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Notes -
I bet you've heard the phrase "living well is the best revenge." I think it's also the best argument. There are so many ideas, or larger schemas, that are alluring in abstract. See: every teenager's politics. But far fewer paradigms are actually effective in practice. (Granted, which ones work does vary somewhat based on the local circumstances / environment.)
Living out one's ideals is a costly signal of sincerity, and achieving success and happiness by doing so is the least refutable argument. This is a big reason why religion is so persistent despite sounding batshit crazy from the outside — and I say this as a religious person. The philosophy makes sense once you fit yourself inside of it, but the incentive to attempt that in the first place, despite the context of a secular overculture, is that religious people are more likely to thrive.
Anyway, my question is, why don't more culture warriors pursue this path, of exemplifying why their chosen philosophy is good? Am I wrong that it's the most convincing way to advocate for one's ideals? Or maybe everyone is indeed trying to do this, and most just don't seem very effective from my particular vantage point / vis-a-vis my conception of the good life? Perhaps it's a selection effect where people who deeply care about what everyone else is doing are less likely to be happy, point blank, so anyone discernible as a culture warrior is already precluded from "living well is the best argument" unless they learn to give less of a shit in general.
Edit: Apologies for not responding individually, this ended up getting more responses than I expected. But I appreciate you all and am pondering your points!
Because your opponents will claim that you're only happy because you're oppressing somebody else, and the suffering you're causing is utalitarian-ly greater than the happiness you're experiencing. See: all the anticolonialism theorists who attack the visible prosperity / happiness of the west be claiming that Westerners are only happier / more prosperous than non-Westerners because they stole all the latter's resources. Or all the anti-Christians who insist that the spiritual harmony of monoreligious Europe only worked because they were constantly squeezing Jews / witches / gays / scapegoats to serve as the Two Minutes Hate foundation of community cohesion.
I confess that I've never been able to take Yudkowsky seriously since he announced his separation. "If you're so smart, how come your marriage failed?"
That one's a bit unfair. I hold no brief for Yudkowsky, and yes it's very enticing to have a laugh about his weight struggles and marriage failure, but that just goes to show that the human heart is unfathomable and being smart is not enough to solve all problems (yes, Rationalists should have known this already, but they tended/tend to be young when they caught the bug, and youth is the time of idealism and overblown ambition and passionate conviction that previous generations knew nothing but this time we all know the secret to success is X and once we implement that, it will all work out!)
So yeah - his marriage broke up, like a lot of ordinary people undergo. You can try to make things work, but in the end if you're incompatible, or you both want different things, or one party feels beyond reason that they've fallen out of love and what remains isn't a good enough reason to stay, then there's not much can be done save to keep the split as amicable as possible.
He's an ordinary guy, after all, it turns out! The philosophy may still be sound, we don't judge the art by the artist in most cases after all, so if we're older and a bit more mature we can go "yeah, emotions are complicated, who knew?" and argue for/against his views on their merits, not on "ha-ha, you're a romantic failure!"
Does he now claim that he acted irrationally with respect to gaining weight? Or does he claim that because of physics and metabolism it's just impossible for him to lose weight? There's a difference between "he recognizes that it's a failure of rationality" and "he uses rationality in a nonsensical way".
An important part of the philosophy here is the claim that you can improve rationality in a domain-general way. That you could learn to avoid e.g. motivated reasoning in a way that would work on all topics simultanuously, so that your preformance in even the weakest field that a critic might adversarially pick will be ok (and that he has done this, obviously). Claiming to have a metabolic defect that would be lethal in the ancestral environment is strong evidence against that.
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