alt Hacker NewsIt'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.
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Everybody's mileage will vary on this ... I spent a lot of time in the year after I read Paul Graham's essay on "things you can't say", searching for things that I thought matched the criteria he set out, and found a few. But it's not that the words may never cross my lips, I can say these things within some small circle of people, but would definitely not be saying them in public without being prepared for an onslaught of negative attention. Some examples of 'cancel culture' are proof of this. Donald G. McNeil comes to mind.
That said, I'm not impressed with the notion of Straussian memes and agree that way better examples are needed to give the idea some validity.
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Your rant about Bay Area subcultures is suspiciously written in jargon that only someone deep in these subcultures would recognize- well done, very Straussian.