They broke Robin Hanson. http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/JuneteenthApology.html

Hanson chose to be an icon and leader. Giving in is a betrayal of his followers, fans and values. It signals that you can't succeed by standing up for truth and free speech. He's discouraging them. He took on a responsibility and failed at it.

He was some sort of role model. He knew it and wanted to be. And that's why he was targeted. And then, with little fuss, RIP.

At the same time, Scott Alexander stood up to the NYT. Though, interestingly, Alexander wasn't even given the option to apologize and recant.

They gave Alexander the options fight back or not fight back, and be attacked either way using the same weapon (dox him by printing his name).

I saw something recently, forget where, about a revolution long ago, I think somewhere in China. I don't know if it's a true story or just designed to make a point. Was like:

What's the penalty for being late? Death.

What's the penalty for a revolution? Death.

So then they revolted cuz it's the same penalty anyway.

Did Hanson naively think that his job would always be safe when he criticized mainstream ideas? Did he think he lived in a society with free speech and tolerance of intellectual diversity? Or just that his particular university was especially great? I doubt it.

He ought to have known a confrontation was possible. If he wasn't prepared for the confrontation, what the hell was he doing? If his plan was to give in, he misled his readers about that.

Hanson is trying to proceed with blogging like nothing happened, without any explanation to his readers (other than the official apology, which doesn't explain it – a real explanation would be e.g. "they threatened my job, and i wanted to keep it, so i spoke out against the cause". That particular explanation would raise some questions before he was accepted back as an advocate and leader of the cause. If he has a better one, let's hear it. If he's muzzled, and can be threatened into not saying whatever the university leaders choose, then can we trust anything he blogs to be his real opinion?).

I was not much of Hanson fan anyway, but he's one of the symbols we have ... well had. I don't know of a bunch of better ones.

People should not accept him back. Don't act like this didn't happen. He's clearly compromised and there is no plan or strategy in place to enable his free and honest speech going forward. There are problems here which Hanson is trying to ignore instead of present solutions to. He's doing no post mortem. He's making no plan to be more successful next time. He's presumably just decided on a bunch of things he's no longer willing to say publicly, and he's hiding the list from his audience. And I doubt it's even a list, in writing, or that he has any policies to ensure he consistently follows his plan. He may well behave inconsistently and get in trouble more, or refrain from saying things that aren't on the list, or both, and there's no transparency.

Gamings Metoo is a Profitable Catastrophe

Hundreds of people in gaming industry, e.g. Twitch streamers and pro gamers, have recently faced MeToo type allegations about e.g. sexual assault. There's a big outpouring of accusations.

Some are no doubt true and horrible. Others are much milder accusations even if true, which shouldn't be lumped together as if everyone who is accused must be a vile creep. Other accusations are partially or even mostly false. Some pictures of chat logs are photoshopped (I saw an example of photoshopping when looking at a few accusations on the Competitive Overwatch subreddit in the last few days).

Accusers gain a lot of social media followers. The narrative that they have nothing to gain here, besides justice, and therefore they must be telling the truth, is false. That's a theme of the video linked above. (They also have revenge/punishment to gain – hurting their ex.)

This has major witch hunt elements. Standards of proof are low. People don't get a trial before they get fired and lose their fanbase. People aren't getting due process. This is very dangerous.

Many of the accusations are about old events which also violates the concept of a statue of limitations. Time limits being accused of most kinds of crime are important so people can feel safe and done with things, and move on in their life, after a while. Plus the older it is, the harder to investigate objectively. But this witch hunt is happy to use old accusations with little or no hard evidence. Also the cultural rules about acceptable behavior in relationships change over time, and people get cancelled for doing things that were acceptable when they did them, but which are unacceptable now (this also happens with e.g. making jokes that used to be allowed but now are considered unacceptably racist).

Some guys (and girls) do bad things. People in relationships hurt each other. Cancel Culture is not a solution, it's a huge additional danger which tries to bypass the legal system and its protections for the accused. (And this aspect of cancel culture is very biased in a sexist way. Basically women can accuse men, but men mostly don't get to accuse women.)

iamok asked on Discord:

why is objectivism so small?

