Woke is the opposite of stoicism.

​Stoicism: whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger
Woke: whatever doesn't kill you gives you trauma

Stoicism: reason is the highest virtue
Woke: reason is white supremacy

Stoicism: your feelings are irrational and should be improved
Woke: your feelings are valid and should be wallowed in and always listened to

Stoicism: it could be worse, so life is awesome
Woke: it could be perfect, so life is dark and full of microaggressions

Stoicism: expose yourself to intense suffering to toughen yourself up and appreciate what you have
Woke: avoid all possible "triggers", because they'll make you more traumatized

Stoicism: the world sucks, so you must learn to find happiness anyways
Woke: the world sucks, so you will be permanently traumatized and should fear all "oppressor" groups

Stoicism: the public is full of idiots. Do what you think is right, even if it leads to ostracism.
Woke: if the public says you're wrong, you're wrong and you must grovel and swear to "improve", lest you be ostracized.

Or does woke cause mental illness?

I think it’s probably both.

Here are the ways it goes in both directions.

Woke (aka SJW/critical theory/whatever it is that Robin DiAngelo is the central example of) gives people mental illness by:

• Training people to interpret ambiguous circumstances as oppression/”micro-aggressions”/racism/_____ism/etc.
• Training people to think that most things will traumatize you
• Training people to think large groups of people are dangerous and will hurt you
• Training people to feel guilty for the color of their skin, gender, etc (e.g. if you’re white, you’re guilty for the sins of all white people in history)
• Spreading the idea that a lot of things will make you suicidal (e.g. you’ll be suicidal if you question your gender as a teenager and your parents don’t agree with you immediately)
• Giving status to the most “oppressed”, thus incentivizing people to identify as oppressed
• Promoting the idea that forgiveness is bad
• Promoting the idea that the way to get over a fear is to avoid it, instead of facing it and getting exposure therapy
• Training people to think that trying to resolve conflicts on your own is dangerous and damaging, so you should simply report all bad feelings to an authority figure
• Telling people that your emotions of fear or whatever are valid instead of checking to see if they’re misfiring (they usually are)
• Encouraging people to cut off friends or family ties if they disagree about politics, which leads to even more isolation in an already isolated society

Mental illness causes people to approach woke by:

• Narcissists and sociopaths can use cry-bully tactics to do smear campaigns and take down people they don’t like or who have insulted them
• BPD people can swing from adoring somebody to thinking they’re the worst. They can then go around saying that the person is the worst and ruin their career and reputation
• HPD people can get oodles of attention easily by saying that people are being racist/sexist/____ist towards them. They can also tell people to stop talking and just listen to them because they’re the most oppressed and “it’s their turn to talk now”
• People with delusions of persecution can have a field day accusing people of being out to get them. They can say that they were being held back / fired because they were racist/sexist/____ist, etc
• Generally, the worse off you are, the higher status you are in woke, so it’ll naturally draw in people who are struggling.
• People who have Munchausen by proxy (where you pretend your child is ill to get attention, money, and status), can instead be used by making your children non-binary/trans/any-other-form-of-”oppressed”-group
• People with hypochondria can say that they have an invisible disability and say that the doctors are just gaslighting them and not taking them seriously because of their race/gender/weight/etc
• Sociopaths can just cry ____ism to get whatever they want and you’re not allowed to argue because that’s gaslighting them or DARVO or denying their lived experience or whatever. Female sociopaths are probably having a field day in today’s environment.

So it goes both ways.

Woke gives people delusions of persecution but also, people with existing delusions of persecution are drawn to it.

Woke gives people vulnerable narcissism, but it also draws in vulnerable narcissists.

Woke makes people switch on a dime to deeply hating a person, but it also draws in BPD people who are splitting.

Some people will be more the former. Some people will be more the latter.

It’s a massive group of people and they’re very diverse in the ways they’re messed up.

Effective Altruism is in danger of actually becoming super culty and people need to speak up and stop it from happening

There’s currently a loud minority of EAs saying that EA should ostracize people if they associate with people who disagree with them.

That we should try to protect EAs from ideas that are not held by the majority of EAs.

This is one of the defining features of a cult.

EA should not cross this line.

