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Viliam_Bur comments on Why I Am Not a Rationalist, or, why several of my friends warned me that this is a cult - Less Wrong
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Comments (192)
Not generally -- I keep coming back for the clear, on-topic, well-reasoned, non-flame discussion.
Many (I guess 40-70%) of meetups and discussion topics are focused on pursuing rational decision-making for self-improvement. Honestly I feel guilty about not doing more work and I assume other readers are here not because it's optimal but because it's fun.
There's also a sentiment that being more Rational would fix problems. Often, it's a lack of information, not a lack of reasoning, that's causing the problem.
I agree, and I agree LW is frequently useful. I would like to see more reference of non-technical experts for non-technical topics. As an extreme example, I'm thinking of a forum post where some (presumably young) poster asked for a Bayesian estimate on whether a "girl still liked him" based on her not calling, upvoted answers containing Bayes' Theorem and percentage numbers, and downvoted my answer telling him he didn't provide enough information. More generally, I think there can be a similar problem to that in some Christian literature where people will take "(X) Advice" because they are part of the (X) community even though the advice is not the best available advice.
Essentially, I think the LW norms should encourage people to learn proven technical skills relevant to their chosen field, and should acknowledge that it's only advisable to think about Rationality all day if that's what you enjoy for its own sake. I'm not sure to what extent you already agree with this.
A few LW efforts appear to me to be sub-optimal and possibly harmful to those pursuing them, but this isn't the place for that argument.
Not answering this question is limiting the spread of LW, because it's easy to dismiss people as not sufficiently intellectual when they don't join the group. I don't know the answer here.
A movement aiming to remove errors in thinking is claiming a high standard for being right.
The PhD student dropping out of a top-10 school to try to do a startup after attending a month-long LW event I heard secondhand from a friend. I will edit my post to avoid spreading rumors, but I trust the source.
I'm glad your experience has been more ideal.
If it did happen, then I want to know that it happened. It's just that this is the first time I even heard about a month-long LW event. (Which may be an information about my ignorance -- EDIT: it was, indeed --, since till yesterday I didn't even know SPARC takes two weeks, so I thought one week was a maximum for an LW event.)
I heard a lot of "quit the school, see how successful and rich Zuckerberg is" advice, but it was all from non-LW sources.
I can imagine people at some LW meetup giving this kind of advice, since there is nothing preventing people with opinions of this kind to visit LW meetups and give advice. It just seems unlikely, and it certainly is not the LW "crowd wisdom".
Here's the program he went to, which did happen exactly once. It was a precursor to the much shorter CFAR workshops: http://lesswrong.com/lw/4wm/rationality_boot_camp/
That said, as his friend I think the situation is a lot less sinister than it's been made out to sound here. He didn't quit to go to the program, he quit a year or so afterwards to found a startup. He wasn't all that excited about his PHD program and he was really excited about startups, so he quit and founded a startup with some friends.
Thanks!
Now I remember I heard about that in the past, but I forgot completely. It actually took ten weeks!