone else noticed and had no excuse to say "I didn't know you think coffee is bad".

But that's not even the main issue regarding it being hard for me to guess who is drinking how much coffee. The main issue is that my fans are self-selected. Even if 90% of the population does something dumb, it's still possible that under 10% of my fans do it. Or at least under 10% of the active posters, who are even more self-selected. For example, being religious is widespread but I'm not aware of any active posters being religious, and I don't think that I should guess posters are religious when they don't specify. If someone was hiding being highly religious from me, I'd think that was bad behavior and a relevant issue to their perspective on philosophy. And I'd consider it unreasonable to say I should have known that maybe they were religious since religion is so common. Similarly, a lot of people believe in superstitions like ghosts or astrology, or believe dumb stuff like UFOs and alien visits, or believe conspiracies like that 9/11 was an inside job. But I don't expect such things from the people on my forums.

I now realize more that a ton of people, even very "rational" type people, think being addicted to brain-affecting drugs is OK. I thought they'd value their brain highly and be more protective of it. And, again, I have brought this up before. And maybe most of the forum posters don't drink coffee (or energy drinks and other caffeine sources)? Not many people actually said. But a few admitted to being caffeine addicts (and defended/rationalized that) and now I'm concerned that a bunch of other people are too.

I think approximately everyone does know not to have drunk conversations with me and act like they are trying to learn while hiding that they're drunk. Same with being high on marijuana.

But they might not disclose that they smoked pot yesterday, had one or two beers earlier today before posting, or used some nicotine today. Those things are bad too. Not disclosing coffee is more like that. Being drunk while posting would be more extreme and more unreasonable. But from a rational/logoical perspective, the difference is quantitative not qualitative. It's less bad by degree to only have one beer instead of being drunk, but it's the same kind of thing. Beer makes it harder for you to think straight. So do coffee, nicotine and pot.

More or less every other drug is problematic too. All the painkillers are problematic to take long term. Hormonal birth control is problematic. All the psych drugs, anxiety drugs, sleep drugs, etc. The big distinction to make is whether it's a mind-affecting drug or not.

Caffeine is mind-affecting. Tylenol may be bad for your body if you take it regularly (and a tiny bit bad to take it even once, but that isn't a serious concern), but to a reasonable approximation it doesn't affect your thinking. It screws with other parts of your body. Whereas caffeine goes into your brain and binds with receptors there (which prevents some normal binding from happening). Caffeine affects and prevents the regular functioning of your brain, rather than just your liver, heart, kidneys or something like that. (Caffeine also has some non-brain effects, but those kinds of effects, whether from caffeine or anything else, are significantly less relevant to philosophy learning.)

Basically, any brain or mind affecting drug is a relevant problem for philosophy learning. If you're getting stuck, that could be part of your problem. Any drug considered calming or anti-calming may be mind-affecting. Any drugs with (or alleged to have) a positive or negative effect on anxiety, or on any emotion or psychological state, could be mind-affecting. (Some stuff is placebo or inaccurate reputation instead.) This is not a perfect distinction, and drugs often have complex effects throughout your body, but you should be somewhat wary of all drugs, and especially wary of brain-affecting drugs. Any drug where affecting your brain is one of the main effects it does is especially concerning.

I feel kinda like I have to police people's entire lives or they'll just massively sabotage their philosophy learning. But that isn't my job, nor my place, and I don't want to do it. Plus they put work into preventing me from policing their lives. They don't regard that as help and don't want it – at least that's how they often act regardless of what they say. If they really seriously wanted help then, among many other things, they'd post hours of raw video of their learning activities and samples of other stuff in their lives. Which is something I've absolutely brought up before repeatedly and everyone just ignores me and doesn't want to do it or talk about it or talk about why they won't do it, etc.

Half-Life

Also, caffeine has a half-life. People sometimes say stuff like it wears off or leaves your system after 12 hours. It doesn't. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7361718/

The half-life of caffeine for healthy people varies. It's commonly in the 3-6 hour range. Suppose it's 5.33 hours for you. You wake up, drink 4 cups of coffee instantaneously, and go to bed 16 hours later. That's the same as drinking half a cup of coffee immediately before bed. Three half lives passed after drinking the coffee, so the amount of coffee in your system is reduced by half three times, going from 4 cups to 2 to 1 to 1/2 a cup of coffee.

There are a lot of people who drink 5+ cups of coffee per day, and some of them keep drinking it in the afternoon or even the evening (e.g. an after-dinner coffee). Some of those people also get caffeine from other sources like tea, soda or chocolate. Some other pepole drink little or no coffee but drink lots of "energy drinks".

Also a "cup" of coffee is misleading and refers to roughly 100mg of caffeine. A lot of coffee drinks have more like 200mg and some have over 300mg. A coke is more like 30mg. Mainstream authorities currently commonly say that over 400mg in a day may be harmful.

The result is a lot of people go to bed with half a "cup" (50mg) or more caffeine still active in their body.

Repetitive Conclusion

Here's some conclusion that I wrote before some of the explanation above so it's kinda repetive now:

If you're trying to be a good thinker and learn stuff, while taking mind-effecting drugs, we don't have full knowledge of all the detailed effects, but you're presumably sabotaging yourself. I now suspect this contributes significantly to the difficulty I have explaining stuff to people or getting reasonable answers from them in debates or discussions. I think people have mistreated me by having low quality discussions and then not disclosing a contributing factor: that they were taking caffeine or other relevant drugs. Being sleep deprived is a similar issue which I fear is another widespread form of philosophical sabotage.

I've been trying to brainstorm why people get stuck and none of them bother to mention to me that they're on drugs.

It's kinda like if people were trying to have conversations with me while drunk and didn't disclose that they were drunk. I think a lot of readers would find that example pretty bad and see my point about how that would be mistreating me. Doing the same thing with caffeine, sleep deprivation, other drugs or smaller doses of alcohol is also unreasonable in a similar way to doing undisclosed drunk conversations. It's the same issue qualitatively, just less bad as a matter of degree, but still bad.

Also, caffeine is surprisingly under-researched scientifically.

Quitting

Fire replied to this article and it sounded like he wants to quit caffeine cold turkey (meaning abruptly, all at once, just immediately start entirely avoiding caffeine). I replied:

Quitting addictive drugs cold turkey is often not the best approach. If it works for you, cool. But don’t stress too much if it doesn’t and don’t try too hard to force it with a ton of will power.

It can be better to taper the dosage down.

It can be better to do non-judgmental introspection, and pay attention to what using the drug is like, so that you understand it better, before trying to quit.

It can help to do research like reading books before quitting (or during a quitting process that takes weeks or months) so you know what you’re doing more and are more sure about your conclusion. You wouldn’t want to try to quit then change your mind when you get a new piece of information, then change your mind again when getting another new piece of information, etc. The Caffeine Blues book looks OK. I like Allen Carr’s Easy Way To Stop Smoking – some of the ideas in it would help (like anti-willpower stuff) but it’s about the wrong drug so some wouldn’t. (EDIT: Carr also has a book on quitting caffeine that I haven't read. He also has books on some other similar topics like alcohol and eating problems.)

It can help to be familiar with other people’s stories and experiences so you know what to expect and can be more confident of your conclusion about how to run your life and your method for achieving that. Talking with other people can help too like Alcoholics Anonymous and other IRL meetups or online forums. Reddit has stuff like https://www.reddit.com/r/decaf/

Fights, Games, and Debates by Anatol Rapoport (1960), p. 289 (btw I read 285-309 based on a lead from a different, better book):

The reciprocal task has been proposed as the foundation of ethical debate, namely, the task of stating the opponent's case as clearly and eloquently as possible (99).

There are reasons I find this difficult or problematic.

One is my standards of clarity and eloquence (and elegance, simplicity, generality, etc.) are often higher than my opponent. This leads to asking clarifying questions because his own presentation is inadequate and unclear. Or it leads to guessing what he means and making up parts of his position myself. More broadly it leads to me changing things.

And regardless, if I only repeated back his exact words, he wouldn’t think I understood him. So changing things is a necessary part of this task.