EA should have absolutely no say over who you associate with or the information you’re allowed to consume.

If you agree, you should go to these two posts and vote according to your conscience on the posts and comments, and ideally, leave your own comments too.

I think that most humans behave in morally horrifying ways - but I don’t shun them

I try to persuade them.

Or I just don’t go out of my way to talk to them, which is pretty easy. The world is massive.

I don’t boycott events where people I deeply disagree with are giving talks.

I don’t tell my friends that they can’t be friends with people who I deeply disagree with.

I don’t “protect” my friends from information or people that they deeply disagree with, because it is their choice what they watch or who they hang out. Not mine.

Shunning people you deeply disagree with is a bad social norm.

It leads to echo chambers, cultishness, a culture of fear, polarization, and a loss of freedom.

It is better to try to persuade people, or to tolerate them and not go out of your way to talk to them.

I am a woman in a male-dominated field and I've attended conferences where people discussed IQ differences between men and women. 

It made me feel safe. 

It made me feel like I could talk freely and people wouldn't freak out and try to banish me. 

That is my lived experience.

Should you go to a conference where somebody with morally abhorrent views is speaking?

If I shouldn't attend conferences with speakers with morally abhorrent views, then I wouldn’t be able to go to virtually any conference, because I think speciesism is morally abhorrent and leads to people literally paying for the torture and rape of trillions of defenseless beings.

And speciesism is explicitly endorsed by almost all humans, including conference speakers.

But just because some people have bad views doesn’t mean that all of their views are bad and you can’t learn from them.

OK, but speciesism is normal. Doesn’t it tell you more about a speaker if they hold really out there moral beliefs?

Well, for one thing, most of the time when people decide to boycott a conference, it’s not actually talking about “out there” moral beliefs.

It’s usually saying things like there are genetic differences between groups, such as races or genders, that explain some of the differences in outcomes.

This is actually just standard beliefs among a huge percentage of the population, so doesn’t really give you evidence of underlying psychopathy.

Imagine that the speaker doesn't hold a common belief and it’s morally abhorrent.

Well, first off, moral progress is made by people pushing the envelope, and people are terrible at telling whether it’s moral progress or moral decay.

Most people originally thought homosexuality was morally reprehensible, and would have seen activists promoting acceptance of it the same way people would see people promoting pedophilia.

Of course, pushing the moral envelope is not always progress. 

How do you tell?

Societies have come up with many ways to deal with this problem. 

And by far the best solution is having a thriving marketplace of ideas and letting ideas duke it out in the court of public opinion.

If somebody says that the earth is flat, you don’t silence them and deplatform them.

You post pictures of earth from space.

Yes, some people are idiots and will continue to have dumb beliefs regardless. 

But trying to make one group and ideology the decider of what’s true or good for people to see does not lead to good results.

What if the beliefs of certain speakers make a certain group feel bad and unwelcome? 

Isn’t it better to create a welcoming environment?

Banning people who have certain beliefs definitely creates an unwelcoming environment.

Feeling unwelcome is different from being unwelcome.

If people are actually being unwelcoming towards a certain group for unethical reasons, that’s obviously bad.

But most of the issues here actually have nothing to do with welcoming somebody or not.

An intuition pump: a conference could have a talk about how men commit more violent crime than women, and very few people would say that this means most men won’t come to the conference because they feel unwelcome.

I’m a high IQ woman and I feel perfectly fine with people discussing IQ differences between men and women. 

I find it interesting actually! 

If it turns out that men on average have higher IQs than women, that doesn’t change my IQ at all, anymore than the fact that women are shorter than men on average affect the fact that I’m taller than most men.

And I want to believe what is true, not what is palatable.

I even have a prominent friend who thinks that women going into the workforce is net negative. 

He doesn’t make me feel unwelcome. 

He clearly values our friendship and thinks I’m good in the workplace. 

I just debate it with him and talk about a bunch of other things.

I think one of these days I’ll persuade him, and if not, oh well. 

I can be friends with I deeply disagree with. 

Otherwise I’d be incredibly lonely and depressed.

I get why people might feel like they’re not welcome at events where there are speakers who speak about something negative about a group they belong to, but people need to distinguish between feelings and reality.

