I read quite a bit of LW/ACX/etc though by no means do I keep up on all of it. I'll add Against Empathy to my reading list (though working on House of Leaves a

I read quite a bit of LW/ACX/etc though by no means do I keep up on all of it. I'll add Against Empathy to my reading list (though working on House of Leaves at the moment, so give me a few months). One of my general criticisms of strict EA folks (and EA is a wide spectrum from common sense to very strict interpretations) is that they get stuck in a loop of describing the internal motivations of others ("People volunteer for the fuzzies!") and then use their own description of that black box to dismiss it ("Fuzzies aren't worth much!"). That is a fundamentally flawed logic. More than the obvious flaw there is a hidden one: the assumption that because the value of a thing is poorly described (the fuzzies) that it has little value or only soft value. Humans are feeling machines who sometimes engage in rationality - doing rationality more or better does not change that equation. Those who can't understand that are doomed to not be successful.