But when you change things, people often don’t like it. Even if it’s objectively better, they may think it’s worse. They will feel understood only if they like the changes (and don’t recognize substantive additions, even ones they like). What does that require? Cultural affinity. Rapport. Knowing and pandering to (or genuinely fulfilling) their values. etc. It requires some knowledge of their psychology and values.

Making their position clearer often makes some flaws more apparent. They never say anything that reveals those flaws so clearly and they dislike it when I do. They want me to make statements about their position which are less clear in some ways.

I often find it hard to state people’s positions when those positions are illogical. And they won’t be satisfied if my statement of their position makes the illogic very clear. They want me to give arguments from their perspective about why it is actually logical, rather than give my own opinion. OK but how when none of their arguments make sense?

There is a trick to talking like they do and glossing over certain issues, which is developed by exposure to their subculture. But learning that trick is quite a different thing than merely listening to their reasoning and debating statements and understanding what they said. Being able to satisfactorily pose as one of them, by having or imitating the same blind spots, is a huge and unreasonable burden to ask of debate partners. And no one does ask for that openly. They merely ask you to state their position in a way which is acceptable to them. And then they don’t analyze what that means, in general, or how it’s problematic. It sounds so reasonable to people but I’ve never seen them analyze it further.

Similarly the “principle of charity” and “steelmanning” (opposite of strawmanning) is popular among rationality-oriented people but I never see them do any analysis of the major difficulties with it. If someone says something that you think is wrong in all reasonable interpretations, then what is the charitable interpretation?

Similarly, the Rapoport book seems to think listening and understanding others is great and a big improvement over what people usually do. And that may well be so. But to me it’s basic and I have experience running into more advanced problems like understanding people too well and having too much insight into their flaws and contradictions. Part of the problem is they don’t like it. And part is that they don’t understand it. If you know more about them than they do, then you know stuff that they don’t, so they have to learn new things in order to understand what you’re talking about. This stuff works better when you’re on a similar intellectual level with the other guy, and also you were ignorant so you can just listen and find out some ideas you didn’t know before, and then you state them to show that you now know what they are instead of still not knowing. For simplistic people that’s pretty good and way better than many alternatives. But at a deeper level with more powerful thinking abilities, part of that is just basic stuff that should be taken for granted (of course one understands first and then engages with statements in the discussion rather than not listening) and part actually doesn’t work well.

People have demanded of me that I express their position but those same people are unsympathetic to me saying things like: “I have been unable to find any literature on your side which expresses your position in a reasonable way and I don’t know how to fix it to be reasonable; I think it’s wrong. What literature do you endorse?” In their minds, that doesn’t seem to qualify as properly listening, even though often part of what’s going on is that I’ve read more of their side’s literature than they have, and I know more about their side than they do.

Whenever I talk to inductivists, for example, I always want them to state their position and take a clear position, and I find them very ignorant of what induction is and unable to present any clear epistemological position. And when I try to state their position for them, I can successfully give an inductivist position, but I have no way to give theirs specifically since there is so much variation in inductivist positions, as well as dishonest goal-post moving (they might deny something is their position and adjust their position if my clear explanation starts revealing flaws in it or merely makes it seem vulnerable by being too well defined without enough wiggle room.)

How do you charitably explain someone’s position when part of their position is to dishonestly use ambiguity to sabotage debate? How do you charitably state someone’s position when a major part of their position is irrational strategies for entrenching bad ideas against criticism? They will think it’s very uncharitable to believe that about them, but what is the alternative? To think they are doing it on purpose, maliciously? That’d be more uncharitable. They want me to conclude that they are good and rational, but that position is sometimes not honestly available to me given my best effort at objective analysis. And they hate that and don’t want to talk with me because I’m too insightful and my reasons for my conclusions, that they find threatening, are too compelling, reasonable, objective, logical, detailed, etc.

As I’ve gotten better at debate, at understanding people, etc., I’ve found a lot of dishonesty, evasion, vagueness on key issues, and other problems. And they want me to just ignore that – ignore the reasons I see the discussion failing – and help them keep up pretenses.

They want me to state their position, and make it coherent, and make it not wrong. They don’t want me to clearly nail down their position and then refute it. Even if they agree that I stated their position correctly, they’ll usually try to walk that back after I refute what I stated. They will suddenly realize, when my version is clearly false, that it doesn’t match their position at all… They will start making ad hoc modifications to their position, moving the goal posts, etc.

That doesn’t happen every time. But one of the major factors is their social comfort: having rapport with them, them being in a situation where they feel threatened by potential loss of social status, them not feeling attacked, etc. Getting good reactions depends a lot on that problematic stuff, not just on listening or being logical. But even saying that is kind of an accusation that the other guy is not logical, pursues social status, etc., which they might take as offensive, threatening and uncharitable, even if it’s true.

Similarly, Rapoport talks about stating conditions under which the opponent’s position is correct and I’d agree with it (stating its region of validity). These can be real situations or just hypothetical ones. On what premises would I agree with them? And that makes sense when everyone has flawed compromise positions and you can (or should be able to) see some merits to the other side too. But what about when I think I have decisively correct ideas which are already optimized for all cases? Then any deviation is just bad.

I already aimed to take into account all the standard views and make something strictly better. So compared to one standard view, I can give their other standard view some credit for having some merits. But compared to my more sophisticated view, that already considered and learned what it could from all standard views, I can’t give their standard view any credit – it’s just strictly worse in all ways as far as I know (if that wasn’t my best understanding, I’d have a different position so that it would be the case – I choose positions so it’s the case).

The only premises on which I’d accept their view are (in my opinion) false, and often quite severe/drastic/weird/unintuitive like epistemology would have to be different which could mean changing the laws of physics so information processing is different and then if you do that in the right way – so you can throw out our current logic and concepts like true and false – then one of their ideas would work. It’d have to be a just so story though. That vast majority of large changes to physics would make their view incoherent. But if the change to physics is designed just right, it could make their idea happen to work. You could look through millions of different laws of physics until you find one where their position gets lucky and accidentally works well. They won’t appreciate that kind of charity though (and it isn’t really charitable to think they are “right” in some special cases of that nature – it’s just disagreeing with them and considering them wrong).

Rapoport says debates fail a ton because people won’t listen to each other. And that’s true. But I listen and people often don’t like it. They don’t want me to ask clarifying questions that they can’t answer which reveal they don’t have a clear view of their own position. They don’t want me to understand their position, their motive, their relevant psychological flaws, their errors, their defense mechanisms, etc. And they don’t want to talk about all that either. They get angry and defensive if I point some of that stuff out. Often they have little understanding of themselves, and little ability to reason, so they can’t even tell if I’m right. But they want to keep up a pretense of having great self-knowledge.

There is a widespread belief that people’s statements about their own psychology have strong authority and should be accepted basically without question. It’s also widely believed that knowing things about the psychology of others is very very hard and it’s arrogant to try. So then they think I’m being unreasonable to form an opinion about what’s going on in their head when we debate. Then they make a statement flatly contradicting me and they think that settles it and proves me wrong. But they don’t give an argument and don’t understand how to objectively analyze their mental states or how to provide evidence about their mental states which differs from their conclusions or opinions and is instead more raw and appropriate to analyze.

What do they want me to do? Not form a mental model of them when we talk? Not have any empathy or consider their feelings, motives or unstated reasoning at all? Not say any meta discussion? I’ve tried those things too and I’ve found that people hate it. They want me to make some meta statements and to have some mental model of them including their ideas and interests. A lot of what they are asking for with listening, charity, etc., is that I do pay attention to them, understand their ideas, mentally model them instead of not understanding their perspective, etc. But they want me to do all that and then agree with them.

They think that if I mentally model them and listen then I’ll see they’re right.

If I do that stuff – listen, mentally model them well, be charitable, etc – and reach a different conclusion, like that they’re wrong, that’s extra threatening. The better I listen and be fair and objective, the more insulting it is when I conclude that they’re wrong. Especially if I conclude they’re fully, decisively wrong instead of having some good points that can work with a few modifications. The more rational and high quality my analysis, the more threatening my continued disagreement with them is. The better a listener I am, the worse it is for them if I still think they’re wrong (and it’s even worse if I think it’s a big deal which is harming their life, rather than an irrelevant, minor issue).

