Scott Alexander: belief

Transcript context

…Anybody who was sort of counterfactually responsible for you starting to blog or keeping blogging? So I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Eliezer Yudkowski. I had a live journal before that. But it was going on LessWrong that convinced me I could move to the big times. And second of all, I just think I learned I imported a lot of my worldview from him. I think I was the most boring normie liberal in the world before encountering LessWrong. And I don’t 100% agree with all LessWrong ideas, but just having things of that quality beamed into my head and for me to react to and think about was really great. And tell me about the fact that you could be and were at some point anonymous, I think for most of human history, somebody who is an influential advisor or an intellectual or somebody. Actually, I don’t know if this is true. You would have had to have some sort of public persona. And a lot of what people read into your work is actually a reflection of your public persona.…

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