One of a few issues I have with groups like these, is that they often confidently and aggressively spew a set of beliefs that on their face logically follow from one another, until you realize they are built on a set of axioms that are either entirely untested or outright nonsense. This is common everywhere, but I feel especially pronounced in communities like this. It also involves quite a bit of navel gazing that m…
But I constantly battle tested them against other smart people’s views, and just after I ran out of people to bring me new rational objections did I become sure.
Now I can battle test them against LLMs.
On a lesser level of confidence, I have also found a lot of times the people who disagreed with what I thought had to be the case, later came to regret it because their strategies ended up in failure and they told me they regretted not taking my recommendation. But that is on an individual level. I have gotten pretty good at seeing systemic problems, architecting systemic solutions, and realizing what it would take to get them adopted to at least a critical mass. Usually, they fly in the face of what happens normally in society. People don’t see how their strategies and lives are shaped by the technology and social norms around them.
Here, I will share three examples:
Public Health: https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/
Economic and Governmental: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362
Wars & Destruction: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=424
For that last one, I am often proven somewhat wrong by right-wing war hawks, because my left-leaning anti-war stance is about avoiding inflicting large scale misery on populations, but the war hawks go through with it anyway and wind up defeating their geopolitical enemies and gaining ground as the conflict fades into history.