Lumpy is an undergraduate at some state college somewhere in the States. He isn’t an interesting person and interesting things seldom happen to him.
Among his skills are such diverse elements as linguistic tomfoolery, procrastination, being terrible with computers yet running Linux anyway, a genial temperament and magnanimous spirit, a fairly swell necktie if he does say so himself, mounting dread, and quiet desperation.
Plays as a wizard in any table top or video game where that’s an option, regardless of whether it’s a [i]strong[/i] option. Has never failed a Hogwarts sorting test, of any sort or on any platform. (If you were about to say how one can’t fail a sorting test . . . one surmises that you didn’t make Ravenclaw.) Read The Fellowship, Two Towers, and Return of the King over the course of three sleepless days at age seven; couldn’t keep down solid food after, because he’d forgotten to eat. Was really into the MBTI as a tweenager; thought it ridiculous how people said that no personality type was “better” than the others when ENTJ is clearly the most powerful. (Scored INFP, his self, but hey, one out of four isn’t so bad. (However, found a better fit in INTP.)) Out of the Disney princesses Lumpy is Mulan—that is, if one is willing to trust BuzzFeed. Which, alas, one is not.
No, but seriously.
Mulan?? 0_o
If, despite this exhaustive list of traits and deeds, your burning question is left unanswered, send a missive in private. Should your quest be noble and intentions pure, it is said that Lumpyproletariat might respond in kind.
A lot of the people who built effective altruism see it as an extension of the LessWrong worldview, and think that that’s the reason why EA is useful to people where so many well-meaning projects are not.
Some random LessWrong things which I think are important (chosen because they come to mind, not because they’re the most important things):
The many people in EA who have read and understand Death Spirals (especially Affective Death Spirals and Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs) make EA feel safe and like a community I can trust (instead of feeling like a tiger I could choose to run from or ride, the way most large groups of humans feel to people like me) (the many (and counting) people in EA who haven’t read Death Spirals, make me nervous—we have something special here, most large groups are not safe).
The many people in EA who aim to explain rather than persuade, and who are clear about their epistemic status, make me feel like I can frictionlessly trust their work as much as they do, without being fast-talked into something the author is themself uncertain about (but failed to admit their uncertainty over because that’s not considered good writing).
(The post by Ben Garfinkel linked above (the one that admitted up front that it was trying to argue a position and was happy to distort and elide to that end, which was upvoted to +261) contributed to a growing sense of ill-ease. We have something special here, and I’d like to keep it.)
Thought experiments like true objections and least convenient possible worlds swimming around the local noosphere have made conversations about emotionally charged topics much more productive than they are in most corners of the world or internet.
...I was going to say something about noticing confusion and realized that it was already in Quadratic Reciprocity’s post that we are in the replies to. I think that the original post pretty well refutes the idea that the LessWrong mindset is just the default scientific mindset with relatively minor things of dubious usefulness taped on? So I’ll let you decide whether to respond to this before I write more in the same vein as the original post, if the original post was not useful for this purpose.