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MichaelVassar comments on What I've learned from Less Wrong - Less Wrong
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LW has helped me a lot. Not in matters of finding the truth; you can be a good researcher without reading LW, as the whole history of science shows. (More disturbingly, you can be a good researcher of QM stuff, read LW, disagree with Eliezer about MWI, have a good chance of being wrong, and not be crippled by that in the least! Huh? Wasn't it supposed to be all-important to have the right betting odds?) No; for me LW is mostly useful for noticing bullshit and cutting it away from my thoughts. When LW says someone's wrong, we may or may not be right; but when LW says someone's saying bullshit, we're probably right.
I believe that Eliezer has succeeded in creating, and communicating through the Sequences, a valuable technique for seeing through words to their meanings and trying to think correctly about those instead. When you do that, you inevitably notice how much of what you considered to be "meanings" is actually yay/boo reactions, or cached conclusions, or just fine mist that dissolves when you look at it closely. Normal folks think that the question about a tree falling in the forest is kinda useless; nerdy folks suppress their flinch reaction and get confused instead; extra nerdy folks know exactly why the question is useless. Normal folks don't let politics overtake their mind; concerned folks get into huge flamewars; but we know exactly why this is counterproductive. I liked reading Moldbug before LW. Now I find him... occasionally entertaining, I guess?
Better people than I are already turning this into a sort of martial art. Look at Yvain cutting down ten guys with one swoop, and then try to tell me LW isn't useful!
cousin_it:
Trouble is, the question still remains open: how to understand politics so that you're reasonably sure that you've grasped its implications on your personal life and destiny well enough? Too often, LW participants seem to me like they take it for granted that throughout the Western world, something resembling the modern U.S. regime will continue into indefinite future, all until a technological singularity kicks in. But this seems to me like a completely unwarranted assumption, and if it turns out to be false, then the ability to understand where the present political system is heading and plan for the consequences will be a highly valuable intellectual asset -- something that a self-proclaimed "rationalist" should definitely take into account.
Now, for full disclosure, there are many reasons why I could be biased about this. I lived through a time and place -- late 1980s and early 1990s in ex-Yugoslavia -- where most people were blissfully unaware of the storm that was just beyond the horizon, even though any cool-headed objective observer should have been able to foresee it. My own life was very negatively affected by my family's inability to understand the situation before all hell broke loose. This has perhaps made me so paranoid that I'm unable to understand why the present political situation in the Western world is guaranteed to be so stable that I can safely forget about it. Yet I still have to see some arguments for this conclusion that would pass the standards that LW people normally apply to other topics.
I agree with you on this, but honestly, its a difficult enough topic that semi-specialists are needed. Trying as a non-specialist to figure out how stable your political system is rather than trying to find a specialist you can trust will get you about as far as it would in law etc.
Trickier than the 'how stable' question is that of what is likely to result from a failure. To the extent that such knowledge is missing the problem of what to do about it gains faint hints reminiscent of Pascal's Mugging.
That sounds plausible, but should probably have a time frame added.