Validating everybody’s feelings might feel like the compassionate thing to do, but it’s short term compassion.

If you tell somebody with social anxiety that yes, people do actually secretly hate them, you are not helping them.

When somebody says they feel unwelcome when they aren’t unwelcome, the kind thing to do is to help them overcome their social anxiety.

Even if that speaker didn’t welcome you, don’t judge the many based on the actions of a few.

There are a few people in my community who I know really don’t like me in particular and are actively unwelcoming to me. They even have proactively gone out of their way to harm me in the past. 

They are often speakers at these events.

I go anyways. 

Because the rest of the community is welcoming and I judge people as individuals, not groups.

Also I value the virtues of courage, tolerance, anti-fragility, and empathy.

I cultivate courage and push myself to go to events, even if I’m scared.

I practice anti-fraglity, and if they do try to harm me, I use that to improve my systems and learn how to become a better human.

I practice empathy and remember that they are flawed humans who are trying their best, just like the rest of us.

I appreciate that they tolerate me and I tolerate them, and we can go about our businesses

In summary, you should attend conferences even if there are speakers with morally reprehensible views because:

• Just because some people have bad views doesn’t mean that all of their views are bad and you can’t learn from them.
• Moral progress comes from people pushing the moral envelope
• The best way we’ve found to distinguish between moral progress and moral decay is to let ideas duke it out in the marketplace of ideas
• Just because an idea makes you feel unwelcome doesn’t mean you actually are unwelcome
• Even if one person actually doesn’t welcome you, don’t judge the many from the actions of the few.
• It is better to cultivate the virtues of courage, tolerance, anti-fragility, and empathy

​Also, there's a fairly decent chance that you misunderstood the speaker's views. 

People misunderstand each other all the time and it's worse on the internet, where one misunderstanding can linger on the internet forever, despite being corrected many times. 

Sensationalism and the way attention works, the more scandalous interpretations of words spread and stick more than the boring and normal explanations of ordinary events.

One of the fundamental flaws of woke reasoning is them not realizing that they’re reasoning.

Like, they don’t think that they’re shunning people they disagree with.

They think they’re shunning bad people. (E.g. racists, mysogynists, etc)

Their thoughts are reality.

It’s not that they think the other person is a racist.

The other person is a racist.

​Fun fact: they've actually scientifically cured hiccups

They ran a study and had a 100% cure rate and I've been using it for years now and it's worked 100% of times for me

Step 1: breathe completely out, emptying your lungs
Step 2: take a deep breath in and hold it a few seconds
Step 3: without letting any air out, breathe in a little more air, then hold for a few seconds. 
Step 4: repeat step 3

And then you're done.

PSA for EAs: it’s not the unilateralist’s curse to do something that somebody thinks is net negative

That’s just regular disagreement.

The unilateralist’s curse happens when you do something that the vast majority of people think is net negative.

And that’s easily avoided.

You can see if the idea is something that most people think is bad by --- just checking

Put the idea out there and see what people think. Consider putting it up on the AI Safety Ideas sub-reddit where people can vote on it and comment on the idea

Or you can simply ask at least 5 or 10 informed and values aligned people what they think of the idea.

The way sampling works, you’ll find out almost immediately if the vast majority of people think something is net negative.

There’s no definite cut-off point for when it becomes the unilateralist’s curse, but if less than 50% of them think it’s net negative in expectation, you’re golden.

If even 40% of people think it’s net negative - well, that’s actually just insanely common in EA.

I mean, I think AMF is quite likely net negative!

EA is all about disagreeing about how to do the most good, then taking action anyways.

Don’t let disagreement stop you from taking action.

Action without theory is random and often harmful.

Theory without action is pointless.

It’s funny seeing people describe EA when they’ve clearly never met an EA

“They’re deceptive! See, here’s this article saying how they start off by explaining how they help children in Africa instead of jumping straight into AI exctinction risks!!!”

. . .  which they wrote about publicly in a million places. How secretive! 😛

I’m not sure if it’s advanced manipulation tactics to make transparency seem like secrecy or if it’s just a default human tendency to form prejudices against groups, especially when that group says that your job is unethical.