"Among these strengths I count their propensity to question mainstream cultural norms: precisely what one needs in order to challenge the Monoculture"
Given my situation I think of challenges to the healthcare establishment, most notably during COVID; in Jan and Feb 2020, randoms on Twitter like Balaji were far more right than the healthcare establishment mainstream, since Twitter randoms were warning about the potential for a pandemic while public health authorities were downplaying that risk. Neurodivergent types were calling for masking when the mainstream health authorities were still (wrongly) saying masking is ineffective.
In the U.S., the FDA's slowness to approve vaccination was wrong, and led to thousands if not hundreds of thousands of extra deaths. While outsiders called for challenge trials, the FDA refused to approve them.
After mass vaccination, much of the mainstream wanted to continue policies like closing schools, which was also wrong. "Vax and relax" was the right way to go, and relatively few mainstream types got this right.
While the rest of the culture plays various kinds of follow-the-leader (one can see this in the left- and right-wing reactions to e.g. COVID, or vaccines more generally), a lot of the neurodivergent people are trying to figure out what's actually true.
"it’s probably no wonder that rationalism comes with a certain skepticism of established institutions — with the good and bad that this entails"
One intellectual danger some people indulge in goes something like this: 1. public health / the FDA are wrong about some things, so therefore 2. anything public health / the FDA / the medical establishment argues for is wrong. It's important to avoid becoming a default contrarian or nihilist: http://jakeseliger.com/2024/01/11/on-not-being-a-radical-medicine-skeptic-and-the-dangers-of-doctor-by-internet. I've gotten a fair number of comments and emails from people who like what I've said about the FDA and therefore think that special diets or supplements will cure cancer, when data do not in fact support that. "rationalism has to be understood as a movement of autistics disaffected with existing institutions who care a lot and generate content"
Almost all of that content is written, too, which probably reduces its virality in an oral-video age.
"I know Robin Hanson thinks the Internet (or anything for that matter) won’t save us from our low fertility promoting Monoculture"
The failure to allow more housing construction through zoning restrictions indicates that we are collectively not even remotely serious about fertility. If we can't even do the low-hanging fruit then the stuff with more trade-offs is way out of bounds.
