What Friedeich posted about why SC socks and we do too got me thinking. he was saying that the people here are not real, and they should talk more about what their real issues and life is like, instead of portraying an image of themselves according to how they like to be seen.
I was complaining about SC, too, until Trypt made that post that woke everyone up.
At any rate, I started to reflect on what I'm doing here, and why I don't feel like I belong here. I'm quite different from all of you. I don't have huge issues in my life, I have a happy family, I don't get into fights, and I'm for the most part happy to watch SC unfold from the sidelines. Presumably that's why not many of you know anything about me, despite some of you having interacted with me for 10 years.
So here's something I can share about me. I'm lonely.
I say that I'm lonely because I'm smart with a tongue in cheek. However, there is some truth to it. I would say that I'm lonely because I have a set traits that is rare. As a consequence, most people cannot relate to me.
After some self reflection, Ive come to the conclusion that the reason I'm lonely is because I'm smart and I like philosophy. However, there are some other smart people who also like philosophy. But I also like ambition and religiosity. There are very few people with those characteristics.
Consequently, I had a chat with Grok. I asked it "suggest a community for me". It gave me a long list of communities, none of which fitted me. Finally it told me to go to conferences to find friends in my field.
More specifically, it first suggested some physics and science forums. I told it that I already have a bunch of science friends and I'm not looking to just talk about science. It then suggested reddit thread for solo travelling. But it felt like it had a lack of community. After a few more prompts, it suggested finally slatestarcodex and lesswrong. These are intellectual forums.
Ive been to both forums. Theyre interesting, but the problem I see is that the people there aren't interested in actually applying that knowledge. They have posts about the wysiati principle and other things but they're all surface level and nobody seriously tries to apply their philosophy to anything. It feels like a circle jerk forum where people just... Think about kind of contrived philosophical nonsense and at the end of the day achieve nothing. I feel like it lacks ambition and practical applications.
I told Grok this. Grok then recommended effective altruism. I checked the forum. I feel a sort of primal distate towards the community. It feels like rational people trying to rationalize morality, with no grand ideas, stories, or passion. I'm also religious. So then Grok started to hallucinate and tell me I should find a forum for Christian intellectuals, lol.
Finally, after a long back and forth, I found something interesting. This was a community centered around solving a math problem, triggered by a blog post by a field medalist. I found it really, really interesting. They gathered around a few dozen mathematicians who worked to solve an unsolved math problem and completed it in 7 weeks, which frankly is astonishing. It ticked what I wanted, an interesting community with interesting discussions, doing something concrete. I tried to look up similar projects but in science and Physics but didn't find many equivalents. So I was a bit disappointed.
But then I thought, Ive however hosted something recently that wasnt "all that different" from what this math project was about. Why can't I just create a new community following the same model? I am in a position to do that, I can get the funding, I have been very successful in many other projects.
So that's what Ill be doing now. I'll create a science copy of that project. Then people like myself will hopefully flock to it.
