alt Hacker NewsDid I miss something, or are none of the examples both Straussian and memetic/memes? I feel like if this were a real thing, one could imagine one example. Also, that's not how churches generally work.
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It's classic Bay Area monoculture, like that Paul Graham essay about "things you can't say". People are deferential to it because LessWrong is a hugbox or because Graham is rich but in that monoculture people are used to laughing at jokes that lack a punch line and thinking that makes them "insiders", "cool", or "smart", compared to people in flyover states, the East Coast, and the rest of California who can't see the Emperor's clothes.
The article itself is an example of something that overlaps to some extent with its subject without being an example of the subject, like all the examples in it. It's an intriguing idea, like "things you can't say" but without examples it falls flat but that won't bother the rationalists anymore than they are bothered by Aella's "experiments" or allegedly profound fanfics or adding different people's utility functions or reasoning about the future without discounting. It's a hugbox.
Or maybe it is something they can't find any examples of it because humans can't make them, only hypothetical superhuman AI.
Religions themselves are a great example of a Straussian meme, it’s shocking how close they got to using that example but instead went somewhere else with it that made zero sense.
I suspect that the use of incredibly bad examples is some sort of intentional Straussian joke, and that the entire article itself, and not the examples in it, is supposed to be the real example of a Straussian meme.