List of compartmentalized people (who both win and fail at truth-seeking)

gwern

Following up on an impromptu list XiXiDu made of famous recent scientists & thinkers who also held quite odd beliefs, I've created a wiki article with that list & a few other people.

This Discussion is posted for feedback on a few points:

Is this a good idea in the first place? I feel vaguely uneasy, like it could be taken as a 'hit list' or a list of inviolable norms.
What's a better name? 'Irrationalists' is a bad name but the only half-way self-explanatory one I could think of at the moment.
Who's missing? There are currently only 8 people on the list right now.
Is it reasonable to limit the list temporally only to people who lived in the 20th century & later, and so had access to all the data and philosophy done then that we take for granted?
I added in a few 'See Alsos' that I could think of; are there more germane wiki articles? Especially LW articles? (I know Aumann in particular has been discussed occasionally by Eliezer - worth linking directly?)

Following up on an impromptu list XiXiDu made of famous recent scientists & thinkers who also held quite odd beliefs, I've created a wiki article with that list & a few other people.

This Discussion is posted for feedback on a few points:

Is this a good idea in the first place? I feel vaguely uneasy, like it could be taken as a 'hit list' or a list of inviolable norms.
What's a better name? 'Irrationalists' is a bad name but the only half-way self-explanatory one I could think of at the moment.
Who's missing? There are currently only 8 people on the list right now.
Is it reasonable to limit the list temporally only to people who lived in the 20th century & later, and so had access to all the data and philosophy done then that we take for granted?
I added in a few 'See Alsos' that I could think of; are there more germane wiki articles? Especially LW articles? (I know Aumann in particular has been discussed occasionally by Eliezer - worth linking directly?)

This is an awful idea for so many reasons that I'm seriously disappointed that I have to spell them out here.

For start, publishing condemnatory lists of people is bad for all sorts of PR reasons. Can you imagine what this list will look like to random visitors and what associations it will evoke?

Then, if you're going to denounce people publicly for their views, basic decency requires that you give a correct and detailed account of what exactly they said and wrote. Supporting your list with paraphrased soundbites from Wikipedia and the popular press is far below this standard.

Next, what exactly qualifies a belief as so irrational that someone who has it should be put on the official LessWrong list of shame? If religion counts, why wouldn't Marxism or any other modern ideological delusion? And if you're going to call out people for those, then you might as well save space by instead listing those who didn't (or don't) have any, according to you.

Also, as one commenter already noted, you're being extremely disrespectful towards people with mental problems who have ended up on your list. Normally I'm the last one here to insist on hypersensitivity, but this is in bad taste however you turn it.

These are not the only reasons why this list should be deleted, but they should be sufficient.

One PR problem is that the list may come across as an attempt to shame people out of their ideas (as opposed to an instructive list of examples of failure modes), and so people seeing the list may mistakenly infer that LessWrong thinks it has enough social clout to make famous thinkers fear its disapproval, and hence that LessWrong has delusions of grandeur. "Irrationalists" seems like a bad thing to title the page in this context.

0[anonymous]15y

That sounds right; so can we find a different way to learn such lessons as we would have learned from this exercise?

0gwern15y

I don't understand the standards you and your upvoters are using. So Eliezer can single out Aumann (with summaries of as much scholarly merit as the ones on the wiki page), to name one, in multiple articles - to general upvotes and lack of Vladimir_M comments; XiXiDu can make a list - to general upvotes and lack of Vladimir_M comments; I, timtyler, and nhamann can suggest additions - to general upvotes and lack of Vladimir_M comments, and so on except when I post a Discussion article about a wiki article, then it gets fiercely downvoted. What lesson am I meant to infer from this? That I am not high-status enough to make such claims (but Eliezer is)? That only now have people come to their senses under your trenchant critique? That it's fine to name names and have a community-wide agreement that some are beyond the pale - but we dare not write it down? And as far as bad taste goes - I would think that the ones with mental illness would be the most valuable ones to include inasmuch as they are the only ones most of the rest of humanity will agree with us in saying that they were flat-out wrong and this demonstrates compartmentalization. (There's a difference between mental diseases and mere religious or other beliefs...? But the mind is a physical thing, so the difference is not one of kind.)

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List of compartmentalized people (who both win and fail at truth-seeking)

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List of compartmentalized people (who both win and fail at truth-seeking)

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