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ChristianKl comments on Guarding Against the Postmodernist Failure Mode - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (79)
Given the amount of contrarians on LW that open discussions on whether or not LW is a cult, I don't really think we have a problem with lack of self criticism.
MIRI does engage in writing some academic papers. As far as I understand CFAR it wants to run publishable studies that validate it's approaches. CFAR also sells a service.
If you make predictions about the effects of your actions and check whether you make them successfully you don't need other people to evaluate your arguments. Reality does the evaluating fine. Whether it's prediction book, prediction markets or simply betting with your friends, gathering QS data are all activities that ground you in reality in a way that postmodernists don't ground themselves.
How much of EYs material has been retracted or amended under critique? AFAICT , the answer is none.
Complexity bound and speed limit for evolution
The April Fool post of EY would be an example retracted from LW because of criticism. I still consider retractions to be a good metric for criticism. Not everyone thinks that honest mistakes should be retracted.
He did solicit amendments for republication. Going back and changing old blog posts is considerably more... revisionist.
IIRC, he retracted one of his earlier articles on gender because he doesn't agree with it anymore.
On the subject of people opening discussions about whether LW is a cult, I'd like to suggest that while it is useful to notice, that metric alone is not enough to determine whether LW has become a cult: We could easily wind up constantly opening discussions about whether LW is a cult, patting ourselves on the back for having opened the discussion at all, and then ending the discussion.
Incidentally on a somewhat unrelated note about cultishness, I don't know how other LWers feel about it, but when I personally think about the subject I feel a really, really strong pull towards concluding outright that LW is not a cult and calling it settled, both because it feels less scary and takes less work than having to constantly guard against cultishness (reading some of EYs writing on how cultishness is something that needs to be constantly guarded against terrified me). I doubt I'm the only one to feel that way so it's something I thought would be good to mention.