alt Hacker News> For one, their analyses almost always amounted to post hoc justifications of the things they liked.
"Almost always" is carrying a lot of weight here. Rationalists are ideologically diverse [1] when it comes to things like monogamy vs polyamory, left vs right, pro-AI vs anti-AI, nature vs nurture, racism vs anti-racism. The distribution is different from the general population, but many people have changed their minds about various aspects of their life after discussions and debates with rationalists.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf5FqX6XBJlfOShMd3U...
> What’s less known is that the memo was originally sent to the [email protected] mailing list, which I was a member of. It was a personal belief masquerading as a rationalist inquiry that tried to pull everyone into an unwanted workplace argument.
One of Damore's mistakes was opting for a high-decoupling route on a politically charged topic instead of a low decoupling route. That tends to end badly and he learned this the hard way.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7cAsBPGh98pGyrhz9/low-decoup...
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On those survey results several items show a 5 item bar chart with the bars labeled 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 showing the counts and percentages of respondents who chose 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5.
For example, "Do you prefer modern or older architecture?" shows 20% chose 1, 34.6% chose 2, 25.6% chose 3, 15% chose 4, and 4.8% chose 5.
WTF does this mean? I don'e see anything that says what those labels mean. I'd guess for questions asking X or Y they mean X, lean X, no preference, lean Y, and Y but in what order?
But some aren't comparisons. One such chart is simply titled "Global Warming". What does it mean to answer "2" to that?
> One of Damore's mistakes was opting for a high-decoupling route on a politically charged topic instead of a low decoupling route.
Why does the formation of correct beliefs, a topic people have been discussing for millennia, require such exotic jargon? It's things like this that give off cult vibes.
That graph looks incredibly un-diverse. Assuming it's accurate, it's mostly childless white male Americans, who skew heavily towards being students.