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Another thing people do is claim it’s boring for you to state their case correctly. Why bother stating obvious truths that they already know? For example, on HBL (an Objectivist group), I wrote some arguments against Popper before advocating CR ideas. No one later said “Since you do see flaws in Popper, we’ll take it seriously when you agree with some of his ideas”. No one praised or appreciated my rationality. Instead they got confrontational. Why bring up Popper? We already hate him. Why talk about him? He’s out-group. They didn’t use those words but they didn’t like my rational criticism of Popper. And I guess rational criticism of Popper is not their position. They never do it… They never point out real flaws in accurate quotes of Popper’s writing. Their real position is that Popper should be flamed and stigmatized, and that one shouldn’t ever listen to what Popper said and engage with it, not even to critique Popper’s errors. They don’t hide their prejudices very well. But they did pretend to agree with and be bored by some of my criticism – not see the point – rather than recognizing it as analysis that they’d never do, which they dislike because it’s not hostile enough towards Popper since it merely refuted some of his errors objectively.

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Rapoport talks about an English speaker who helped a Russian with a speech (keep in mind that this book came out in 1960). The Russian said that Russia wants only peace but when he said it he sounded very hostile and aggressive. She coached him to say it in a different tone. Rapoport thinks this is wonderful. I think it’s dangerous to help war-mongering liars fool more people. It’s problematic to tell them how to lie more effectively. She didn’t merely listen to and understand his case. Rapoport thinks she helped him state his case most effectively. But he isn’t analyzing deeply. There are different types of effectiveness. She didn’t help him use logic more effectively. She helped him be more effective at lying.

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Helping people use logic and reason more effectively, to help them make their cases better, works in a short term, local way. But if you do it too well, as I strive to, then global optima matter. Ultimately, if they are wrong and take the issues seriously and pursue it with high standards, then they will conclude they are wrong. They may think logic is on their side, but the more extensive the analysis done, the harder it may be for them to keep thinking that. As your logical reasoning is more powerful and developed, and takes into account more issues, you can go from an ally who is helping them be more logical to someone who is challenging their conclusions.

If they’re wrong, helping them reason better ultimately won’t lead to them making the case more effectively but to them changing their mind (or irrationally refusing to). This counters the goal of being on their side (on the side of their current conclusion, which they’re attached to).

I run into this. If I try to share all the logical analysis I know starting from their premises, I end up concluding they are wrong. I can go through the process from their perspective involving rationally changing their mind. But they just interpret that as an especially effective, scary attack, not as something they want to listen to that shows I listened to them. The problem is I used charitable premises and logic, but their real views are irrational, so the process of mind changing I wrote down won’t work for them. They will not change their mind like that. But they should. So it reveals they’re bad and they’re wrong (or lying) about what their premises are, their commitment to rationality, etc. It ends up being a debate about whether they are flawed. But I don’t know how to dumb down my analysis so they’ll reliably like it and keep them consistently liking it even as I progress the discussion to point out some of their errors and ways they should change.

People don’t like it when you’re super reasonable, a super good listener, and you show how their premises and points lead to your conclusions, not theirs. Unless they decide to actually change their mind. But they often don’t. And whether they are willing to change their mind generally depends on things other than what the truth is or how rational or good my analysis is.

I can try really hard to accommodate reasonable requests or concerns and reach a conclusion that doesn’t trample on or compromise anything good. Generally other people have nothing to add to that since their ideas are repetitive with other ideas I’ve encountered before (or sometimes thought of myself). But what I can’t accommodate is them being unreasonable and illogical. And they can’t and won’t just accept rational explanations. So we get stuck in a way that’s damning to them. So these debating techniques don’t work well and don’t fix things.

Broadly, generally, the issue is that the more I do rational things that should work and should get positive responses, the more it pressures people (who care about rationality or say they do) and makes me look better than them. The more I do all the right, rational things, the harder it is for them to come up with any excuses not to listen. So they fall apart. High quality rationality doesn’t leave space for them to keep having dumb views.

People want to be listened to, and interpreted charitably, because they think they will win. They think that the reason their arguments aren’t working is that other people don’t listen, are ignorant, are biased, are uncharitable, etc. If you do all the right things that they ask for, and still disagree with them, they often really, really hate it. It reveals to them what a fraud they are. It forces their rationalizing into overdrive. It gives them a big challenge to cope with when all they wanted was for you to change.

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The book gets pretty silly and unrealistic. It says you can ~always find some region of validity for stuff people say. OK so far. And it gives various often-pedantic examples.

For example, if someone says paper is thick, you can agree that it’s thick compared to the sides of a soap bubble.

But the guy saying paper is thick probably never thought about soap bubbles… You’re partly agreeing with him in some technical sense but what you’re really doing is denying that paper is as thick as cardboard, and trying to insist on the usual view of paper, which you’re convinced is true. You aren’t listening to what he disagrees with the usual view about, or why. Rapoport is actually arrogant and a bad listener. He doesn’t take seriously that people get stuff wrong. He wants you to listen by finding some exception where their statement is true so you can grant them something. But that isn’t what they wanted or meant. They weren’t saying it because they know of that one exception while also agreeing that their statement is wrong in general. They made their statement because they like it in some kinda general way.

He gave an extended example with an arithmetic based on rotating dice in order to rescue some mathematical error as having a region of validity. But none of that shows any understanding of the perspective of the guy who is making a basic math error. It’s saying a bunch of stuff he doesn’t understand while also assuming the whole time that the actual thing he meant is false as he meant it. And without even acknowledging that you’re disagreeing with him and think he’s wrong. Instead you bizarrely try to agree with him about something he didn’t say, didn’t mean, and doesn’t understand. So you talk circles around him, and never inquire about what he really meant, and never explain why it’s wrong.

This stuff in the book from 1960 all reminds me of Less Wrong (LW) people. They seem like intellectual descendants of it (they aren’t the only ones, and also maybe there were other similar books that were more influential – I haven’t done any kind of comprehensive review of which books had a leadership role and which just repeated a trend). But LW lacks the intellectual leadership to go read old books to try to understand where their ideas come from. They are a disorganized community that does a poor job of citing its sources and influences, with some specific exceptions that they do credit like Bayes. And there’s no one in particular at LW to talk to about disagreements.

Part of the premise of this book, when it talks about debate, is that there are some people willing to talk. It’s all about what to say in a debate instead of the prior problem that people don’t want to have the conversation in the first place. Often they’d rather go debate someone else who agrees with them more or who they think they can beat. They don’t want to go through an elaborate procedure that requires them to try to understand my detailed and challenging views. Nor do they want to try to clarify their views to my satisfaction.

They don’t want me to ask too many questions about what they think. They don’t want me to show them up by taking their views more seriously than they do. (BTW Gigahurt said he liked that but in fact stopped talking with me.) They don’t want to face a bunch of hard, detailed questions. They want me to adopt their attitude of believing stuff with limited detail. They want me to adopt their low standards, not try to bring my standards to their position. Their low standards are idiosyncratic, inconsistent, illogical, unpredictable, etc., so even if I wanted to I could not adopt them without either a ton of questions they’ll hate or else a bunch of cultural assimilation over time. (Related to cultural assimilation – I remember being mocked at LW for mentioning that I had read HPMOR – a very long work, written by an LW leader, that is highly relevant for understanding and assimilating to LW culture.)

Another Rapoport book example is a man who says “black is white” and you’re supposed to agree regarding photographic negatives. But he wasn’t thinking of negatives, so with that response you aren’t listening and still have no idea what he meant or why he said it. Maybe he did want to shock or be contrarian (as Rapoport wanted to assume he didn’t, in the interests of charity). Maybe he’ll say “all colors are just light so it’s all the same” or “both have high contrast so they’re broadly equivalent – you can use either one and it doesn’t matter” or “both lack any real colors like green or blue. they’re perfectly neutral so they can’t actually be different. seeing them differently is an illusion of our eyes.” People often have dumb or weird ideas that are different than your attempt to rescue their position in some special case while continuing to deny it in general. You can’t know what he thinks without asking more and listening in a different way than Rapoport suggests.

