And before you attempt to assert that fundamentally no truths are "knowable", and that all we have are "beliefs of varying degrees of confidence", let me just say that this, too, is a modal failure. But a subtle one: it is an assertion that because all we have is the map, there is no territory.
Is there anyone else here who would have predicted that I was about say anything remotely like this? Why on earth would I be about to do that? It doesn't seem relevant to the topic at hand, necessary for appeals to experts to be a source of evidence or even particularly coherent as a philosophy.
I am only slightly more likely to have replied with that argument than a monkey would have been if it pressed random letters on a keyboard - and then primarily because it was if nothing else grammatically well formed.
The patient is very, very confused. I think that this post allows us to finally offer the diagnosis: he is qualitatively confused.
Quote:
The only error that's occurring here is your continued belief that beliefs are relevant to this conversation. They simply aren't. We're not discussing "what should you believe" -- we are discussing "what should you hold to be true."
Attempts to surgically remove this malignant belief from the patient have commenced.
LessWrongers as a group are often accused of talking about rationality without putting it into practice (for an elaborated discussion of this see Self-Improvement or Shiny Distraction: Why Less Wrong is anti-Instrumental Rationality). This behavior is particularly insidious because it is self-reinforcing: it will attract more armchair rationalists to LessWrong who will in turn reinforce the trend in an affective death spiral until LessWrong is a community of utilitarian apologists akin to the internet communities of anorexics who congratulate each other on their weight loss. It will be a community where instead of discussing practical ways to "overcome bias" (the original intent of the sequences) we discuss arcane decision theories, who gets to be in our CEV, and the most rational birthday presents (sound familiar?).
A recent attempt to counter this trend or at least make us feel better about it was a series of discussions on "leveling up": accomplishing a set of practical well-defined goals to increment your rationalist "level". It's hard to see how these goals fit into a long-term plan to achieve anything besides self-improvement for its own sake. Indeed, the article begins by priming us with a renaissance-man inspired quote and stands in stark contrast to articles emphasizing practical altruism such as "efficient charity"
So what's the solution? I don't know. However I can tell you a few things about the solution, whatever it may be:
Whatever you may decide to do, be sure it follows these principles. If none of your plans align with these guidelines then construct a new one, on the spot, immediately. Just do something: every moment you sit hundreds of thousands are dying and billions are suffering. Under your judgement your plan can self-modify in the future to overcome its flaws. Become an optimization process; shut up and calculate.
I declare Crocker's rules on the writing style of this post.