= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
wedrifid comments on On Leverage Research's plan for an optimal world - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (87)
The parent is misinformed trolling.
(Not) Leverage Researcher: Yes I have. What are you basing this pretentious diatribe on? You clearly know nothing about us and are pattern matching to the issues you rant on about incessantly with respect to SingInst.
(Not) Leverage Researcher: I haven't seen you be convinced about anything substantial ever. "Motivated skepticism" would be a polite declaration - it assumes your 'curiosity' is not a rhetorical facade. (See blog post #1355 for the appropriate response to this kind of rubbish.)
I thought it was supposed to be funny. Curse you Poe's Law!
It is supposed to be funny. Humor at the expense of Leverage Research (or, based on content, perhaps SIAI?). Humor is one of the most effective ways of undermining something's credibility. Making jokes based on false premises is rather insidious. If you reject any blatant falsehoods you may be conveyed as unable to take a joke.
I saw that coming and I knew it would be you. People are either trolling or part of a dark arts conspiracy.
The comment I wrote is the way I perceived lesswrong when I first came here. And I can tell from conversations with other people that they share that opinion.
A lot of your comments are incredible arrogant and consist of dismissive grandstanding. And on request you rarely explain yourself but merely point out that you don't have to do so.
I wrote the comment so that SI can improve their public relations.
I can't tell whether you guys are metatrolling each other or what.
Can they come to an Aumann agreement on the matter?
TWO OPINIONS ENTER! ONE OPINION LEAVES!
Only perfectly rational people are guaranteed to be able to do that. And you know that they are not both rational once the accusations like "trolling" and "arrogance" start flying.
Sometimes an Aumann agreement just isn't appropriate. This is one of those times.
Maybe you should add a note at the top of the comment explicitly stating that it is not really about Leverage and does not at all represent your views about them.
Really?
How confident were you that your comment would result in noticeable improvements to SI's public relations?
People here have pretty much stopped replying to objections with "you should read the Sequences". This suggests that pointing out socially clunky behaviour is worth at least trying, for all the outcries of the stung.
Mm. That's fair.
Updated in favor of communication being a marginally less hopeless way of improving the world than I'd previously believed.
I am confident that people like Luke Muehlhauser will update on my comment and realize that you can't approach outsiders the way it often happens on lesswrong. I voice this particular criticism for some time now and it got a lot better already.
Although people like wedrifid will probably never realize that it isn't a good idea to link to lesswrong posts like they are the holy book of everyone who is sane and at the same time depict everyone who does disagree as either stupid, a troll or a master of dark arts.
Just check his latest comment, all he can do is attack people with a litany of charges like being logical rude or not able their change your mind.
On a first pass, the Leverage Research website feels like Objectivism. I say this because it is full of dubious claims about morality and psychology but which are presented as basic premises and facts. The explanations of "Connection Theory" are full of the same type of opaque reasoning and fiat statements about human nature which perhaps I am particularly sensitive to as a former Objectivist. Knowing nothing more than this first impression, I am going to make a prediction that there are Objectivist influences present here. That seems at least somewhat testable.
There are no Objectivist influences that I am aware of.
I didn't notice any Objectivist influences looking through the high-level claims on the Leverage website, but their persuasive style does remind me quite a bit of Objectivism's: lots of reasonable-sounding but not actually rigorous claims about human thinking, heavy reliance on inference, and a fairly grandiose tone in the final conclusions. I'd credit this not to direct influence but to convergent evolution. To Leverage's credit, Connection Theory does come off as considerably less smug, and the reductionism isn't as sketchy.
Now, none of this is a refutation -- I haven't gone deep enough into Leverage's claims to say anything definitive about whether or not any of this stuff actually works. Plenty of stuff that I'd consider true reminds me of Objectivism's claims, or of those of other equally pernicious ideologies. But it's definitely enough to inform my priors, and it should shed light on some potential signaling problems in the presentation.
Maybe you are not aware of them?
Your denial would be more convincing if you compared and contrasted CT ideas and objectivist ideas.
Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with Ayn Rand's ideas on psychology.
For a given value of 'unfortunate'. :)
^Beat me to it.
Since Connection Theory is mostly Geoff Anders' work, I would be very surprised if it could have big influences he wasn't aware of (maybe if he delegated a lot of stuff to Objectivist students or something, or was heavily influenced by some Objectivist psychologist).
I'm not an expert on Objectivism, but one of Rand's principles was to always pass moral judgement.
Connection theory has much less moral judgement to it than most approaches.
It's conceivable that there's a similar intellectual style of trying to understand the world by starting with abstractions, but that's not necessarily a matter of direct influence.
Leverage Research is not SingInst. I have some reservations about their ideas, but they don't overlap at all with the ones you've expressed here. Generalizing complaints you have against SingInst comes across as holding a grudge and misapplying it.
I don't think that's what happened. I think the aim was not to criticise LR at all, but to demonstrate to LW what LW's answers to XiXiDu's questions look like to him, when they're portrayed as coming from somewhere else, somewhere LW is not particularly impressed by.
You are trolling Leverage because you have issues with SingInst? It just isn't ok to slander an organization like that based, from what I can tell, on the fact that there are social affiliations between Leverage and another group you disapprove of.
I thought the point was that the comment showed how the arguments, which we've gotten used to and don't fully question anymore, would look ridiculous when applied in a different context. (It was a pretty effective demonstration for me - the same responses did look far less convincing when they were put in the mouth of Leverage Research people rather than LW users..)
Exactly right.
Some remarks:
Could you please stop such accusations, it's becoming ridiculous. If you have nothing sensible to say then let the matter rest. Your main approach of gaining karma seems to be quantity rather than actual argumentation.
I was just making fun of the original post that described Leverage Research as "secular messianism". At the same time I was pointing out something important about how some behavior here could be perceived.
You seem to be the actual troll here who hides behind the accusation of trolling.
The people being slandered here aren't just strangers on the internet - they are people I know. If I see them being misrepresented then of course I am going to object. I spent a week taking classes from Geoff and he most certainly has studied (and researched) psychology. Yet his company is portrayed here in the role of uneducated. And then, by way of justification, you say:
I most certainly am going to make accusations about that because it just isn't ok. You don't go around misrepresenting the qualifications and credibility Leverage Research just because you have an issue with the Singularity Institute.
There's only one way I was able to interpret XiXiDu's top comment (the one you link to), and that was as a satire of responses to his many previous questions about SIAI. I can't read it as a slander against Leverage at all. To me, this thread is roughly equivalent to attacking Jonathan Swift for his policy of baby-eating.