Oism disagrees with the left on tons of stuff and disagrees with the right on religion, and disagrees with everyone on secondhandedness, pandering, compromising, being a moderate, and altruism. there's more but that's plenty to have trouble being big. Rand disliked libertarians too b/c of their bad philosophy and morality, and also typically their inadequate seriousness re economics and capitalism.

and it's extremely big for the kind of thing it is. over 10 million books sold.

Oism also doesn't get along with academia. ARI wants to change that by betraying Oism which is working badly in many respects.

also Rand is dead without replacement and never got a chance to spread her ideas using the internet.

ofc i get the internet and that doesn't solve the problem of getting high quality rationality to be popular

the normal thing "big" philosophies do now is sell few books but get spread by cultural elites. journalists, authors, ppl who went to Harvard...

there's this small group of "ruling class" types and most of the masses are pretty damn gullible and are influenced way more than they realize by the NYT, CNN, etc. also, on a related note, way more influenced than they realize by advertising.

the elite group includes TV commentators (political or otherwise), reviewers, including video game reviewers and has strong ties and overlaps with many politicians, biz execs, top lawyers

and to wall street and big non profits

there's a whole social network of "elites" who have other friends in high places and trade favors and they have a ton of influence to spread their dumb ideas

oh i forgot to say professors! and all schools and teachers in general. the lower ones are controlled by govt curriculums and textbook companies and union bosses a bunch.

university administrators too

most professors aren't very influential. the connected ones get media coverage and more grants. the less elite ones still help spread the ideas to their students. which ideas? usually the ones their betters believe. the ones compatible with trying to socially climb and get admitted to more elite parties.

silicon valley, as a massive source of New Money, has challenged this in some ways and has been attacked a bunch by the elites, but also mostly panders and tries to get accepted and join existing ingroup.

I’ve been tutoring people to help them learn philosophy concepts. The videos are free and public.

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Look for opportunities to use measurements to help your judgment. And also work on developing good judgment (about anything) and developing ways to prevent, detect and correct bias, dishonesty and irrationality.

How? Many ways. E.g. these articles could help:

• Lying
• Emotions
• Using Intellectual Processes to Combat Bias

Let's talk about a different way.

Assuming you're an adult, there are some things you're already good at judging. There are some areas where you're confident, competent, skilled, etc.

You can find more stuff which is similar or related and work on that. You can try to expand the good judgment you already have by applying it to more things.

Suppose you learn math to pass school tests. You might later find the math you already know is also useful for figuring out whether a system of pulleys will let you lift a large stone. And then later you you find the math you already know can help you analyze video game strategies, e.g. figuring out how much damage you can do in 60 seconds by casting different sequences of spells.

Skills often help with many things that weren't the original purpose you learned them for.

So you can take skills you already have and look for more stuff they can already help with. If the skill is related to judgment, and you find more ways to use it, then you're expanding the scope of what you can skillfully judge.

You can also expand on the skills as you apply them to more areas. E.g. you might find learning a few more mathematical techniques helps you with your pulleys or video games. Similarly, you could learn a few new things to help your judgment skills deal with new areas.

The main thing that's great about measurement is it's easy to be objective. It deals with facts that we can quantify with numbers. Often we have measuring tools to aid us, e.g. timers, rulers, microscopes, etc.

We measure some things without tools. If I'm loading boxes onto a truck, I can count them one by one as I load them, and I can write down the count at the end (or even update the written count after every box). We count this as a measurement. Similarly, "I read book X" is close enough to the concept of measurement, and easy enough to evaluate, that one can think of it as a measurement or as similar enough. (Note the issue isn't whether you understood the book or paid much attention or gave it much thought. What's easy to judge or measure is whether you went through it page by page and read what it said. There are borderline cases like how many pages can you skip before it doesn't count? But let's not worry about that now.)

Something that's easy to judge, and involves physical objects and facts, is identifying objects or their traits. Is that a cat, yes or no? I look at it and say yes. Is that an apple? I look at it and say no it's a strawberry. Is that object red? I look at it and say yes (I could also measure that using a digital camera, a computer, and some software – and actually we now have software that's pretty good at classifying pictures as various objects like cats or apples). Is it a type of "measurement" to say that object A in my room is a chair and object B is a chair? That's just terminology. It's not especially important what we call it. Regardless, that kind of thing can easily be judged and used in our goals. We're good at doing that without being biased. It's the kind of thing we find hard to get wrong or lie to ourselves about.

