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by fwlr 1188 days ago
One of the issues that makes an index less valuable is that to make sense of a given rationalist idea you kinda need to have a mental virtualenv set up with most of the rationalist tools already installed (otherwise e.g. when someone says “this is a choice between Good and Evil” you will simply say “I choose Good” as in https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good), and the only reliable way to install all of those tools is to just read most of the rationalist literature. Likewise for the “dark cousins”, to make sense of a given neoreactionary idea you need a mental virtualenv with all the neoreactionary tools installed and to install them you need to read all of Moldbug. And don’t get me started on postrationalist ideas - despite being the most important of all, you can’t make sense of them without having all the rationalist and neoreactionary tools installed in the same environment, and have spent five years marinating in the dependency conflicts, and you also have to be so intractably contrarian that neither rationalist nor neoreactionary thought is contrarian enough to satisfy you…

I still think an index would be helpful, but it does have its issues as well.