Rapoport says it’s good to steer the discussion to organized analysis of contexts of validity. But that is threatening to people who didn’t take such things into account when forming their views, and who are going to consistently lose arguments when they do that kind of analysis with a clever intellectual. This is all a way to steer the debate to them losing while giving them some fake, pseudo credit/acknowledgment/sympathy but not really listening to what they actually meant. When you try to reinterpret their errors as some special case truths instead, you are not listening to them and are erasing their actual ideas from the conversation. This material is deeply insensitive, arrogant and condescending while presenting itself as being very nice, non-threatening, taking other people seriously and really listening, etc. This stuff is nasty. It helps experts and intellectuals put on a show of rationality and be mean to people and appear to win while seeming to be good listeners and kind people, etc., when they really aren’t.

Roe vs Wade was overturned today. I haven't read any articles; I just saw headlines. I don't want to get drawn into politics a bunch, but I do want to share some comments today, including criticism of adoption.

I'm pro-abortion.

Overturning Roe vs. Wade is going to be messy and cause a bunch of suffering. This is going to be bad, not good.

The politicians and judges doing this have the money/resources not to personally worry – they can fly their daughters to other states for abortions if necessary.

Many teens, young adults and poor adults have limited access to travel. Some won't make it to another state. (Some states, like Texas, are quite large, btw. E.g. San Antonio to Alburquerque is a 10 hour drive. That's not the worst case scenario, and New Mexico might make anti-abortion laws too.) Some girls will take risks, like hitch hiking, to travel.

In the 2016 election, I didn't think a Republican winning would result in Roe vs. Wade being overturned. I was wrong.

There are so many political issues where stuff is broken and urgently needs improvement. But instead we get this.

My vague understanding is the Federalist Society has had a lot of influence of Republican judge selection. If you want to figure out who to blame, they're a lead for research.

Adoption Is Trauma

One of the groups that lobbies for anti-abortion laws is the adoption industry. They want more babies to profit off of. And a bunch of couples want more babies for sale, particularly white babies. They are hoping more young white girls will take babies to term and then put them up for adoption so they, the adoptive parents, can have what they want. Most adoptive parents are primarily trying to satisfy their own preferences, not trying to help a kid. They hope and pray for other people to have bad experiences so they can get something they want.

Adoption is trauma. It's trauma for the child and for the mother. Even newborns are familiar with their mother – in the womb they heard her talk, heard sounds from her home, got used to her heartbeat and walking gait, and more. (I give some sources and quotes below.) Babies who come out of the womb don't want to be taken away from the caregiver they're familiar with (older children also predominantly want to stay with their caregivers). Surrogacy is traumatic for the baby too (and usually for the surrogate, I imagine). Purposefully, unnecessarily denying the baby breastfeeding is also bad. Keeping a newborn baby in a hospital bed for a few nights without a compelling medical need is also bad and traumatic (it's still traumatic with a compelling medical need – having a good reason can't make the baby like it better).

Adopted and Foster Kids Have Worse Statistical Outcomes

On an aggregate, societal level, outcomes from adoption are statistically worse than outcomes from parenting one's own child. Parents treat adopted and foster kids worse including sometimes "rehoming" them – deciding not to be their parent anymore and giving them to some other adults. Some "rehoming" is done on unregulated Facebook groups. It seems suspiciously like human trafficking and some of it leads to physical and sexual abuse (which happens to adoptees at higher rates in general).

Some children are only put up for adoption because the parent doesn't have enough money. The adoptive family then spends $25,000 or some other large amount on the adoption. If they'd just donated that money to the parents, then the parents could have kept their kid. If their goal was to help the kid, that would generally be more effective.

Sometimes the U.S. government pays a bunch of money to put a kid in foster care. They will pay foster families with monthly checks. But the only reason they were taking the kid away from their family is because of poverty. The parents weren't abusive or anything; they just failed to provide the kid with good enough material circumstances to satisfy social services. If the government gave the same amount of money to the parents and let them keep their kid, that would be clearly better for the kid, let the parents buy the things social services wanted, and cost the same amount. Doing nothing would often be better for the kid, too – poor, non-abusive parents are usually better than foster parents and taking away kids from poor people is a human rights violation. Also, foster parents sometimes are poor or they deprive foster kids of resources that they could afford.

Some kids get sent to many different foster families and live in some kind of group home or orphanage in between. The lack of stability or continuity is awful and being exposed to a bunch of living environments dramatically raises the chance that at least one is abusive.

Information About Newborns

Relinquishment Trauma: The Forgotten Trauma

Research has shown that babies in utero learn their mother’s characteristics. Characteristics include the sound of their mother’s voice and her olfactory signatures from the pregnancy[5][6]. The newborn child may become easily frightened and overwhelmed when the caretaker is not their first mother. The greater discrepancies between the adoptee’s prenatal and early life (sound of the mother’s heartbeat, language, sounds, facial features, smells, the personal gait of walking, level of activity) the greater stress on the child. When a child is not with their first mother day after day, the newborn frequently becomes anxious and confused causing the infant’s body to release stress hormones. Even newborns that are placed with the adoptive parent within days of their birth can feel traumatized.

TED Talk: What we learn before we're born

A study published last year found that from birth, from the moment of birth, babies cry in the accent of their mother's native language. French babies cry on a rising note while German babies end on a falling note, imitating the melodic contours of those languages.

I first saw anti-adoption information on TikTok where the hashtag #adoptiontrauma has 47 million views.

I've been paying more attention to marketing messages because Critical Fallibilism (CF) could use better marketing. Keeping things short is really important. Unfortunately, one of the common tactics I've seen for short, snappy marketing is dishonesty.

For example, I saw two ads from Aimchess. They're short and small. They each communicate a feature that a chess video viewer might want. But are they true?

THE ONLY CHESS TRAINER WHERE 10 MINUTES A DAY IS ENOUGH

That sounds nice. But it's kind of vague. Enough for what? Also, is it actually true that every other chess trainer requires more than 10 minutes per day? What makes Aimchess so much faster? (Or just slightly faster? Do some competitors require 11 minutes per day?)

Enough of something means you're satisfied. It means your goals are achieved. The dictionary says "as much or as many of something as required" which leaves open the question: required for what? For some goal. Typically that's either your goal or a goal specified in the sentence. Like "I don't have enough gas to get home" specifies the goal within the sentence. "Enough" is often modified with a prepositional phrase to tell us enough "for" what or enough "to" what.

So what goals is 10 minutes a day with Aimchess trainer claiming to be enough for? Your chess goals. They have to be reasonable, realistic goals. If you want to be the world's best player tomorrow, that isn't Aimchess' problem. But the advertised claim should work for people who are being reasonable.

What is a reasonable chess goal? One reasonable goal is something you could achieve using a different trainer, self-study or playing online practice games. If you can get a result using one of those other methods for an hour a day for a month, you should be able to get a similar result with Aimchess.

How fast should Aimchess deliver the same result? If they could do it in two months instead of one, they're still 3x faster in terms of total time spent. That's pretty good and seems reasonable.

If Aimchess needs six months instead of one, for the same total time spent, then I'd say they failed at their marketing promise. They were implying that you'd save time and reach your goal without waiting unreasonably long.

Where's the cutoff? That's hard to say precisely. If Aimchess needs three months instead of one, and half the total time spent training, that's actually a good product, but the ad would seem misleading to me.

Does Aimchess live up to their promise? No way. Tons of people have reasonable, achievable chess goals that they will not achieve using Aimchess for 10 minutes a day (plus playing chess however much you normally do, but no other training or study, and no extra practice games).

Is Aimchess fundamentally better than other trainers so you learn way faster? No. Is saying so fraud? Probably not. You're allowed to exaggerate in ads, like saying you have the "world's best burger". I'm not saying it's illegal false advertising or anything like that. But it's still somewhat dishonest. Or put another way, it's not maximizing honesty. They could be more honest if they tried.

