PeerGynt comments on Wikipedia articles from the future - Less Wrong

19 Post author: snarles 29 October 2014 12:49PM

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Comment author: PeerGynt 30 October 2014 04:51:46AM *  1 point [-]

Less Wrong

Less Wrong (German: Weniger Falsch) was an association of philosophers gathered on the internet in 2007, chaired by Eliezer Yudkowsky. Among its members were Yvain, Lukeprog, Michael Vassar, Will Newsome and Gwern. PeerGynt was an eminent student at the time. He was allowed to participate in meetings, but was not a member of Less Wrong.

Members of Less Wrong had a common attitude towards philosophy, consisting of an applied rationalism drawn from Eliezer Yudkowsky, whose Sequences formed the basis for the group's philosophy. Less Wrong's influence on 21st century philosophy was immense, and much later work was in response to the group's thoughts.

The pre-history of Less Wrong began with blog posts on the philosophy of science and epistemology from 2006, promoted by Robin Hanson on Overcoming Bias.

(This is only half joking. If you want the rest of the future history of Less Wrong, it is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Circle . )

(Edited to fix Google Translate's German grammar)

Comment author: Azathoth123 30 October 2014 07:24:17AM 3 points [-]

What? No mention of Carl Shulman or Anna Salamon? Or Michael Anissimov for that matter?

Comment author: ZankerH 30 October 2014 08:03:25AM 2 points [-]

Anissimov went on to splinter LW into the Neoreactionary fraction, and was subsequently unpersoned by True followers of EY.

Comment author: Curiouskid 30 October 2014 11:25:18PM 1 point [-]

Could you elaborate on this? I've heard the term Neoreactionary thrown around, but I'm not exactly sure what it means.

Comment author: jaime2000 31 October 2014 12:36:11AM *  5 points [-]

Neoreaction is an intellectual tradition of right-wing political philosophy composed of bloggers who are ideologically descended from the ideas of Curtis Yarvin, better known as Mencius Moldbug. If you want the five-minute version, read Konkvistador's summaries. If you are willing to read a much longer introduction, try one of these. Or just read the Neoreactionary Canon, which includes all three.

Anyway, the relevance to the grandparent is that LessWrong has a non-trivial neoreactionary minority (3% as of the last survey), and that former SIAI employee Michael Anissimov and his friends went and made a neoreactionary website called MoreRight (an obvious pun on LessWrong). Eliezer Yudkowsky was not amused.

Comment author: [deleted] 31 October 2014 10:49:20AM 2 points [-]

BTW, Yudkowsky and Moldbug have been enemies basically ever since Overcoming Bias and Unqualified Reservations have existed, give or take a year.

Comment author: advancedatheist 01 November 2014 03:03:50PM 1 point [-]

Neoreactionary thinking goes back to the foundations of Western philosophy.. Plato and Aristotle saw democracies in action, and they both argued that human nature finds its fulfillment in small, organic communities of related people where the natural aristocracy that emerges gets to run things, instead of the vulgarians who lacked the personal excellence for the task. This makes Neoreaction a revival of a formerly mainstream view which has fallen out of fashion since the 18th Century because of contingent historical setbacks, not because it got the worse in a fair debate.

So what do intellectual advocates of democracy, egalitarianism, cosmopolitanism, etc. want to do? Throw Plato's and Aristotle's writings out of the Western Canon?

Comment author: ChristianKl 01 November 2014 03:22:42PM 1 point [-]

So what do intellectual advocates of democracy, egalitarianism, cosmopolitanism, etc. want to do? Throw Plato's and Aristotle's writings out of the Western Canon?

That looks like a strawman to me. Could you link to anyone who wants to throw Plato out of the Western canon because he didn't favor democracy? (There are other valid arguments against the Western canon)

Comment author: polymathwannabe 06 November 2014 04:31:56PM -1 points [-]

And better reasons than anti-democracy to throw Plato out.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 31 October 2014 10:18:58AM *  4 points [-]

It's what happens when you look at the lessons of "Politics is the Mind-Killer" and "Reversed stupidity is not intelligence", and decide to ignore them because affective spirals are too much fun to give up.

But it's difficult to choose whether the correct reversed stupidity in politics should actually be libertarianism or monarchy. The former seems more popular among LW crowd, but that also makes it kinda boring; the latter seems more original, but is usually defended by worse arguments. So you invent a libertarian-ish monarchy world, where the freely competing subjects are not the puny average humans, but the Gods-Emperors of different states. (You call all other regimes "demotist" to show that they are actually all the same.)

Of course, putting it this way is not attractive, so you have to hide it in hundreds of pages written in obscurantist language, so that no outsider is really sure what you are actually talking about. Then you insert some interesting historical facts, and a lot of criticism of political left, some of which is insightful.

And then you keep promoting the new teaching in LessWrong debates, because clever contrarianism is your selling point, and LessWrong has a weakness for clever contrarians. And then you use your presence at LessWrong as a proof that rational people support you, despite the fact that your fans are actually a tiny minority here (probably even smaller than religious people; and LW is explicitly atheistic).

Better analysis can be found here: "Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell", "The Anti-Reactionary FAQ". The first article explains the ideas better than the original sources, and the second article shows that this map doesn't fit the territory.

EDIT: Ignoring the beliefs and focusing only on behavior, Neoreaction is LessWrong's creepy stalker.

Comment author: hawkice 02 November 2014 08:54:48PM *  -1 points [-]

But it's difficult to choose whether the correct reversed stupidity in politics should actually be libertarianism or monarchy.

It's worth pointing out that modern politics (especially American politics) is so jammed packed with opinion and false equivalencies (gay marriage != immigration amnesty) that it has many more than just two reversals. But I see your point, which is about LW politics and socialization specifically. Given that weakness for clever contrariness, perhaps we should focus on the wide expanse of ideas is a good way to confound tempted readers?

Comment author: ChristianKl 30 October 2014 10:13:24AM 2 points [-]

German: Weniger Falsche

As a German native that feels wrong to be. I would rather translate it as "Weniger Falsch". I also see no reason to translate it into German at all.

Comment author: PeerGynt 30 October 2014 05:10:00PM 2 points [-]

I can see why this would look strange to a German speaker. It was just intended as a joke/reference to the Wikipedia article on the Vienna Circle. I've fixed the grammar