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ciphergoth comments on Open Thread: February 2010, part 2 - Less Wrong
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More cryonics: my friend David Gerard has kicked off an expansion of the RationalWiki article on cryonics (which is strongly anti). The quality of argument is breathtakingly bad. It's not strong Bayesian evidence because it's pretty clear at this stage that if there were good arguments I hadn't found, an expert would be needed to give them, but it's not no evidence either.
I have not seen RationalWiki before. Why is it called Rational Wiki?
From http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/RationalWiki :
So it's inspired by Traditional Rationality.
A fine mission statement, but my impression from the pages I've looked at is of a bunch of nerds getting together to mock the woo. "Rationality" is their flag, not their method: "the scientific point of view means that our articles take the side of the scientific consensus on an issue."
Voted up, but calling them "nerds" in reply is equally ad-hominem, ya know. Let's just say that they don't seem to have the very high skill level required to distinguish good unusual beliefs from bad unusual beliefs, yet. (Nor even the realization that this is a hard problem, yet.)
Yes, they're pretty softcore by LessWrongian standards but places like this are where advanced rationalists are recruited from, so if someone is making a sincere effort in the direction of Traditional Rationality, it's worthwhile trying to avoid offending them when they make probability-theoretic errors. Even if they mock you first.
Also, one person on RationalWiki saying silly things is not a good reason to launch an aggressive counterattack on a whole wiki containing many potential recruits.
I guess I should try harder to remember this, in the context of my rather discouraging recent foray into the Richard Dawkins Forums -- which, I admit, had me thinking twice about whether affiliation with "rational" causes was at all a useful indicator of actual receptivity to argument, and wondering whether there was much more point in visiting a place like that than a generic Internet forum. (My actual interlocutors were in fact probably hopeless, but maybe I could have done a favor to a few lurkers by not giving up so quickly.)
But, you know, it really is frustrating how little of the quality of a person (like Richard Dawkins, or, say, Paul Graham) or a cause (like increasing rationality, or improving science education) actually manages to rub off or trickle down onto the legions of Internet followers of said person or cause.
This is actually one of Niven's Laws: "There is no cause so right that one cannot find a fool following it."
Wait, you have a model which says it should?
You don't learn from a person merely by associating with them. And:
I would bet a fair bit that this is the source of your frustration, right there: scale. You can learn from a person by directly interacting with them, and sometimes by interacting with people who learned from them. Beyond that, it seems to me that you get "dilution effects", kicking in as soon as you grow faster than some critical pace at which newcomers have enough time to acculturate and turn into teachers.
Communities of inquiry tend to be victims of their own success. The smarter communities recognize this, anticipate the consequences, and adjust their design around them.
You understand this is more or less exactly the problem that Less Wrong was designed to solve.
Is there any information on how the design was driven by the problem?
For example, I see a karma system, a hierarchical discussion that lets me fold and unfold articles, and lots of articles by Eliezer. I've seen similar technical features elsewhere, such as Digg and SlashDot, so I'm confused about whether the claim is that this specific technology is solving the problem of having a ton of clueless followers, or the large number of articles from Eliezer, or something else.
not to detract, but does Richard Dawkins really posses such 'high quality'? IMO his arguments are good as a gateway for aspiring rationalists, not that far above the sanity water line
that, or it might be a problem of forums in general ..
Dawkins is a very high-quality thinker, as his scientific writings reveal. The fact that he has also published "elementary" rationalist material in no way takes away from this.
He's way, way far above the level represented by the participants in his namesake forum.
(I'd give even odds that EY could persuade him to sign up for cryonics in an hour or less.)
Here's Dawkins on some non socially-reinforced views: AI, psychometrics, and quantum mechanics (in the last 2 minutes, saying MWI is slightly less weird than Copenhagen, but that the proliferation of branches is uneconomical).
Obviously the most you could persuade him of would be that he should look into it.
Bloggingheads are exactly 60 minutes.
Convincing Dawkins would be a great strategy for promoting cryonics... who else should the community focus on convincing?
you're absolutely right, I didn't consider his scientific writings, though my argument still weakly stands since I wasn't talking about that, he's a good scientist, but a rationalist of say Eliezer's level? I somehow doubt that.
(my bias is that he hasn't gone beyond the 'debunking the gods' phase in his not specifically scientific writings, and here I'll admit I haven't read much of him.)
Interesting. Hom many places have you brought this issue up? Is there any forum which has responded rationally? What seem to be the controlling biases?
LW is thus far the only forum on which I have personally initiated discussion of this topic; but obviously I've followed discussions about it in numerous other places.
You're on it.
I mean, there are plenty of instances elsewhere of people getting the correct answer. But basically what you get is either selection bias (the forum itself takes a position, and people are there because they already agree) or the type of noisy mess we see at RDF. To date, LW is the only place I know of where an a priori neutral community has considered the question and then decisively inclined in the right direction.
In the case of RDF, I suspect compartmentalization is at work: this topic isn't mentally filed under "rationality", and there's no obvious cached answer or team to cheer for. So people there revert to the same ordinary, not-especially-careful default modes of thinking used by the rest of humanity, which is why the discussion there looks just like the discussions everywhere else.
It's noteworthy that my references and analogies to concepts and arguments discussed by Dawkins himself had no effect; apparently, we were just in a sort of separate magisterium. Particularly telling was this quote:
Now on the face of it this seems utterly dishonest: I hardly think this fellow would actually be tempted to convert to theism upon hearing the news that eight Perugians had been convinced of God's existence. But I suspect he's actually just trying to express the separation that apparently exists in his mind between the kind of reasoning that applies to questions about God and the kind of reasoning that applies to questions about a criminal case.
Technical nitpick on the use of 'a priori' in the context. Subject to possible contradiction if I have missed a nuance in the meaning in the statistics context).
I would have just gone with 'previously'.
(As an extreme example, a few weeks idly checking out RationalWiki led me to the quote at the top of this page and only a few months after that I was at SIAI.)
I only just noticed this. Good Lord. (I put that quote there, so you're my fault.)
Point taken.