TheAncientGeek comments on RationalWiki's take on LW - Less Wrong

1 Post author: LordSnow 09 May 2012 10:58PM

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Comment author: Vladimir_M 10 May 2012 12:31:07AM *  33 points [-]

I've browsed through a bunch of topics on RationalWiki, and it looks like a heavily ideological website. Thus, it tends to be extremely unreliable and biased on any topic that has even the slightest whiff of controversy. Anyone who makes a genuine effort to form an accurate view of the world will surely come to have at least some beliefs that will be met with scorn and sneering by the sort of people who write on RW.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 07 September 2015 09:07:58AM 1 point [-]

Is LessWrong supposed to be ideology-free?

Comment author: Vaniver 07 September 2015 04:38:48PM 1 point [-]

I think the ideology on LW is supposed to be something like "epistemic rationality is tremendously important." This maps onto standard political ideologies in bizarre ways.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 07 September 2015 06:32:13PM 1 point [-]

LW seems to have ideology about MWI, cryonics, etc. Maybe LW looks as weirdly ideological to RW-ers as RW does to LW-ers. Discuss.

Comment author: Vaniver 07 September 2015 10:24:41PM 1 point [-]

LW seems to have ideology about MWI, cryonics, etc.

What do you think the word "ideology" means?

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 08 September 2015 09:20:23AM 1 point [-]

A normative set of beliefs. IOW, not synonymous with politcal ideology.

Comment author: Vaniver 08 September 2015 01:49:53PM *  2 points [-]

It seems to me that LW has normative beliefs about metacognition that, if taken seriously, imply that one should take seriously ideas like MWI and cryonics and, regardless of whether or not one subscribes to them, at the very least not make bad objections to them.

I think confusing that with an object-level position is problematic.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 12 September 2015 02:55:07PM *  2 points [-]

Revisionary. LW has made much stronger statements about MWI than "should be taken seriously" .. it has used the language of "slam dunks".

One obvious way is to start with some things that are slam-dunks, and use them as anchors. Very few things qualify as slam-dunks. Cryonics doesn't rise to that level, since it involves social guesses and values, not just physicalism. I can think of only three slam-dunks off the top of my head:

Atheism: Yes. Many-worlds: Yes. "P-zombies": No. These aren't necessarily simple or easy for contrarians to work through, but the correctness seems as reliable as it gets.

Of course there are also slam-dunks like:

Natural selection: Yes. World Trade Center rigged with explosives: No.

Note also:

But there are also simpler things we could do using the same principle. Let's say we want to know whether the economy will recover, double-dip or crash. So we call up a thousand economists, ask each one "Do you have a strong opinion on whether the many-worlds interpretation is correct?", and see if the economists who have a strong opinion and answer "Yes" have a different average opinion from the average economist and from economists who say "No".

Comment author: Vaniver 12 September 2015 05:00:40PM 2 points [-]

Revisionary. LW has made much stronger statements about MWI than "should be taken seriously" .. it has used the language of "slam dunks".

I am using LW to refer to a community of users and posts; you seem to be using LW to refer to Yudkowsky. I suspect that suffices to explain our disagreement.

Comment author: username2 12 September 2015 09:25:20PM *  2 points [-]

There is a danger that the existence of this difference might lead to motte and bailey differences among LWers who do not examine their beliefs about MWI (or their beliefs about what LWers believe about MWI, for a different group of people) carefully.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 12 September 2015 05:56:58PM 0 points [-]

This still counts as normative, because the community is being urged to follow it, whether they do or not.

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