What are LessWrong's thoughts on Venkatesh Rao, Gregory Rader, and Daniel Lemire?

InquilineKea

I just discovered him via a link from Zed on this site. And I appreciate all the links and summary text to help me explore his output.

My initial take after about 10 hours of reading is that he's a incredibly erudite verbal thinker who is awesome for (1) pointing to books that I may actually buy and read, (2) breaking me out of "one model thinking" on topics I didn't even realize I was using only one model to think about. In this respect he strongly reminds me of Mencius Moldbug. However, also like Mencius, he seems to have a very political/social focus which fuels my suspicion that many of his top down "grand theories of how reality works" are false.

Estimating from the hip: there is a 12% chance that I'll buy his book :-)

6gwern15y

Oh yes, this is the aptest comparison on the page (a comparison to Robin Hanson would not be amiss either), except I get the feeling that Moldbug is more of a single big idea thinker than Rao (if you used Tetlock's dichotomy, Moldbug is a very happy curled-up hedgehog, and Rao would be the fox, possibly a fox on Adderall). Both are provocative thinkers who probably are only occasionally truly right. But that's better than most writers, who are never right or provocative.

1Zed15y

His book took me by surprise. I expected it to have the same style and sort of content as his blog (like every other blogger who writes a book) but it was completely different. It consists of half a dozen (unrelated) chapters that end with an exercise. I'm not sure if Tempo is any good (I suspect his solutions overfit the data) but it's short (130 pages or so) so there's no reason not to pick it up if you like the way Venkat thinks. I'm taking the liberty of adjusting your estimate of wanting to buy the book upwards to 30%.

Tempo was a bit more in the style of the blog, but a good read.