And I'm not actually sure the ad is or should be legal. If you advertised that you were "the only burger joint with a value menu" you'd probably get sued by McDonalds. If you delete the word "only" from the ad then it'd be more normal exaggeration. With "only" it seems like it's lying about competitors (who do in fact make products that you can use for just 10 minutes a day to improve at chess).

Aimchess isn't being dishonest enough to stand out to most people. It's pretty normal. But I think people ought to improve their skill at noticing dishonesty. I think people would benefit from more critical thinking, more skepticism, more analysis of marketing messages, and more attention to what is honest or not. I wrote an article on lying and this article is also meant to help educate people about honesty.

That sort of exaggeration or relatively mild dishonesty is unsuitable for marketing CF philosophy because CF values getting details right and being extremely honest (much more than is typical). Most companies have no particular connection to honesty, so being mildly dishonest doesn't make them hypocrites. CF strongly advocates honesty so its marketing needs to very honest. CF's marketing shouldn't contradict its ideas.

GET PERSONALIZED LESSONS USING MISTAKES FROM YOUR OWN GAMES

I saw this second ad from Aimchess later in the same video. Is this true? I don't think so. I think I know what feature they're talking about and how it works. If I'm right, it's misleading to call it personalized lessons.

Chess software (called "engines") is significantly better at chess than humans are. After you play a game, you can put it into an engine and find out what better moves you and your opponent missed. You can go to a hard position and find out what you should have done. It's really useful (despite basically being the sort of predictive oracle criticized in The Fabric of Reality – chess engines do not provide conceptual explanations of why moves are good, they only say moves and numeric evaluations of who is winning by how much in a chess position).

This is great but it's readily available without paying for a chess trainer, and I doubt Aimchess is offering something subtantively more personalized than this. They might offer some extra features like finding patterns in your mistakes across multiple games (e.g. you make the most mistakes in the opening), but I wouldn't consider summary statistics a "lesson".

I think they're trying to make it sound similar to getting personal attention from a human teacher who teaches you lessons. But the product is actually just an impersonal algorithm.

Again this is pretty normal but there is some dishonesty here. Or in other words, they could definitely make it more accurate, non-misleading and honest if they tried. There's clearly some room to be more scrupulously honest.

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I wrote the above without visiting Aimchess' website. Now I've checked the website. The website confirms that the product works how I thought it did. They're selling software, not attention from coaches. They say their software is better than studying with a chess engine because they have an algorithm that looks at summary statistics over multiple games. Their website has some more statements that are pretty similar to the ads, and some other statements that are clearer, but nothing super clear. They don't come out and directly say things like "you're buying software; no human will review your games" but there is some information that lets me be more confident it's just sofware. They say "we do X" or "Aimchess does Y" but they avoid saying "our software does X". Both "we" and "Aimchess" are terms that sound like they refer to people not software.

I also saw this which particularly stood out to me:

Why isn’t Aimchess Premium free?

Downloading all of your games and analyzing them with a high-depth engine isn’t cheap, so we have to charge you to pay for our costs. You can always use our standard free service to get lower-depth 40-game reports for free.

They're claiming the reason their service isn't free is because the compute power needed for it is expensive. They're trying to sound like they're a non-profit that's just charging enough to break even. They're lying. They look like a typical SaaS website (software as a service) charging a monthly subscription fee that's very high relative to the price of computing power. They're charging this money because they (reasonably) want to get paid for their work. What's expensive isn't the computations. It's having programmers write the software, as well as making the website, marketing the product, and doing customer service.

If they were charging to cover their costs, they wouldn't be able to give you a 40% discount for an annual subscription. Either the annual subscription is too low to cover their costs, or the monthly subscription is way higher than their costs. Realistically, the annual subscription price is way above their computing costs.

Also, if they were just trying to cover their cost from people's actual usage, why would they try to lock you into a year long contract? They're setting this up like gym memberships (and like other SaaSes) to try to make money from people who stop using their product but already paid in advance for many more months of service. In other words, they're trying to get paid by people when their cost of serving those people is zero since those people are not using the service anymore. If their goal was merely to pay for computing costs, they'd charge for actual usage or they'd let you cancel anytime.

I've seen this before where for-profit companies lie and try to sound like non-profits. They're doing it because non-profits and anti-capitalism are trendy. It's ironic because it exemplifies some of the common complaints against for-profit businesses: that they're short-sighted and dishonest. People hate X, so they lie and claim to be Y instead, but they're actually acting even more like X by doing that.

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Hopefully this has been helpful for showing people an example of analyzing something from everyday life. I hope to inspire people to learn to notice and think about things like this routinely. I'd like people to go about life more thoughtfully and I try to teach skills to enable that. If you want to learn more from me, check out my Critical Fallibilism articles and videos.

There are two basic ways that creators with small audiences get a larger audience that supports their work and provides significant value in return.

1. They make stuff that appeals to a lot of people.
2. They make stuff that super-appeals to a small audience.

For (2) to work, the audience has to care a lot more than for (1). They have to be happy that their niche is being served at all even though it isn’t very popular. It has to mean enough for them to take tangible actions and ignore minor negatives (e.g. typos, less professional audio quality, worse art, smaller community, the articles/videos impress their friends less, and worse marketing). Worse marketing means the audience has to do more work to see the value in stuff themselves instead of being told the value in words that are really easy for them to understand.

Fans in a small niche have to do stuff at much higher rates like:

• share, promote
• comment, discuss, engage
• praise
• pay money, donate
• advocate for the creator
• help with stuff (e.g. volunteer moderators, helping newbies, making a subreddit, making transcripts, making art)
• ask questions
• respond to polls, prompts or questions
• click buttons such as like, favorite, subscribe, thumbs up, upvote
• finish reading/watching articles/videos instead of stopping in the middle
• read/watch older content instead of only paying attention to new releases
• become invested in the creator and/or community
• feel inspired and motivated without music, art, slogans or facecam

If they don’t do these things at higher rates, then the niche creator never gets a good deal (from other people, from the external world). He isn’t rewarded for serving that niche. He can’t get value from as many people, and he’s also not getting extra value per person. That means the people in that niche didn’t care all that much, even if they said they do.

For all creators, but especially niche creators, these positive behaviors are especially needed from early adopters. Getting started with little audience is hard and is helped by superfans who care a lot. As Ayn Rand put it in The Fountainhead:

Don’t despise the middleman. He’s necessary. Someone had to tell them. It takes two to make every great career: the man who is great, and the man—almost rarer—who is great enough to see greatness and say so.

If the early adopters for a creator serving a small niche don’t care much and don’t take action, then it doesn’t work. The niche can’t be profitably served, or it wants to be served in a different way. When people really highly value something that is not mass-produced and not readily available, then they act like it. If they don’t seem to care much, then they probably don’t really see much difference between the specialized content and some other more mainstream content, and they wouldn’t mind very much if they didn’t have the specialized content at all. Or they just don’t think this content is especially good. People often lie about how much they care because they like having the specialized content for free or very cheap, and they value it more than nothing. If they mislead a creator into thinking he’s more valued and appreciated than he is, so he expects rewards that don’t materialize, it can provide them with more opportunity to be leeches.

To be clear, lurkers are harmless; people who only care a little aren’t a problem; it’s people who lie that they care more than they do, and then take actions in conflict with their words, who are problematic.

As small, early audiences should have high rates of positive behaviors, they should also have have unusually low rates of negative behaviors. Negative behaviors include saying things that make the creator or his fans lose social status, being adversarial/hostile with the creator or with other fans, breaking rules, being toxic, being passive-aggressive, pushing discussion topics away from the creator’s niche, quitting/leaving, and breaking promises (e.g. implying you’ll follow up on a discussion topic, but then not doing it).

