I was thinking more about people losing interest and not joining or leaving the forum. But that’s kind of only thinking of the extreme. Some good people might still interact with CF but less so because they now view Elliot as lower status because of this article. Perhaps that could be crossing a breakpoint to where they would have been making rapid progress and isn’t because they view it as lower status. That could be, but the standard for being a person able to make rapid progress seems so high that this wouldn’t stop them. If they were going to make rapid progress I don’t think this article would change that for the worse. Still there are other possible negatives like getting more negative interaction from other people and getting less than 20 rational debate advocates. So I think it was correct for Elliot to put in the caveat.
Actually yes. I was very high initiative for sports and exercise. l looked up how to do stuff and exercises on YouTube, and then I practiced that on my own. I also created training sessions of my own. I did lots of self-practice. At 12 y/o I had a period where I woke up early in order to practice an hour before school by myself.
I guess in an absolute sense I’m not that high initiative for intellectual stuff and learning, but comparatively I think I’m in a quite high percentile for people with some intellectual interest. Just reading a bunch of philosophy books, like almost all of Rand, some histories of philosophy and some other philosophy is more than most. Now I’ve also commented on some articles and also done 3 (mini-)projects here. There has probably been a lot of lurkers on Elliot’s stuff, so I’m higher initiative than them. I do regret waiting for so long to join and not already having done more though.
Perhaps it’s better to already think of myself as a pretty high initiative person who has been suppressed by school?