Sasha Gusev

@sashagusevposts · Twitter · 2026-09-12 11:38 UTC

rationalists established a culture where loudly proclaiming your edgiest opinion was seen as a marker of truth-seeking and sense-making and so on. now when trying to persuade non-rationalists about an actual urgent issue, they are running head-first into the wall of Message Discipline. this is a challenge for fringe movements that suddenly need to persuade the broader public. to take one timely example, it has not been uncommon for people on the left to express extreme, edgy anti-american views -- america deserved 9/11, for instance -- as a way of signaling brave truth telling. then when faced with a genuine crisis like the war in iraq, the left struggled to give up these cultural indicators and focus on persuasion and Message Discipline. like the rationalists, many on the left respond to this critique with indignation: "i *genuinely* believe this edgy thing i'm saying, it is my truth! surely you cannot expect me to lie". this sounds very good internally and to the group, but what it is really saying is that one is more committed to personal expression ("you need to hear the true belief *i* care most about") than with persuasion ("you need to hear the true belief i think *you* will care most about"). it goes without saying that the appeals a fringe group cares most about internally are often not the appeals the broader public cares most about. you only get so many shots on goal with the public before they tune you out. so even though the left was correct on the implications of the war in iraq, their inability to practice message discipline quickly made them irrelevant to the foreign policy discussion. this same pattern repeated again a decade later with occupy wall street, where the left took a directionally correct (or at least popular) view of income inequality and corporate corruption, and squandered it in exchange for drum circles, leaderless organizing, and a hodgepodge of ancillary issues (the war in iraq, israel-palestine, global warming). and the same pattern is repeating now with rationalists and AI.