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nbouscal comments on Connection Theory Has Less Than No Evidence - Less Wrong
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Comments (48)
I would. I would think that such a post was quite silly, in the context of being posted to LessWrong. I would hope that, if there were any question about the subject, someone would simply post a list of evidence or neutral well-reasoned arguments. Homeopathy is easily enough dispatched with "there is no explanation for this that conforms to our understanding of physical laws, and there is no evidence for it, therefore it is very unlikely to be true." Bringing political speech and in-group/out-group dynamics into it is detrimental to the conversation.
I have to say that I am extremely disappointed in the response to this post. I have no stake on either side of the issue, but if this is the best we can do then I can't tell that the Sequences have had any effect at all.
Apparently the OP was worried that this "Connection Theory" has become surprising popular in his/her social circle of "rationalists"/effective altruists.
Well, I haven't read most of them, but some of the parts I've read contained an endorsement of cryonics, which I think is part of a common pattern around here....
Seems to me the pattern is: "I know a guy or two who read LessWrong/HPMOR, and they really strongly believe X. Therefore, X is the core belief of rationalist community".
Where X is Connection Theory today, belief that aspiring rationalists consider themselves always correct and free of biases a few days ago, and if my memory serves me well, a year or two ago there was a link in open thread to some guy abusing his girlfriend and calling his behavior rationalist because he has read a few early chapters of HPMOR (he didn't debate on LW or go to meetups, and no one of us really knew him; but he presented himself as a member of our community, and his claims seemed credible to outsiders).
This is a PR issue, and it would probably be nice to have a FAQ explaining what are and what aren't our beliefs. There would be a place for cryonics (with the explanation that on average people predict cca 15% chance it would work), but e.g. the CT wouldn't be there.
How about building a list of 100 statements and then making a poll and let everybody do Likert ratings? It might also tell us how different beliefs cluster together.
Or in other words, some sort of LWean Creed? :)
But yes, you're right: having some clearly defined core beliefs is indeed useful for delineating in-group/out-group and avoiding the non-central fallacy where things like that guy and his STDs and walking on broken glass are clearly not normative or common or related to the LW memeplex and represent his glib rationalizations. Yvain wrote a little bit about that recently: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/14/ecclesiology-for-atheists/
Personally, I prefer using the LW survey for this. It doesn't address many of the higher-level issues but at least for basic object-level stuff like cryonics, it's useful for laying out clearly what LWers tend to believe at what level of confidence.
(And to point out something yet again, this is why not being allowed to add the basilisk question to the LW survey has been so harmful: it lets a very niche marginal belief be presented by outsiders like Stross as a central belief - it's suppressed by the Grand Leader as a secret, it must be important! - and we are unable to produce concrete data pointing out 'only 1% of LWers take the basilisk at all seriously' etc.)
The crazier things in scientology are also believed in by only a small fraction of the followers, yet they're a big deal in so much that this small fraction is people who run that religion.
edit: Nobody's making a claim that visitors to a scientology website believe in xenu, and it would be downright misleading to make a poll of those visitors and argue that scientologists don't believe in xenu. Fortunately for us, scientology is unlikely to allow such a poll because they don't want to self undermine.
The crazier things are only exposed to a small fraction, which undermines the point. Do the Scientologists not believe in Xenu because they've seen all the Scientology teachings and reject them, or because they've been diligent and have never heard of them? If they've never heard of Xenu, their lack of belief says little about whether the laity differs from the priesthood... In contrast, everyone's heard of and rejected the Basilisk, and it's not clear that there's any fraction of 'people who run LW' which believes in the Basilisk comparable to the fraction of 'people who run that religion' who believe in Xenu. (At this point, isn't it literally exactly one person, Eliezer?)
Visiting a Scientology website is not like taking the LW annual poll as I've suggested, and if there were somehow a lot of random visitors to LW taking the poll, they can be easily cut out by using the questions about time on site / duration of community involvement / karma. So the poll would still be very useful for demonstrating that the Basilisk is a highly non-central and peripheral topic.
I'm pretty sure that a poll taken of most Catholics would show that they think abortion and birth control are moral. I'm also pretty sure that a poll taken of most Catholics would show that (to the extent they've heard of the issue at all) they think the medieval Church was completely wrong in how it treated Galileo, not just factually wrong about heliocentricism.
The church itself would disagree. Is it illegitimate to crticize either the church or Catholicism on that basis?
Well, mostly everyone heard of Xenu, for some value of "heard of", so I'm not sure what's your point.
Yeah. So far, though, it is so highly non central and so peripheral that you can't even add a poll question about it.
edit:
Roko, someone claimed to have had nightmares about it... who knows if they still believe, and whoever else believes? Scientology is far older (and far bigger), there been a lot of insider leaks which is where we know the juicy stuff from.
As for how many people believe in "Basilisk", given various "hint hint there's a much more valid version out there but I won't tell it to you" type statements and repeat objections along the lines of "that's not a fair description of the Basilisk, it makes a lot more sense than you make it out to be", it's a bit slippery with regards to what we mean by Basilisk.
Is this a reference to something that actually happened? I think I'd very much like to hear that story
It was claimed to have happened. I think the guy & his antics were described somewhere on LW in the past few months, I may've replied to it.