-[TODO—
- * Jessica: scortched-earth campaign should mostly be in meatspace social reality
- * my comment on emotive conjugation (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qaYeQnSYotCHQcPh8/drowning-children-are-rare#GaoyhEbzPJvv6sfZX)
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+I got into a scuffle with Ruby (someone who had newly joined the _Less Wrong_ mod team) on his post on ["Causal Reality _vs. Social Reality"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xqAnKW46FqzPLnGmH/causal-reality-vs-social-reality). One section of the post asks, "Why people aren't clamoring in the streets for the end of sickness and death?" and gives the answer that it's because no one else is; people live in a social reality that accepts death as part of the natural order, even though life extension seems like it should be physically possible in causal reality.
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+I didn't think this was a good example. "Clamoring in the streets" (even if you interpreted it as a metonym for other forms of mass political action) seemed like the kind of thing that would be recommended by social-reality thinking, rather than causal-reality thinking. How, causally, would the action of clamoring in the streets lead to the outcome of the end of sickness and death? I would expect means–end reasoning about causal reality to instead recommend things like "working on or funding biomedical research".
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+Ruby [complained that](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xqAnKW46FqzPLnGmH/causal-reality-vs-social-reality?commentId=7b2pWiCL33cqhTabg) my tone was too combative, and asked for more charity and collaborative truth-seeking[^collaborative-truth-seeking] in any future comments.
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+[^collaborative-truth-seeking]: [No one ever seems to be able to explain to me what this phrase means.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uvqd3YiBcrPxXzxQM/what-does-the-word-collaborative-mean-in-the-phrase)
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+(My previous interaction with Ruby had been my challenge to "... Not Man for the Categories" appearing on the _Less Wrong_ FAQ. Maybe he couldn't let me "win" again so quickly?)
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+I emailed the coordination group about it, insofar as gauging the psychology of the mod team was relevant to upcoming [Voice _vs._ Exit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty) choices:
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+> he seems to be conflating transhumanist optimism with "causal reality", and then tone-policing me when I try to model good behavior of what means-end reasoning about causal reality actually looks like. This ... seems pretty cultish to me?? Like, it's fine and expected for this grade of confusion to be on the website, but it's more worrisome when it's coming from the mod team.[^rot-13]
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+[^rot-13]: This part of the email was actually [rot-13'd](https://rot13.com) to let people write up their independent component without being contaminated by me; I reproduce the plaintext here.