In my time at LW I saw so many people becoming anxious, struggling with how to "escape themselves", how to transcend their biases, and meta-biases, knotting themselves into paradoxes with the elaborate hypothetical constructions, it was just sad after some point. They convinced themselves that rationality means trusting an external system so that if it leads to something counterintuitive, it must surely be seriously accepted. I mean it's kind of how it works, you shouldn't rule out your potential conclusions at the outset, but real life is a lot messier than theories. And I know one can say, this sounds like an excuse to be lazy and unreflective and uninterested in the world's problems, but actually all I'm saying is you can't obsess over this sort of thing and keep your mental hygiene at the same time. This sort of thing can make people burn out or become actually depressed or paranoid.

One must keep the ability to laugh at oneself, to be able to humorously see a kind of futility in what one does but dance the dance anyway. Clenching too hard, making one more nested iteration in the prisoner's dilemma or the chicken game won't help.

Also don't take stuff more seriously than a certain ceiling.

For me, reading about Zen ideas helped me get out of this narrow, "rationalized", neatly ordered, algorithmic, packaged-and-labeled way of thinking. Metaphorically it's kind of the difference between a probabilistic machine learning system vs. a symbolic knowledge system where everything is defined precisely and unambiguously and every rule is laid out etc.

I'm still materialist and atheist, but I think being too deeply involved in any ideology is harmful (be it Marxism or Fascism or Scientology or LW). Yeah, you can reflect upon whether it's possible to live truly independent of ideologies without making or finding a new one for yourself. But there are certain indicators, like when you feel you're getting distanced away from the people around you physically, when you start feeling superior for belonging to the in-group etc., it usually means you're just not noticing some aspects and are obsessing over something. Sure one can say that if innovators thought like this and always stayed in line of the mainstream, we never would have gotten Ford or Jobs etc. And there is truth to this, but it kind of sounds like "X dropped out of college and went on to be successful therefore dropping out of college is a good idea". No, generally the good idea is to be humble and positive about the people around you, be open and reflective but not obsessive and be able to relax.