Some people don’t understand that content is specialized for a small niche audience, and what that means. Sometimes when they say they really love it, they mean they like it for an unspecialized thing, but they don’t actually like it much by the higher standards of a specialized thing. If you see it as slightly outcompeting mainstream content, that isn’t good enough – you aren’t a super fan or helpful early adopter. Creators for small niches cannot survive off being liked slightly more; that doesn’t make up for the downside of serving a small niche.

If an article or video gets 100k views, then if 99% of people do nothing that’s fine. 1% of people commenting or donating is 1k people. However, if it gets 100 views, it needs an engagement rate far above 1% or else the creator is simply being charitable. Small early-adopter audiences for specialist creators have to do things like share, donate, discuss, praise, help, etc., at much higher rates than audiences of popular creators do. If they don’t, they are signaling there’s no viable niche there, and that they shouldn’t be served.

It’s like how successful email newsletters have high rates of being opened and read early on (e.g. when they have 1k subscribers), and that goes down when they get to 100k subs. If you view a new, specialist creator as offering 10% higher value than a popular mainstream creator, then to a very rough approximation you will be 10% more likely to share links, post comments, etc., and 10% less likely to do negative behaviors. That isn’t even close to good enough. A new creator with a relatively small target audience needs positive behavior rates way above 1%. Getting 1.1% (from the average person liking it 10% more) won’t work – instead of 1.1% it needs to be more like 20%. Even a new creator with a huge target audience needs to start out with high positive behavior rates, e.g. 5%.

Good YouTube click through rates (CTR) provide another example:

• Views below 1000 can have a CTR between 25% and 35%
• Views between 10,000 to 20,000 can have a CTR between 18% and 25%
• Views between 100,000 to 200,000 can have a CTR between 10% and 15%
• Views above one Million can have a CTR between 2% and 5%

In other words, according to this article, videos below 1k views need roughly a 30% positive behavior rate to stand out and be successful. The drops to 22% by 15k views and 12% by 150k views. Past a million views, 2% can mean things are working well. Those are good numbers that indicate success; average or typical numbers are lower.

These are loose numbers but the point is small/initial audiences should on average be significantly more positive than big audiences, and audiences for specialists should be significantly more positive, and with both at once (small audience and specialist content) there should be a lot more positivity. A fair amount of fans need to see a qualitative difference instead of just an incremental improvement. There need to be super fans and high rates of positive things in the broader audience too (excluding the super fans). If positivity rates are low early, there’s a big problem, because they are only going to get lower as the audience expands (early adopters are the best fit there’s going to be; growing the audience requires expanding to people whose preferences don’t fit the content as well).

Some audience members make excuses to themselves. One excuse is that they are busy – that almost always just means they are prioritizing other things, and don’t care all that much. If they don’t follow any other creators, don’t use social media, don’t play video games, and don’t read the news, maybe they really are busy. That’s rare. Broadly, everyone is pretty busy (even if they are busy watching YouTube rather than doing obligations), and creators have to compete for the attention of busy people. Every creator has audience members who are busy but choose to spend time on his stuff anyway.

Another excuse is people think they don’t know how to help with anything or they aren’t in a position to do anything. That’s not true. Anyone who appreciates stuff could leave positive comments regularly. They could also share stuff (basically everyone has friends and/or could figure out how join some relevant online communities that enable sharing like on Reddit, Facebook or Discord).

People also make excuses about barriers to entry. But if you highly value specialized stuff, then you would find ways to overcome barriers – happily, on your own initiative. If you don’t have initiative for anything then you just aren’t capable of highly valuing things. (Many people who are generally low-initiative suddenly do have some initiative when it’s actually very important to them – e.g. trying to get a spouse or job, or trying to fix some problem in their life that they regard as urgent.)

Another thing people do is: The creator makes X and Y. Some people say they like X a lot but act more like they like Y (e.g. they upvote it more). Often X is a more specialized thing (e.g. epistemology) and Y has broader appeal (e.g. political commentary) and is available elsewhere.

If an initial small audience has a bunch of excuses and isn’t engaged, then a larger audience in the future, if it ever happened, would be less engaged. But engagement wouldn’t have enough room to decline a normal amount with audience growth, and still exist. So basically a larger audience is impossible because if some growth somehow happens (e.g. using paid advertising) engagement would go down to near-zero and be too low for e.g. stuff to get shared enough. The bigger the audience you find, the less good the fit will be with them, and the more engagement and appreciation will drop.

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Talking about these issues is unusual. It’s often counter-productive. People interpret it as desperation, as an admission of weakness and failure. And it leads to increased lying from moochers who are willing to pay with a few lies to try to get more “free” ice cream (usually this is done without conscious understanding of what they are doing or why, and without conscious knowledge that they have lied).

Some people exaggerate to try to flatter the creator in order to appease him, but don’t consider that dishonest.

Some people feel pressured and respond negatively (or short term superficially positively) – they don’t think they signed up to be asked to actually do anything so they resent it. But asking a public readership in general for something isn’t pressuring (e.g. if someone makes a GoFundMe, they aren’t pressuring you), and explaining a situation isn’t even asking.

Other people feel overwhelmed by the responsibility of trying to act like they value stuff (many people are bad at valuing anything and are unsuited to being early adopters or active members of a specialized community, but don’t admit that to themselves).

In general, if people highly value stuff, they will act that way naturally, without being asked/prompted. If you’re trying to explain to people what leaving positive comments on articles and videos is, and why to do it, then they just aren’t that into you (but those same people somtimes won’t admit to not being that into you). Having to ask (or bring it up without asking) is a bad sign and asking mostly doesn’t increase how much people genuinely value stuff.

Even though I’m a philosopher and writing about an issue like this is on-topic for me (unlike for most creators) – it’s the kind of thing I might write about even if it had zero relevance to my community – it still will be interpreted by some people (including some who deny it in their own minds) as low status, even though it’s an explanation not an ask (and a brief flurry of activity that dies off without explanation is not something I actually want anyone to do – I’m not asking for that; please don’t). Also a lot of rationalist people are like “I don’t care about status. Why are you even talking about status? Do you care about status? That is a you-problem.” But they do care a lot about status without realizing it, and it determines a lot of their behavior like whether they share links, buy stuff, spend time on stuff, etc.

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Regarding my own community, I think a major problem is that most people (even of the relatively small group interested in rational philosophy) don’t actually want to put effort into improving themselves. The more I’ve moved to explaining pathways for progress – actions people can take to improve – the more I’ve seen people are mostly unwilling to actually do the work, practice stuff, and keep at it over time. And I think clarity about that drives people away, because some people liked to pretend to do that stuff, and it’s harder to pretend now.

I also started outclassing people at debate too much and they don’t actually value losing debates in clear, conclusive ways (that’s something I value highly but have nowhere to get).

I’ve also put long term effort into suppressing tribalist political posting and other tribalist behaviors, but lots of people want ingroups and outgroups to be biased about. There are various reasons for this like wanting to feel accepted/sanctioned (whereas I suggest they should actually put effort into learning stuff instead of expecting immediate praise just for joining the group). And having an outgroup gives people a way to write safe comments that won’t be wrong/refuted/unpopular (if they do get attacked, they’re likely to be defended by others, since they’re saying what most of the group thinks). One of the reasons people don’t post much at my forums is they don’t know what they can say without a risk of receiving criticism.

They also are unwilling to say they don’t want criticism and thereby appear irrational. Some people want me to sacrifice my integrity for them – pretend to do unbounded criticism while actually holding back most criticism, so they can appear highly rational. That’s a common mutual arrangement among “intellectuals”, but it’s bad, and I actually want to receive more criticism not less, so both parts of the arrangement are bad for me.

Anyway, a lot of people treat philosophy as entertainment or as a source of clever things to say (usually without giving adequate credit for where they got it), but they don’t really want to examine their life and put work into improving much. Also they see a lot of life in terms of social status without realizing it.

One solution to a bad early audience is to give up and make something else. Serve a niche that there’s more demand for. Another option is to find a different source of initial audience members to use (e.g. go recruit Goldratt fans). Another is to change how the content is presented and communicated (there could be misunderstandings). It’s possible with a small sample size that having a bad audience is bad luck, and things will improve by themselves over time as some new members join, but that’s uncommon.

