How do you and/or LWers distinguish among science, pseudoscience and crackpottery?
Such a question demands a serious and principled answer, which I won't give. But it's a cultural fact about this place that parapsychology (and all other standard skeptics' whipping-boys) will be regarded as pseudoscience, and something like the eight-circuit model as too incoherent to even count as pseudoscience. There are thousands of people here, so there are all sorts of ideological minorities lurking in the woodwork, but the preferred view of the universe is scientifically orthodox, laced with a computer scientist's version of platonism, and rounded out with a Ray Kurzweil concept of the future.
How do you and/or LWers distinguish mystical mental states from mind-as-computation mental states (that looks like cognitive reductionism from my perspective)
Mysticism isn't a topic that LW has paid any attention to. I think it would mostly be filed under "religious mental disorder", except that, because of the inevitable forays into reality-as-computer-program and all-is-mathematics, people keep reinventing propositions and attitudes which sound "mystical". This is a place where people try to understand their subjectivity in terms of computation, and it's natural that they would also do this for mystical subjectivity, and they might even regard an evocative computational metaphor as a plausible theory for the cognitive neuroscience of mysticism. For example... maybe mystical states are what happens when your global cognitive workspace is populated with nothing but null pointers! You could turn that into a physical proposition about cortical columns and neural activation patterns. That's the sort of "theory of mysticism" I would expect a LWer to invent if they took up the topic.
These are topics in which I deviate somewhat from the LW norm. My trademark spiel is all about qualia-structures in quantum biology, not universe as Turing machine. Also, LW isn't all scientific reductionism, there are many other things happening here at the same time. In framing RAW vs LW as tolerance for mystical nondualism versus preference for atheist naturalism, I'm just singling out the biggest difference in sensibility.
Fair enough. I like your sense of humour and you (and pretty much everyone I've interacted with here) are very polite and civil which I appreciate a bunch. I've spent some substantial time on some internet forums and shit can get pretty heated in a hurry. I'm sure people go to battle here occasionally, but I haven't encountered anything to volatile (yet?). Anyway, just my way of saying thanks. Besides, I'm not here to make sure LW fits into to my perceptions about RAW et al. I'm here to learn more about rationality.
To break up the awkward silence at the start of a recent Overcoming Bias meetup, I asked everyone present to tell their rationalist origin story - a key event or fact that played a role in their first beginning to aspire to rationality. This worked surprisingly well (and I would recommend it for future meetups).
I think I've already told enough of my own origin story on Overcoming Bias: how I was digging in my parents' yard as a kid and found a tarnished silver amulet inscribed with Bayes's Theorem, and how I wore it to bed that night and dreamed of a woman in white, holding an ancient leather-bound book called Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (eds. D. Kahneman, P. Slovic, and A. Tversky, 1982)... but there's no need to go into that again.
So, seriously... how did you originally go down that road?
Added: For some odd reason, many of the commenters here seem to have had a single experience in common - namely, at some point, encountering Overcoming Bias... But I'm especially interested in what it takes to get the transition started - crossing the first divide. This would be very valuable knowledge if it can be generalized. If that did happen at OB, please try to specify what was the crucial "Aha!" insight (down to the specific post if possible).