It's classic Bay Area monoculture, like that Paul Graham essay about "things you can't say". People are deferential to it because LessWrong is a hugbox or because Graham is rich but in that monoculture people are used to laughing at jokes that lack a punch line and thinking that makes them "insiders", "cool", or "smart", compared to people in flyover states, the East Coast, and the rest of California who can't see the Emperor's clothes.

The article itself is an example of something that overlaps to some extent with its subject without being an example of the subject, like all the examples in it. It's an intriguing idea, like "things you can't say" but without examples it falls flat but that won't bother the rationalists anymore than they are bothered by Aella's "experiments" or allegedly profound fanfics or adding different people's utility functions or reasoning about the future without discounting. It's a hugbox.

Or maybe it is something they can't find any examples of it because humans can't make them, only hypothetical superhuman AI.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyOEwiQhzMI

Religions themselves are a great example of a Straussian meme, it’s shocking how close they got to using that example but instead went somewhere else with it that made zero sense.

I suspect that the use of incredibly bad examples is some sort of intentional Straussian joke, and that the entire article itself, and not the examples in it, is supposed to be the real example of a Straussian meme.

I wish atheist would just stop writing about Christian practices. Particularly screenwriters. It’s better that your audience assumes you are ignorant than to open your mouth and prove them right.

> Another phrase that comes to mind is "Plausible Deniability": By uttering ambiguous sentences you can deny all but one possible meanings of what you say. And talking to different audiences at different times you can claim you didn't mean anything like what your citics are claiming you did.

This is the core rhetorical tactic of the progressive left in a nutshell. Linguistic superposition, equivocation, Schrodinger's definition - whatever you want to call it, it's the ability to have your cake and eat it too by simply changing your definitions, or even someone else's, post hoc.

Let us take a moment to be reminded of the English Socialism of Orwell and doublespeak.

What is the difference between a Straussian meme and a double entendre?

Right. See also Paul J. Bagley, "On the Practice of Esotericism," 1992. https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/2709872?orig...

I kind of regret calling it Straussian because of the baggage that comes with that label. The key differentiator here compared to exoteric/esoteric is the stabilization mechanism: social costs to either upgrading one’s own understanding, or upgrading someone else’s understanding. That’s what keeps the readings differentiated and therefore the tiered structure stable. Keeping the structure encourages the memes survival, because it widens the acceptability of the message to meet audiences where they are. I think I need a few more examples and I ought to make this point a little more explicit.

> Who are these dudes?

Top right in this picture: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GgTm194WIAEqak3?format=jpg&name=...

Dude, seriously, walk away. You have stumbled upon the website of a cult that ensnares smart people and eats their brains. No level of exposure is safe.

I can't tell whether your question here is satire. I want to believe it's genuine, by the power of HN norms, in which case congratulations, you are one of today's unlucky 10,000.

It's been around long enough to have a Wikipedia page [1], which can give you the main facts & demographics. In short, it started in 2006 as a group blog for people interested in AI. This was long before LLMs, and it was expected among the readership that understanding the math of decision theory would be important to AI. This spiraled out into general interest in how to be more rational as humans, and LessWrong is largely responsible for rescuing Bayesian statistics out of the academic wilderness. Many jargon phrases that are now common in nerdy circles originated there as well. They invented the field of AI safety, and are unhappy about the poor state of AI safety at this time.

There are in-person meetups (primarily as a social group) in most large cities. At the meetups, there is no expectation that people have read the website, and these days you're more likely to encounter discussion of the Astral Codex Ten blog than of LessWrong itself. The website is run by a non-profit called LightCone Infrastructure that also operates a campus in Berkeley [2] that is the closest thing to a physical hub of the community.

The community is called "rationalists", and they all hate that name but it's too late to change it. The joke definition of a rationalist is by induction: Eliezer Yudkowsky is the base case for a rationalist, and then anyone who disagrees online with a rationalist is a rationalist.

There are two parallel communities. The first is called "sneer club", and they've bonded into a community over hating and mocking rationalists online. It's not a use of time or emotional energy that makes sense to me, but I guess it's harmless. The second is called "post-rationalism", and they've bonded about being interested in the same topics that rationalists are interested in, but without a desire to be rational about those topics. They're the most normie of the bunch, but at the same time they've also been a fertile source of weird small cults.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LessWrong [2] https://www.lighthaven.space/

Yeah if only to justify why a phenomenon deserves its own term and article. I wouldn’t even call the examples the author used memes.

-1? Semiotic hater, or clinical psychologist? The former doesn’t like language games, and the latter just doesn’t like any suggestion not backed by observation (god knows where they get their ideas).