Another option is just to ignore the audience – get money in a different way and create stuff as a (charitable) hobby (I’ve done a lot of this). Another option is to keep creating the same stuff but don’t share it publicly – just send it to friends or keep it for just yourself (I’ve done a lot of this too, e.g. I wrote a few books worth of material privately before I started posting regularly to the CF website).

I think my basic problem is that people don’t want rationality. There isn’t demand for it. But I’d rather do it anyway than change niches. I don’t think better marketing could fix this. It could bring in more people who claim to want rationality, but I think that would just lead to problems. The more I put effort into communicating clearly and offering practical, accessible actions people could take, the more I’d be in conflict with my own audience that wants to posture about rationality, and gain rationality-related social status, but doesn’t actually want rationality. I think I’m serving a niche that lacks demand but which people are particularly dishonest about.

Is that plausible? Consider the lack of any other creators or communities that are very rational. There’s no one else who has an audience I want if only I could somehow get their attention. No one else is having success at this (though a few pretend to). There’s no forum I can join to interact with other people with interests and values similar to mine. As usual, of course, these claims are open to debate and criticism – but note the non-existence of any website with high quality rational debates happening. While that is a thing many people say they want, there is no company or creator which has been able to serve that niche successfully.

See also Demand For Intellectual Discussion and the lack of productive discussion of Popper, Rand or Goldratt online. Or search the web for terms like debate online – none of the results appear to be both very rational and very successful (usually neither). And I’ve been asking people for leads on this kind of thing for years in case someone else had found something good, and none of my fans (or the groups or non-fans who I’ve asked) have ever shared anything good. It’s uncommon that anyone has even claimed to know of something good except sometimes the venue I’m asking at (e.g. at Less Wrong a lot of people think Less Wrong is good (including associated stuff like EA or SSC) but think everything else online is bad – and Less Wrong is actually bad). When people do claim to know of something good, it’s usually something I’m already familiar with and they (or any other advocate of it) don’t want to discuss or debate the flaws I identified with it.

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I think community dynamics is an interesting topic and that these concepts are worth understanding like small early adopter audiences, rates of positive behaviors, and specialized niche content. It’s unintuitive to some people that specialized content require more demand (higher prices and other more positive reactions) to be viable. It doesn’t have to exist and be available at all (if it does exist, either some people value it highly and treat it as special, or its existence is charity). It’s similar to custom, hand-crafted physical products, which people often want at mass-production prices (they don’t seem to understand that that’s impossible – they have to be willing to pay a lot extra or they aren’t actually a viable customer base). The sellers often don’t understand this either, have the prices of mass-produced products anchored in their minds, and set prices too low (and often go out of business). To justify the existence of custom products that can’t be mass-produced and mass-marketed, there has to be enough demand for them at much higher prices than the typical mass-produced, mass-marketed products which people are familiar with. People who (economically) demand custom niche products at mass-market or slightly higher prices, but not at way higher prices, are not actually fans of those products, and are not the sort of customers who can keep the seller in business, though they sometimes don’t know this.

For a simple hypothetical example, if you’d be willing to buy my book for $10 (a normal mass-market price) but not $100 (a perfectly reasonable premium for a niche product) then you aren’t really my fan – you are not providing customer demand for my stuff at relevant price points. You don’t value my stuff enough for it to exist. A good fan would be not just willing but very happy to buy a book from me for $100 – the value to him is much higher than that and he’d be thrilled that the book exists at all.

I find it helpful to think about how I treat people I’m a fan of, and then compare behaviors of my fans to that. I was a superfan of David Deutsch and, at that time, I would have viewed a new book by him (or video courses or other format of his choice) as pretty much priceless. I also shared and promoted his work a huge amount, and gave a huge amount of feedback/replies.

Recently, I’ve promoted much more mainstream and popular creators than myself (like Stark, Stoller, Pueyo, Yglesias and various YouTubers) much more than any of my fans promote me. They aren’t perfect but they make some things that I think are good enough to share. And they do a somewhat reasonable job of not pretending to be something they aren’t; flaws are much more tolerable when they aren’t denied or lied about. Another example: there are plenty of people who know more about politics and economics than Asmongold does, but Asmongold is more tolerable to listen to than many more knowledgeable people because he’s more humble – he’s pretty reasonable and open, instead of dishonest, about his limited knowledge.

I know I’m particularly willing and able to take actions at all. Partly I share more because I’m much more energetic than the average person. Directly comparing myself to fans isn’t perfect. But I’m a person with pretty non-mainstream tastes, and I’m really happy when I find things somewhat suitable to my tastes (despite major imperfections, e.g. I’d prefer philosophy over politics but I read some politics anyway due to the severe shortage of readable/watchable philosophy content). There’s a comparison there to fans who don’t really act very excited to have me. If it’s actually because they do value me but they’re passive in their whole life … that’s not that different than not really liking me … it doesn’t particularly matter. The outcome is the same.

Most people aren’t very good good at valuing things and taking actions. Perhaps that’s an even bigger bottleneck than people wanting specialist content. Popular mainstream stuff has the social status, community frameworks and other resources to get regular, passive people to take some positive actions – whereas a tiny niche community can’t offer all that social/community/institutional support to help address people’s passivity for them.

It’s similar to how a lot of people need school classes because they’re too passive to just go online and learn, even though the internet has better content at lower prices in more convenient formats. “Passive” isn’t the exact issue btw, it’s just an approximation.

To summarize/conclude, you can be pretty passive when you’re a fan of mass-market stuff and it’s fine. But when you’re a fan of a new/unpopular creator serving a small/specialized niche, you need to do more positive behaviors (and fewer negative behaviors) or else you’re relying on other fans to do that and/or relying on the creator’s charity.

I’m going to share four incidents that occurred after my last update on David Deutsch’s harassment campaign. This is with my blog comments disabled and my forum paywalled; otherwise it’d be much worse. And, again, none of these people have taken any steps to improve the situation, reduce harassment or negotiate a solution.

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I received information about a CritRat leader. They:

• Privately trash talked me.
• Tried to turn a CF community member against me.
• Encouraged doing things to me that the CritRat believed would trigger me.
• Encouraged knowingly, intentionally doing things that I regard as seriously mistreating me.
• Encouraged adopting a mindset of blaming things on me and viewing me as malicious.
• Suggested that if you have any negative emotions related to Elliot, you should trust them and act on them.
• Pushed the idea that if Elliot could maybe be in the wrong, you should assume he is, reject all alternatives, and stop thinking about it. They said basically that it’s bad to even consider Elliot’s side of the story because he’s a bad faith actor. (They apparently don’t understand fallibilism or rationality.)

The overall message was that praise, acceptance, friendship and rewards are available to people who join the harassment campaign.

And the CritRat leader said this to someone who they were suspicious of! They must say much worse to people who they trust not to tell me anything. It seems that trying to cause harassment is such a habit that they can’t fully turn it off even when trying to be on good behavior.

The CritRats do this stuff routinely. They want to continue and escalate their harassment campaign, and they are putting ongoing effort into that goal. I usually don’t find much out, besides the downstream consequences (the harassment itself), because they work in the shadows and punish people who provide me with any information.

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A long time DD/TCS fan paid $20 on a credit card in order to make an account on my paywalled forum in order to harass me there. They’ve been banned from all my stuff for years but are unwilling to leave me alone.

This harassment is linked to the CritRat community. The harasser and her close associate have been tweeting with multiple CritRats and trying to get their attention. (I don’t know how much success they’ve had because the CritRats have a lot of private conversations, plus I just skimmed through a couple things without really investigating.) They both believe that attacking me is a way to get friendliness and social acceptance from CritRats. A CritRat leader publicly tweeted back to the harasser a week before this harassment incident. This harasser is a person the CritRat leader is highly familiar with from past events, and has reason to fear, so their public encouragement of the harasser was knowing and intentional (and stupid).

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A CritRat leader brought me up and then his conversation partner, another CritRat, harassed me on Twitter using an anonymous account.

