I think I'm the person curi is referring to as "some people" throughout his post. There is a long-ass continuing thread starting about here in which curi tries to convert me to the Sole True Way of Correct Thinking and isn't making much headway.
So all y'all don't have to worry -- the lazy underdeveloped intellectual is me.
P.S. The tl;dr of OP seems to be:
Take me to your leader!
...
What kind of savages are you that you don't even have a Glorious Leader and a Big Sacred Book?!??
In my understanding, there’s no one who speaks for LW, as its representative, and is responsible for addressing questions and criticisms. [...] No one is responsible for defining an LW school of thought and dealing with intellectual challenges.
Correct. There is no Pope of LW, we don't all agree about everything, and no one has any obligation to answer anyone else's objections. That may be inconvenient for some purposes, but that's how it is.
This is also how it is for many other things besides LW. Suppose someone claims that there is something wrong with...
I gave this a strong upvote, not because I agree with this, but because I think you make some good points that need to be heard.
Even though I don't think there should be a Less Wrong pope or official doctrinal creed, I agree that having some champions who go out and debate these principles could be pretty cool!
Also, Paths Forward is certainly an interesting idea, even if it is overly idealistic in term of how much effort it expects people to invest.
I'm thankful for this state. Nobody represents my beliefs, not even me. They are free-floating and do not need a spokesperson or representative to make them true (or correct them when they're not). Actually, beliefs are only models anyway, and there is no "true" except to the extent that they correlate so some observed states of the universe.
But if no one has done that (so there’s no answer to CR they can endorse), then how do they know CR is mistaken?
There are plenty of system of systems of thought out there and there are opportunity costs to spending energy delving into different systems of thoughts. Nothing you did here suggests to me that it's worthwhile to invest a significant amount of time into delving into CR.
Suppose LW, vaguely defined as it may be, is mistaken on some major points. E.g. Karl Popper refuted induction.
Whether or not individual X did Y is not a major point as fa...
In my understanding, there’s no one who speaks for LW, as its representative, and is responsible for addressing questions and criticisms.
Exactly. That is by design. See the title of the site? It doesn't say "MoreRight". Here even Yudkowski, the Founding Father, was frequently disagreed upon.
This is the School-less school.
There are paths forward but it's no one else's job to show them to you or help you find them.
The attitude of expectation is one that does not fit here and will not encourage anyone to help you. I also expect it runs into walls in other cultures too.
Additional info:
In my understanding, there’s no one who speaks for LW, as its representative, and is responsible for addressing questions and criticisms. LW, as a school of thought, has no agents, no representatives – or at least none who are open to discussion.
As some have already said, this is considered a feature, not a bug. We do not care (or try not to care) about "what is the LW way?". Instead we (try to) focus on "how is it, really?". To quote Eliezer, who is closest to being the representative of LW:
Perhaps your conception of rationality is ...
i wrote some commentary on Paths Forward, thought people might appreciate it:
http://justinmallone.com/2017/01/paths-forward-comments-part-1/
Don't bother with these deadbeats. It's been over four years since I mentioned Kirly Prokastian, and there hasn't been a flicker of interest.
In my understanding, there’s no one who speaks for LW, as its representative, and is *responsible* for addressing questions and criticisms. LW, as a school of thought, has no agents, no representatives – or at least none who are open to discussion.
The people I’ve found interested in discussion on the website and slack have diverse views which disagree with LW on various points. None claim LW is true. They all admit it has some weaknesses, some unanswered criticisms. They have their own personal views which aren’t written down, and which they don’t claim to be correct anyway.
This is problematic. Suppose I wrote some criticisms of the sequences, or some Bayesian book. Who will answer me? Who will fix the mistakes I point out, or canonically address my criticisms with counter-arguments? No one. This makes it hard to learn LW’s ideas in addition to making it hard to improve them.
My school of thought (Fallible Ideas – FI – https://fallibleideas.com) has representatives and claims to be correct as far as is known (like LW, it’s fallibilist, so of course we may discover flaws and improve it in the future). It claims to be the best current knowledge, which is currently non-refuted, and has refutations of its rivals. There are other schools of thought which say the same thing – they actually think they’re right and have people who will address challenges. But LW just has individuals who individually chat about whatever interests them without there being any organized school of thought to engage with. No one is responsible for defining an LW school of thought and dealing with intellectual challenges.
So how is progress to be made? Suppose LW, vaguely defined as it may be, is mistaken on some major points. E.g. Karl Popper refuted induction. How will LW find out about its mistake and change? FI has a forum where its representatives take responsibility for seeing challenges addressed, and have done so continuously for over 20 years (as some representatives stopped being available, others stepped up).
Which challenges are addressed? *All of them*. You can’t just ignore a challenge because it could be correct. If you misjudge something and then ignore it, you will stay wrong. Silence doesn’t facilitate error correction. For information on this methodology, which I call Paths Forward, see: https://curi.us/1898-paths-forward-short-summary BTW if you want to take this challenge seriously, you’ll need to click the link; I don’t repeat all of it. In general, having much knowledge is incompatible with saying all of it (even on one topic) upfront in forum posts without using references.
