lukeprog comments on Do people think Less Wrong rationality is parochial? - Less Wrong

27 Post author: lukeprog 28 April 2012 04:18AM

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Comment author: Vladimir_M 28 April 2012 07:29:01PM *  17 points [-]

I don't think "parochial" is the right word here -- a more accurate term for what you're describing would be "contrarian."

In any case, insofar as there exists some coherent body of insight that can be named "Less Wrong rationality," one of its main problems is that it lacks any really useful methods for separating truth from nonsense when it comes to the output of the contemporary academia and other high-status intellectual institutions. I find this rather puzzling: on the one hand, I see people here who seem seriously interested in forming a more accurate view of the world -- but at the same time, living in a society that has vast powerful, influential, and super-high-status official intellectual institutions that deal with all imaginable topics, they show little or no interest in the question of what systematic biases and perverse incentives might be influencing their output.

Now, the point of your post seems to be that LW is good because its opinion is in line with that of these high-status institutions. (Presumably thanks to the fact that both sides have accurately converged onto the truth.) But then what exactly makes LW useful or worthwhile in any way? Are the elite universities so marginalized and powerless that they need help from a blog run by amateurs to spread the word about their output? It really seems to me that if a forum like LW is to have any point at all, it can only be in identifying correct contrarian positions. Otherwise you might as well just cut out the middleman and look at the mainstream academic output directly.

Comment author: lukeprog 28 April 2012 08:57:51PM *  6 points [-]

Presumably thanks to the fact that both sides have accurately converged onto the truth

I think that Eliezer basing 1/4 of The Sequences on articles from the MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences / Judgment under Uncertainty had a lot to do with it.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 28 April 2012 09:52:30PM 4 points [-]

It occurs to me, now that you point this out, that my earlier comment about "mainstream cogsci" may have been misleading.

I was indoctrinated into cogsci as an MIT Course IX major in the 80s, and really that's what I think about when I think about the field. I have no idea if MIT itself is considered "mainstream" or not, though.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 29 April 2012 09:23:22PM 1 point [-]

As someone who has taken cogsci classes more recently than that, I don't think the timing of the research is that relevant or anything else. Your earlier comment seems to summarize decently what aspects are not part of mainstream cogsci (or possibly even mainstream thought at all).

Comment author: fubarobfusco 29 April 2012 12:28:58AM 0 points [-]

Between those and Jaynes' Probability Theory, Pearl's Causality, and Drescher's Good and Real you have quite a lot of it.

Comment author: David_Gerard 29 April 2012 08:35:57AM 5 points [-]

AIUI Eliezer didn't actually read Good and Real until the sequences were finished.

Comment author: ChrisHallquist 29 April 2012 02:44:10AM *  -1 points [-]

Really need to read both of these books.

EDIT: On second thought, which sequences were these?

Comment author: lukeprog 29 April 2012 05:45:11AM 0 points [-]

All the parts on heuristics and biases and Bayesianism and evolutionary psychology.