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A CritRat contacted me repeatedly without disclosing he was a CritRat and he exploited a misconfigured forum setting in order to post and violate my forum’s terms of service. When I found out he was a CritRat and confronted him, he refused to say that he thinks harassment is bad, even in principle or in general. He claims the harassment issue is too boring to look into. He claimed to be neutral, but if you’re going to hang out with the CritRats and refuse to address the harassment issue, do not contact me. If you’re a CritRat and won’t leave me alone, you are violating my consent and harassing me.

Here’s some text I wrote to try to explain the problem to him:

Please condemn the harassment and the people who refuse to say they are opposed to harassment. Alternatively, push for people to participate in conflict resolution and condemn those who refuse. If you won’t, and you continue to have friendly interactions with them, then you’re encouraging them to think their harassment (plus refusal of all conflict resolution) is OK, in which case you wouldn’t be welcome to contact me.

After I told him personally “do not contact me again”, he said “Ok”, but then a few weeks later sent me a very nasty email to harass me. He purposefully violated the no contact request and my consent. In that email, he communicated that when he said he was neutral earlier he was lying, and he actually hates me and thinks I’m badly wrong about the harassment issues that he supposedly finds too boring to read about. He claims I should have somehow already known that he despises me, even though it’s different than everything he said to me before when he was pretending to be neutral because he wanted free philosophy help from me. He also claimed that I was coercing him by ordering him to stop emailing me, which I guess is his justification for violating my no contact request (he’s fighting my coercion that consists of the no contact request itself). The reason he thinks reading my explanations about the harassment would be boring is because he has a predetermined conclusion that I’m wrong, so the only things he could learn are how badly I’m wrong and in what ways I’m wrong (he communicated that). He also purposefully used something else that he believed would trigger me in order to falsely attack me – he chose that unconventional, atypical attack specifically because he thinks it’s something I care about and could be triggered by. He purposefully broke a no contact request to try to hurt me.

I suspect he was aware of my generic no contact request to all CritRats like him, which is on my blog, before he contacted me several times while hiding being a CritRat. I suspect he was already purposefully violating a no contact request at the time I individually, personally asked him not to contact me (which he agreed to before breaking his word). But it’s hard to know.

They won’t leave me alone and they’ve never been willing to discuss any conflict resolution. I don’t do anything like this to them.

Conclusion

Do you think they’re doing something bad? Tell them, particularly their leader, David Deutsch. Demand that he answer for what he’s doing. Bring it up and ask challenging questions. Expose him. Please help. Besides defaming me, he has too many loyal fans willing to attack people he signals should be harassed. It’s a nightmare. Supporting messages to me are also appreciated.

After Deutsch turned against me, I left him alone and didn’t complain about him (like my posts about his harassment campaign) for over 5 years but he grew more hateful over time not less. I tried ignoring the problem for over 5 years and that didn’t work; he seems to have a lifelong obsession with me; there’s no option for me where I could simply be left alone going forward. (I think he’s scared that I could critique and refute anything he publishes about philosophy, and he uses that as an excuse for not writing much, so year after year, in his mind, he blames me for his lack of productivity. Using me as a scapegoat is my best understanding of why he won’t move on. In other words, he feels like I never leave him alone because whenever he considers publishing philosophy he remembers that I could potentially write a rebuttal. I got this idea from Lulie Tanett, who told me about it based on her personal conversations with Deutsch, and it makes sense to me.)

Similarly, part of why the CritRats won’t just forget about me is that a bunch of them think I’m a great intellectual, so they keep reading my stuff and trying to learn from me (and sometimes plagiarizing me). It’s partly a love/hate relationship they have with me, not just a hate relationship. I wish they’d stop reading my stuff, stop watching my videos, and stop remembering that I exist, but I have no way to get rid of them while sharing ideas with the public. The combination of trying to get value from me, while being so nasty to me, is really screwed up.

If people stand up to Deutsch, he’s likely to back off. He’s only able to harass me so much due to the lack of attention it gets and the lack of pushback. If thousands of people were watching and judging him, I’m pretty sure he’d mostly stop. He cares deeply about his reputation and what people think of him. Please try to raise awareness and to show him that people actually care and disapprove of his actions.

I want to be able to reopen my blog comments and also have philosophy discussions on other websites without them being disrupted; is that too much to ask?

I lowered the prices of most of my digital educational products. Check out my updated store.

List of changes:

• Critical Fallibilism Course: 880 -> 400
• Videos: Grammar and Analyzing Text: 250 -> 150
• Fallible Ideas Bundle: 100 -> 75
• Eli Goldratt Screencasts: 250 -> 100
• Educational Videos: Reading George Reisman’s book on Marxism and Socialism: 150 -> 50
• Videos: Objective Knowledge, by Karl Popper, Chapter 1: 100 -> 50

We can divide our food into plant, animal, other living and non-living. Plants get energy from the sun; animal energy comes from plants (directly by eating them, or indirectly by eating other animals). Humans, as animals, don’t get energy from the sun. We mostly eat parts of (formerly) living things, plus water and salt.

Other food from living sources, besides plants or animals, includes yeast, fungi (mushrooms) and mold (blue cheese). We also ingest a lot of bacteria when eating other foods, including fermented foods. The bacteria inside us affects our health even if we aren’t getting calories from it.

Non-living foods include water (all our drinks, including milk and juice, are mostly water) and minerals (salt). Water and minerals have no calories (no fat, protein or carbohydrates) and don’t necessarily count as “food”.

For animals, we can eat their meat, milk, eggs and sometimes other animal products (honey). Milk works because it’s evolutionarily designed to be food. Eggs work because they contain nutrients for reproducing a new animal. Honey works because it’s a food source (for bees, but they’re sufficiently evolutionary related to us).

For plants, what we eat most are seeds. We also eat a lot of fruits and can eat many other parts of plants. Examples:

leaves (lettuce), stem (celery), roots (carrot), tubers (potato), bulbs (onion) and flowers (broccoli). [source]

We can also get sap from plants, which we use in maple syrup.

Seeds have useful nutrients to enable reproduction; they’re like plant eggs. Fruits are also involved in reproduction. They’re often edible so that that animals will move seeds around. Fruits ripen but seeds don’t. Fruits contain seeds but not vice versa. Fruits have more water than seeds. Details: https://www.difference.wiki/fruit-vs-seed/ and https://pediaa.com/difference-between-fruit-and-seed/

“Vegetable” is a vague word, whereas words like fruit, seed, stem, leaf, root and flower have clearer meanings. Many “vegetables” are fruits (all the ones with seeds in them). We tend to count fruits as vegetables when they aren’t sweet. When we eat a part of a plant that isn’t a fruit or seed, we tend to call that a vegetable too. Apparently “vegetable” originally meant any edible part of a plant, but we later started excluding seeds and sweet fruits (and including mushrooms), which made the term somewhat arbitrary.

Grains are grass seeds, nuts are tree seeds, and beans are legume seeds. Legumes are seeds that come in pods like green beans, and include beans, peas and lentils (we often dry these foods out). There are also other uncategorized seeds like sunflower or pumpkin. Pits in fruits are protection around seeds to prevent the seeds from being eaten.

Above-ground plant stalks, stems and trunks need rigidity to stand up in the air. Underground doesn’t need as much rigidity because the earth supports it. We don’t eat a lot of really rigid parts of plants, besides seeds (which we often cook and may grind into flour). We also can’t eat a lot of tree leaves or grass stalks even though they aren’t rigid, but other animals often do eat those. Cows have multiple stomachs because it takes a lot of work to digest those foods. Not many animals eat extremely rigid plant parts like wood.

Many parts of plants, other than fruit, have defenses to discourage eating them. Defenses can include thorns, bitter flavor, poison, being underground, being high in the air, or hard layers (including bark, pits or shells).

A Grassy Trend in Human Ancestors' Diets says humans may have eaten food from grasses a million years before eating meat.

This isn’t exact but gives a rough idea of what kinds of food exist and why. It gives some broad conceptual categories to fit foods into. Corrections are welcome but I’m not very interested in terminological details like nuts vs. drupes or grasses vs. rushes vs. sedges.