My criticism of LW as a whole is that it lacks Paths Forward (and lacks some alternative of its own to fulfill the same purpose). In that context, my criticisms regarding specific points don’t really matter (or aren’t yet ready to be discussed) because there’s no mechanism for them to be rationally resolved.
One thing FI has done, which is part of Paths Forward, is it has surveyed and addressed other schools of thought. LW hasn’t done this comparably – LW has no answer to Critical Rationalism (CR). People who chat at LW have individually made some non-canonical arguments on the matter that LW doesn’t take responsibility for (and which often involve conceding LW is wrong on some points). And they have told me that CR has critics – true. But which criticism(s) of CR does LW claim are correct and take responsibility for the correctness of? (Taking responsibility for something involves doing some major rethinking if it’s refuted – addressing criticism of it and fixing your beliefs if you can’t. Which criticisms of CR would LW be shocked to discover are mistaken, and then be eager to reevaluate the whole matter?) There is no answer to this, and there’s no way for it to be answered because LW has no representatives who can speak for it and who are participating in discussion and who consider it their responsibility to see that issues like this are addressed. CR is well known, relevant, and makes some clear LW-contradicting claims like that induction doesn’t work, so if LW had representatives surveying and responding to rival ideas, they would have addressed CR.
BTW I’m not asking for all this stuff to be perfectly organized. I’m just asking for it to exist at all so that progress can be made.
Anecdotally, I’ve found substantial opposition to discussing/considering methodology from LW people so far. I think that’s a mistake because we use methods when discussing or doing other activities. I’ve also found substantial resistance to the use of references (including to my own material) – but why should I rewrite a new version of something that’s already written? Text is text and should be treated the same whether it was written in the past or today, and whether it was written by someone else or by me (either way, I’m taking responsibility. I think that’s something people don’t understand and they’re used to people throwing references around both vaguely and irresponsibly – but they haven’t pointed out any instance where I made that mistake). Ideas should be judged by the idea, not by attributes of the source (reference or non-reference).
The Paths Forward methodology is also what I think individuals should personally do – it works the same for a school of thought or an individual. Figure out what you think is true *and take responsibility for it*. For parts that are already written down, endorse that and take responsibility for it. If you use something to speak for you, then if it’s mistaken *you* are mistaken – you need to treat that the same as your own writing being refuted. For stuff that isn’t written down adequately by anyone (in your opinion), it’s your responsibility to write it (either from scratch or using existing material plus your commentary/improvements). This writing needs to be put in public and exposed to criticism, and the criticism needs to actually get addressed (not silently ignored) so there are good Paths Forward. I hoped to find a person using this method, or interested in it, at LW; so far I haven’t. Nor have I found someone who suggested a superior method (or even *any* alternative method to address the same issues) or pointed out a reason Paths Forward doesn’t work.
Some people I talked with at LW seem to still be developing as intellectuals. For lots of issues, they just haven’t thought about it yet. That’s totally understandable. However I was hoping to find some developed thought which could point out any mistakes in FI or change its mind. I’m seeking primarily peer discussion. (If anyone wants to learn from me, btw, they are welcome to come to my forum. It can also be used to criticize FI. http://fallibleideas.com/discussion-info) Some people also indicated they thought it’d be too much effort to learn about and address rival ideas like CR. But if no one has done that (so there’s no answer to CR they can endorse), then how do they know CR is mistaken? If CR is correct, it’s worth the effort to study! If CR is incorrect, someone better write that down in public (so CR people can learn about their errors and reform; and so perhaps they could improve CR to no longer be mistaken or point out errors in the criticism of CR.)
One of the issues related to this dispute is I believe we can always proceed with non-refuted ideas (there is a long answer for how this works, but I don’t know how to give a short answer that I expect LW people to understand – especially in the context of the currently-unresolved methodology dispute about Paths Forward). In contrast, LW people typically seem to accept mistakes as just something to put up with, rather than something to try to always fix. So I disagree with ignoring some *known* mistakes, whereas LW people seem to take it for granted that they’re mistaken in known ways. Part of the point of Paths Forward is not to be mistaken in known ways.
Paths Forward is a methodology for organizing schools of thought, ideas, discussion, etc, to allow for unbounded error correction (as opposed to typical things people do like putting bounds on discussions, with discussion of the bounds themselves being out of bounds). I believe the lack of Paths Forward at LW is preventing the resolution of other issues like about the correctness of induction, the right approach to AGI, and the solution to the fundamental problem of epistemology (how new knowledge can be created).
So my claims about QM are ... even better than SA's
ROFL
That's one of the main reasons I'm here instead of DD
And here I was, completely at loss as to why David Deutsch doesn't hang out at LW... But now we know.
you're mean and disruptive. at least you're demonstrating why credentials are a terrible way to address things, which is my point. you just assume the status of various credentials without being willing to think about them, let alone debate them (using more credentials (regress), or perhaps arguments? but if arguments, why not just use those in the first place?). so for you, like most people, using credentials = using bias.