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IlyaShpitser comments on The Ten Commandments of Rationality - Less Wrong
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Here, let me take a stab:
1) Don't confuse beliefs and values.
2) Be agenty.
3) Never leave information on the table.
4) Strive for consistent beliefs.
5) There is actually a Christian formulation of this one: "thou shalt not blaspheme against the Holy Spirit" (Acquinas interpretation). Judaism and Catholicism (perhaps Sufism also, but I am not very familiar with the Sufi tradition so will not comment) have many elements of "proto-rationality", for a number of reasons, one of them being that at one point studying religion was "academia" -- where smart people went.
6) Use CDT :).
7) Having accurate beliefs and completed goals takes work. Remember to work for what you want.
8) Argue collaboratively.
9) Never be certain of anything.
10) Remember to integrate your utility with respect to time.
You know, the difference between people like Dennett or Dawkings and the LW crowd, is that while all are atheists, Dennett and Dawkings genuinely do not miss God or religion. I get the feeling you guys do, with your commandments, and virtues, and solstices, and wedding ceremonies.
I disagree with 4). I think our cognitive architecture is not consistent, and I think wishing it were so is not really very productive. "Man, to thyself be true."
Thank you for that brevity. It makes clear, what can then also be seen in the original, a striking omission: any injunction to pursue the truth, to make one's beliefs correspond with reality. Which highlights the problem with (4): updating towards consistency -- also called decompartmentalising -- while neglecting to update towards reality is a short road to crackpottery.
Dawkins who wants that we call ourselves brights and who preaches militant atheism isn't that from from religion either.
The Brights movement explicitly rejected priests, gurus, and ritual. I sometimes wonder why lesswrong cannot seem to let these things go, as well. Some of this attachment is disguised as humor, but us homo sapiens love to use humor as a cover. Personally, I find this attachment one of the creepier features of the lesswrong community.
Aggressively competing in the marketplace of ideas is not the same thing as religion, many clearly unreligious sets of ideas compete quite aggressively.
What do you mean with "priest" and "guru". For what definition of those terms do they fit for someone in the LW community but don't fit for Dawkins or the other horsemen?
As far as rituals go, you might have a point. I think it's comes out of the rationalism is about winning idea of lesswrong. Rituals are simply very useful tools. Not using them means choosing a suboptimal strategy.
Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided. The argument for or against using rituals shouldn't appear one-sided.
Competing in the market place of ideas doesn't mean that you have to self-identify with a label that signals group loyality. There are a bunch of people in the new atheist community who say things like the purpose of life is to spread one's genes.
Sorry for not being clear -- I am not saying that lesswrong should stop using rituals. That is, this is not a policy debate. I consider myself an outsider to this community, and it would be rude for me to impose. I may find it creepy, but who cares what I think?
If lesswrong wants to use rituals, for whatever reason, it should. But I think it is rather curious in the sense of being an irreligious org that uses religious trappings. This is what I mean when I say that lesswrong misses religion.
I mean "guru" in the sense that EY is considered a guru (and, I believe, deliberately cultivates an air of a guru).
Given that you have 2000 karma I don't think you are truely an outsider.
The Jusos are the youth organisation of Germany's SPD, which is the left party that's currently part of the government.
At one Jusos meeting I attended we sang the Internationale. It's a ritual. It's useful for group bonding. That doesn't make it religious.
Could you be more specific? What behaviors are you talking about?
You know, Israel defines a Jew to be someone who considers themselves a Jew.
I ignore karma. I am not convinced by the idea of rationality or consistent beliefs. I am not a Bayesian with a capital B. I don't subscribe to the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics. I am not an atheist. I don't believe UFAI is an issue worth spending a lot of resources on at the moment. I attended a total of 1 LW meetup (in Boston -- I think Scott Aaronson and Michael Vassar were there).
I do think LW is a good and valuable community, and I think there are many very useful concepts in circulation here (for example tabooing and steelmanning -- these are useful enough to have been reinvented elsewhere), which is why I participate here. Also some folks connected to LW think about and write about interesting things.
Things like point 1 in this post:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/jne/a_fervent_defense_of_frequentist_statistics/ajwa
A guru speaks from a position of authority, a scientist communicates/argues with peers. I think the modern academic approach has a lot less failure modes than the guru approach (which has been tried extensively in the past of our species).
edit: To clarify my thinking a bit. A "guru" is a kind of memetic feudal lord. I am suspicious of attempts to revert to feudalism, our species does it far too easily. I think we can do better than feudal forms.
Being an outsider is more than just not subscribing to the label of belonging to an ingroup.
I don't think disagreeing on things like consistent beliefs makes you an outsider. I think the last longer post on the topic even argued against having consistent beliefs.
I don't think what makes a true citizen of Lesswrong is that a person treats Eliezer as his guru and simply copies his beliefs.
If you decide that this community is good, that you find participation valuable and think for yourself that makes you perfect member.
Then what are you and if you already like religion why do you see a problem with the same pattern appearing in LW?
I don't think it's useful to pretend that everyone understand what you mean with a concept. It can seem authoritative to say that the person you are talking to just doesn't understand what you mean, but it often directly addresses the core issue of a disagreement.
Communication is also not something where you have to pick one style for all your communication needs. One day you can be more intellectual and the other day you can use more simple language.
Would you mind to elaborate on this?
Absolutely -- I think things like (a)theism, and things like interpretations of QM are "questions of taste." I think it is a waste of time to argue about taste. I also think that tolerance of diverse tastes that agree on all empirical predictions (and agree that empirical predictions is how we go about evaluating things) has advantages.
Thanks. Outside of communities that entertain ideas such as acausal trade and ancestor simulations, I mostly interpret "atheism" to be an imprecise but useful term to communicate the beliefs that (a) any given religion has a negligible probability of being true, and that (b) empirical predictions is how we should go about evaluating things.