= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
bramflakes comments on Open Thread, April 15-30, 2013 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (459)
It's much easier to signal rationality than to actually be rational.
True. It's harder to fake rationality than it is to fake the things that matter today, however (say, piety). And given that the sanity waterline has increased enough that "rational" is one of the most desirable traits for somebody to have, fake signaling should be much harder to execute. (Somebody who views rationality as such a positive trait is likely to be trying to hone their own rationality skills, after all, and should be harder to fool than the same person without any such respect for rationality or desire to improve their own.)
Faking rationality would be rather easy: Criticize everything which is not generally accepted and always find biases in people you disagree with (and since they are humans, you always find some). When "rationality" becomes a popular word, you can get many followers by doing this.
Here I assume that the popularity of the word "rationality" will come before there are millions of x-rationalists to provide feedback against wannabe rationalists. It would be enough if some political movement decided to use this word as their applause light.
Do you see any popular people here you'd describe as faking rationality? Do we seem to have good detectors for such behavior?
We're a pretty good test case for whether this is viable or not, after all. (Less so for somebody co-opting words, granted...)
The community here is heavily centered around Eliezer. I guess if someone started promoting some kind of fake rationality here, sooner or later they would get into conflict with Eliezer, and then most likely lose the support of the community.
For another wannabe rationalist guru it would be better to start their own website, not interact with people on LW, but start recruiting somewhere else, until they have greater user base than LW. At the moment their users notice LW, all they have to do is: 1) publish a few articles about cults and mindkilling, to prime their readers, and 2) publish a critique of LW with hyperlinks to all currently existing critical sources. The proper framing would be that LW is a fringe group which uses "rationality" as applause lights, but fails horribly (insert a lot of quotations and hyperlinks here), and discussing them is really low-status.
It would help if the new rationalist website had a more professional design, and emphasised its compatibility with mainstream science, e.g. by linking to high-status scientific institutions, and sometimes writing completely uncontroversial articles about what those institutions do. In other words, the new website should be optimized to get 100% approval of the RationalWiki community. (For someone trying to do this, becoming a trusted member of RationalWiki community could be a good starting point.)
I'm busy having pretty much every function of RW come my way, in a Ponder Stibbons-like manner, so if you can tell me where the money is in this I'll see what I can come up with. (So far I've started a blog with no ads. This may not be the way to fame and fortune.)
The money or lack thereof doesn't matter, since RW is obviously not an implementation of Villam's proposed strategy: it fails on the ugliness with its stock MediaWiki appearance, has too broad a remit, and like El Reg it shoots itself in the foot with its oh-so-hilarious-not! sense of humor (I dislike reading it even on pages completely unrelated to LW). It may be successful in its niche, but its niche is essentially the same niche as /r/atheism or Richard Dawkins - mockery of the enemy leavened with some facts and references.
If - purely hypothetically speaking here, of course - one wished to discredit LW by making the respective RW article as negative as possible, I would expect it to do real damage. But not be any sort of fatal takedown that set a mainstream tone or gave a general population its marching orders, along the lines of Shermer's 'cryonics is a scam because frozen strawberries' or Gould's Mismeasure of Man's 'IQ is racist, involved researchers like Merton faked the data because they are racist, and it caused the Holocaust too'.
So ... RationalWiki, then.
Accomplishment is a start. Do the claims match the observable results?
Yeah, because true rationality is going to be supporting something like cryonics that you personally believe in.