What are some things we can't "measure"? Judging whether an action is moral, pious, honest, wise or fair. Saying whether raspberries taste good to me. Judging how good my understanding of Socrates is. Deciding wether capitalism or socialism is better. Considering the best activities to start learning history with. These things require judgment and some involve things that some people consider a "matter of opinion", "subjective" or "arbitrary" (which they often say when they find it hard to be objective, rather than because they have arguments that objective judgment of the matter is impossible). These issues are getting away from facts like how long an object is, whether it's made of wood, what shape it is, how heavy it is, whether it's flat, etc. They're different and trickier.

"Get good at rational thinking" is a goal that's hard to measure progress, success or failure at.

With a business, you can measure stuff like sales, revenue, profit, widgets produced, number of widgets the factory throws out due to quality problems, number of late customer orders, price of raw materials required to build a widget, and much more. There are many things to attach numbers to. These measurements don't cover everything important but they help.

Websites can measure visitors per day, time on site, number of links clicked, number of visitors who return on a different day within 30 days, amount of people who sign up if shown marketing page A as opposed to signups for marketing page B, and much more. More intrusively and problematically, it's possible for software to e.g. monitor how much a user scrolls down on a web page and how long they spend with different parts of the page on screen.

But what do you measure when you're learning about rationality?

You can measure the time you spend on studying. You can measure words read and words written. You can measure whether you watched a list of videos and read a list of books. But those measurements don't tell you how well you understood the material. How effective was your learning? How much wiser and rational are you getting? It's hard to measure wisdom or rationality, or to measure anything very similar to them.

What's the solution? We must learn ways to think without measurement. We must get good at judging things in other ways besides measurement.

Measurement is useful and is something our culture is generally pretty good at. But it's certainly possible to think effectively in other ways. Measurement is resistant to bias, dishonesty and irrationality – it helps reduce those problems significantly – but it's not perfect at dealing with those problems and those problems can also be dealt with in other ways.

A good, generic strategy is to come up with some goals, then come up with some measurable criteria to judge success or failure for each goal. This helps you recognize problems, mistakes and inadequate plans (plans that somewhat work but not enough to reach the goal measurements).

Measurable criteria help with dishonesty and bias. Instead of moving the goalposts when you get there, or rationalizing how great you did, you clearly know in advance what the goal is (and write the goal and criteria down, often where other people can see it).

If your goal is "learn some stuff about physics" then it's hard to judge how well you're doing. It's pretty easy to fool yourself into thinking you succeeded when you didn't learn much. Or you could learn a fair amount but miss an opportunity to learn way more.

If you have measurable criteria, you can check whether you succeed at them. E.g.:

• spend 3 hours a week minimum on learning physics; miss zero weeks this year. (only solo learning counts for this time, not talking with people)
• post at least one physics question per week on stack exchange (at least 40 weeks this year).
• fully read the following physics books this year: X, Y, Z.
• do all practice problems in books X and W this year.
• at end of year, be able to get passing scores on the physics tests i found online (A, B and C).

This criteria aren't perfect. They don't measure everything I care about regarding my goal. I could succeed at these criteria and still have missed some opportunities.

But they have major advantages. They give me some clear guidelines. It'll be hard to lie to myself that I did one of these criteria when I didn't. They're easy to evaluate as either success or failure. Did I do it or not? I'm realistically going to be able to give a clear, correct answer, even if I'm pretty dumb and biased.

(What if I stop keeping track of time spent on physics, so I can't say if I succeeded? What if I don't keep track of what sections of what books I've read? You can take it as implied that that's a failure. Part of the goal is to keep track. Or you could write it into the goals that keeping track is a requirement.)

It's hard to measure everything we care about, and some goals are harder to make relevant measurements for than others. But measurements are useful and we can often get some benefit from them.

FYI you can find ideas similar to the above in various business management ideas. Regarding business management in general, I favor Theory of Constraints, from Eli Goldratt, who wrote a book actually titled The Goal.