Being a republican is equally as compatible with EA as being a Democrat.

Have you had a look at things like project 2025? Because I'll be honest, if EAs despite that think that "being a republican is equally as compatible with EA as being a Democrat" (as the agree-votes seem to indicate) then I don't think I want to be an EA.

People have expressed reasons why they think this is disappointing but I will add another one. This is yet another way that the groupthink-generating karma system will distort our community.

The EA hub didn't sort people based on karma, but now this new system does. The karma system generates soft-censorship, self-censorship and groupthink. If you write a critique on a post with high-karma authors, they can just strong-downvote it and delete it from the frontpage, which just leaves you with less karma and voting power in the future (and other people can see your low comment-to-karma ratio, or the little icon indicating it, and dismiss you).

People with more voting power can downvote people they disagree with giving them less voting power (and thereby less voting power they can distribute to other people of similar sentiment... ad infinitum) while conversely upvote things they agree with giving those people more voting power (and thereby more voting power they can distribute to people they agree with... ad infinitum).

Getting sorted lower on the directory becomes yet another reason why people wouldn't want to criticize popular EA people/ideas (and the people that disregard this and go against their own self-interest to help EA as a whole will get yet another punishment for it).

I don't see why we'd expect less factory farms under socialism

The comment was about how factory farms are an argument against capitalism; not about why it is an argument for other economic philosophies, so one can't conclude from this that some other specific economic philosophy (e.g., socialism) doesn't have that argument against them. It could be that, e.g. factory farms are an argument against capitalism and socialism, but not mutualism.

It's also not why socialists support socialism

There was no claim that this is why socialists support socialism, but even if there was, it doesn't really matter for the argument. Even if we could conclude from "factory farms are an argument against capitalism" that "socialism is good for animal welfare", why would the motivation of socialists matter? Even if socialists created better animal welfare only unintentionally, wouldn't that still be one reason to support them? (Assuming you care about the consequences of policy more than the virtues of the participants)

except via us being poorer in general

Lastly, I want to talk about this claim. But less so to address you, and more so to address the forum users.

I don't think that socialism would make us poorer, at least not in the long run. The dynamics of capitalism are very destructive (e.g. negative externalities, regulatory capture, planned obsolescence...) and countries like the Nordic countries, with more socialist policies, tend to do better.
Socialist firms were shown in meta analyses to not be less productive than capitalist firms, while being vastly more resilient (among many other beneficial attributes), so they would help the economy grow more in the long run, making us richer. This is not all there is to say; there are many more arguments and there are many more other factors to consider, but in the end, why bother?

You could spend time and energy crafting long chains of arguments with lots of citations and data on unpopular positions (even if you weren't the person who made an assertion, like in this case) only to get vastly less karma/voting power than people who just assert the popular opinion. I.e., in this case, the assertion "socialism would make us poorer" without any sources or arguments. Which btw is fine, this is an internet comment not an academic paper, but I've experienced the dynamics on this forum for years; if one were to reply that it wouldn't make us poorer, also without sources, or even with some sources, you would lose karma/voting power. And then another person would jump in and point out that the reply didn't cover literally every aspect of the economy, and it avoided talking about this or that part, which is fine, demands for rigor are good, but the forum as a whole more often than not makes isolated demands for rigor, and the original anti-socialism assertion rarely if ever gets such a demand.

Case in point, the comment you're replying to. It didn't even make the assertion that socialism is better, just posted some studies and data from which one could infer that he is pro-socialism, and that's enough to make him lose karma/voting power, while your stronger assertion without any studies/data (which, again, is fine) get lots of karma.

(Again, while the first two points are aimed at your reply, this last point is aimed at the broader EA forum user base.)

Not being paid for it doesn't make it okay. They still promote holocaust revisionism, vaccine denialism, and the white replacement conspiracy theory. One could make the argument that it actually makes it worse: he believed in the cause so much he was willing to work for free. (I'm personally agnostic as to whether it makes it worse or not, but again, it doesn't make it okay)

The fact that this reply has positive karma and positive agreement karma is baffling.

"Castles", plural. The purchase of Wytham Abbey gets all the attention, but everyone ignores that during that same time there was also the purchase of a chateau in Hostačov using FTX funding.

You should mention that this graph is not from academics testing nootropics on a random sample, but self-reported from nootropics users. So it is non-random, uncontrolled, and unblinded.

The survey also had probabilities of side effects. Maybe include those? A cost-benefit analysis really should also include the potential costs, and not just the potential benefits.

So I read this and your original subreddit post "Compassionate Eugenics as a Cause Area" and I have some concerns. You say:

We might consider programs that pay for people with desirable traits to reproduce.

The question is: who gets to decide what the "desirable traits" are? Eugenicists seem to focus a lot on the desirability of racial traits, which I vehemently disagree with. If the eugenicists got their way, I don't think the future they'd create is one I would consider desirable. And this has been a central part of the movement since its inception. The founder of eugenics, sir Galton, created a racial hierarchy with whites at the top and wrote things like:

There exists a sentiment, for the most part quite unreasonable, against the gradual extinction of an inferior race.

Now, just because you've named your account after him and advocate for eugenics doesn't automatically mean you secretly share that view, but hopefully you can forgive someone for becoming somewhat concerned.

Uber's activities were deliberately illegal in many countries and I probably on balance support that.

I don't think you should.

I appreciate the work that went into this post, but I do think you understate the link between LW and neoreaction. You say:

Gerard’s second project, to create an association in people’s minds between rationalism and neoreaction, was much more ambitious than the first. [...] Rationalists and neoreactionaries, on the other hand, were distinct and well-defined groups, neither of which particularly liked each other.[...] But Gerard had two cards to play: first, a glancing, single-sentence note in an article from the Reliable Source known as TechCrunch that neoreactionaries occasionally “crop-up on tech hangouts like Hacker News and Less Wrong, having cryptic conversations about ‘Moldbug’ and ‘the Cathedral,’”

Assuming this was true at one point, it seems to no longer be the case (and it's also not a purely online thing anymore) as we could see recently with e.g. Manifest and Yarvin's afterparty.

The post complains about "scientific racists" at the conference, with there being a minimum of eight:

I would be comfortable putting a total of eight people under the eugenics/HBD label. There might be more, but I am not an expert.

We can debate whether it's closer to eight or closer to twelve but let's take eight as the conservative estimate. You say:

we had about sixty such special guests

And:

i think that, on balance, we were like ~5% too edgy or something — but the way that i’d aim to correct this is by having the makeup of speakers more accurately represent my internal set of beliefs and interests (which happens to be like ~5% less edgy)

So 8 out of 60 means that 13.333% of the speakers were "scientific racists" and if we decrease that by 5 percent we end up with five "scientific racists". So is this correct? Will you invite five "scientific racists" as speakers next time?