Kawoomba comments on Why Don't Rationalists Win? - Less Wrong

6 Post author: adamzerner 05 September 2015 12:57AM

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Comment author: Vaniver 07 September 2015 01:48:13PM 4 points [-]

LW vocabulary relabels a lot of traditional rationality terms.

Has anyone put together a translation dictionary? Because it seems to me that most of the terms are the same, and yet it is common to claim that relabeling is common without any sort of quantitative comparison.

Comment author: btrettel 11 September 2015 08:19:35PM 0 points [-]

RationalWiki discusses a few:

Another problem of LessWrong is that its isolationism represents a self-made problem (unlike demographics). Despite intense philosophical speculation, the users tend towards a proud contempt of mainstream and ancient philosophy[39] and this then leads to them having to re-invent the wheel. When this tendency is coupled with the metaphors and parables that are central to LessWrong's attraction, it explains why they invent new terms for already existing concepts.[40] The compatibilism position on free will/determinism is called "requiredism"[41] on LessWrong, for example, and the continuum fallacy is relabeled "the fallacy of gray." The end result is a Seinfeldesque series of superfluous neologisms.

In my view, RationalWiki cherry picks certain LessWrongers to bolster their case. You can't really conclude that these people represent LessWrong as a whole. You can find plenty of discussion of the terminology issue here, for example, and the way RationalWiki presents things makes it sound like LessWrongers are ignorant. I find this sort of misrepresentation to be common at RationalWiki, unfortunately.

Comment author: Kawoomba 11 September 2015 08:56:48PM 15 points [-]

Their approach reduces to an anti-epistemic affect-heuristic, using the ugh-field they self-generate in a reverse affective death spiral (loosely based on our memeplex) as a semantic stopsign, when in fact the Kolmogorov distance to bridge the terminological inferential gap is but an epsilon.

Comment author: Good_Burning_Plastic 18 September 2015 08:30:13PM 3 points [-]

You know you've been reading Less Wrong too long when you only have to read that comment twice to understand it.

Comment author: XFrequentist 12 September 2015 07:08:50PM 1 point [-]

I got waaay too far into this before I realized what you were doing... so well done!

Comment author: Kawoomba 12 September 2015 08:22:30PM 0 points [-]

What are you talking about?

Comment author: nyralech 13 September 2015 05:00:20PM 0 points [-]

I'm afraid I don't know what you mean by Kolmogorov distance.