Comment by guerrilla

> One way that thinking for yourself goes wrong is that you realize your society is wrong about something, don’t realize that you can’t outperform it, and wind up even wronger.

I've been there myself.

> And without the steadying influence of some kind of external goal you either achieve or don’t achieve, your beliefs can get arbitrarily disconnected from reality — which is very dangerous if you’re going to act on them.

I think this and the entire previous two paragraphs preceding it are excellent arguments for philosophical pragmatism and empiricism. It's strange to me that the community would not have already converged on that after all their obsessions with decision theory.

> The Zizians and researchers at Leverage Research both felt like heroes, like some of the most important people who had ever lived. Of course, these groups couldn’t conjure up a literal Dark Lord to fight. But they could imbue everything with a profound sense of meaning. All the minor details of their lives felt like they had the fate of humanity or all sentient life as the stakes. Even the guilt and martyrdom could be perversely appealing: you could know that you’re the kind of person who would sacrifice everything for your beliefs.

This helps me understand what people mean by "meaning". A sense that their life and actions actually matter. I've always struggled to understand this issue but this helps make it concrete, the kind of thing people must be looking for.

> One of my interviewees speculated that rationalists aren’t actually any more dysfunctional than anywhere else; we’re just more interestingly dysfunctional.

"We're"? The author is a rationalist too? That would definitely explain why this article is so damned long. Why are rationalists not able to write less? It sounds like a joke but this is seriously a thing. [EDIT: Various people further down in the comments are saying it's amphetamines and yes, I should have known that from my own experience. That's exactly what it is.]

> Consider talking about “ethical injunctions:” things you shouldn’t do even if you have a really good argument that you should do them. (Like murder.)

This kind of defeats the purpose, doesn't it? Also, this is nowhere justified in the article, just added on as the very last sentence.