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kalium comments on Why I Am Not a Rationalist, or, why several of my friends warned me that this is a cult - Less Wrong Discussion
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I read LW for entertainment, and I've gotten some useful phrases and heuristics from it, but the culture bothers me (more what I've seen from LWers in person than on the site). I avoid "rationalists" in meatspace because there's pressure to justify my preferences in terms of a higher-level explicit utility function before they can be considered valid. People of similar intelligence who don't consider themselves rationalists are much nicer when you tell them "I'm not sure why, but I don't feel like doing xyz right now." (To be fair, my sample is not large. And I hope it stays that way.)
FWIW, I have the opposite experience with online versus offline.
It wouldn't surprise me at all to see this on the website, but I wouldn't expect it to happen in meatspace.
(Obviously meetups vary, but I help organize the London meetup, I went to the European megameetup, I went to CFAR, and I've spent a small amount of time with the SF/Berkeley crowd.)
I once had a friend who got really worried when I invited him to come to a LW meetup with me, and later found out he had another friend who'd read this site and then decided that everyone else needed to be more rational to make her own life easier. The worst I've encountered in meatspace personally was being asked why I believe what I believe a whole lot (which can be really useful when you're actually deciding something, but being asked to cite your sources in conversation also really interrupts the flow of things), which was more than balanced out by the good conversations. So my general impression is that LW as a high standard deviation in acquaintance/conversationalist quality, and either there's more good than bad or I've had good luck.
I experienced this too, though I claimed an explicit utility function (making self-replicating robots) that no one was prepared to argue with, so I didn't get anyone telling me my feelings were irrational and should be ignored.
I also noticed some slow decision-making. Recommendation: in a large group, use a heuristic that takes less than 10 minutes of discussion to decide where/when to go for dinner.
Any suggestions for a better heuristic?
The 'veto method' has worked quite well for me, although I haven't tested it for groups larger than about ten.
Assuming that the group has reached a consensus on eating, any member of the group is free to suggest a restaurant. After the location is suggested, any member of the group can veto that suggestion, but in exchange the vetoing member is required to suggest a different restaurant. Repeat until a suggestion is made that no member of the group vetoes.
I'm not sure that any of those would take less than 10 minutes for a large group. Also, it gets tougher if any in the group have serious dietary or financial constraints.
Sure:
This algorithm is a work in progress.
Not a heuristic, but I would suggest an auction. Example: You have 5 people, A and B want seafood, C wants Thai, D wants Mexican, and E wants steak.
E -- I'll pay for 1% of everyone else's bill if we get steak. A -- 2%, seafood, C -- 3%, Thai, B -- 4% seafood (all pass)
Result, A + B get the food they want, but C, D, and E pay less (with B picking up 2.67% of their bills and A picking up 1.33%).
There are edge cases where this doesn't necessarily work well (e.g. someone with a severe food allergy gets stuck bidding a large amount to avoid getting poisoned), but overall I think it functions somewhat similarly to yootling.
Which LW meetup did you visit? The LWler I meet in Berlin and at the European mega meetup were generally nice and didn't pressure other people into giving justifications for preferences. There might be some curious questions when someone doesn't understand why someone else is doing what they are doing, but I didn't witness anything I would label as pressuring even towards people running around with crookers rules tags.
Not an actual meetup, but some people I knew from college who happened to be LWers/rationalists.
This is going to sound like a stupid excuse... okay, instead of the originally planned excuse, let me just give you an example of what happened to me a week or two ago...
I wrote an introductory article about LW-style rationality in Slovak language on a website where it quickly got 5000 visitors. (link) About 30 of them wrote something in a discussion below the article, some of them sent me private messages about how they like what I wrote, and some of them "friended" me on Facebook.
The article was mostly about that reality exists and map is not the territory, and how politics is the mindkiller. With specific examples about how the politics is the mindkiller, and mentioning the research about how political opinions reduced subjects' math abilities.
One guy who "friended" me because of this article... when I looked at his page, it was full of political conspiracy theories. He published a link to some political conspiracy theory article every few hours. (Judging from the context, he meant it seriously.) When I had him briefly in the friend list (because I clicked "okay" without checking his page first), my Facebook homepage turned mostly to a list of conspiracy links. After seeing this, I quickly "unfriended" him.
What does this mean? This guy somehow believed that we are on the same page, although in my eyes, he is the complete opposite of what I try to achieve. I was horrified by seeing his Facebook page. But he liked my article about rationality. I believe that politics is the mindkiller... and my best model of him (not very reliable) says that he believes that his opponents are mindkilled, but this doesn't apply to him, because he is simply telling the truth, the facts. Anyway, for some reasons he identified with what I wrote, and... I wouldn't be quite surprised if he decided that he likes LW, too, using a similar thought process like he applied to me.
Okay, so here is the originally planned stupid excuse... just because someone likes LW and decides to call themselves rationalist, it doesn't necessarily make them a characteristic member of the culture. People are perfectly able to pick the parts they like, adopt the language, and ignore the incovenient parts.
(And I know it sounds like "No true Scottsman", and I am not sure how to fix this. Let's just make it "No typical Scottsman", perhaps?)
I don't think all or even most LWers exhibit the behavior I'm complaining about. But I think people who do it are attracted to LW/rationalism, and it bothers me enough that I'm willing to give up completely on a community after I've seen it from a few people there.
I think "true" LW members are people who go to meetups or who participate on LW by writing comments.
There are plenty of people who call themselves rationalists who have no relationship to LW. Give than you have 636 karma, you might even have a stronger bond to LW then them.
That is probably true, though at least one of the people in question now attends meetups in my area. In fact I even got a job through LW. On the other hand I don't feel like I use this site socially. I don't have conversations with other users, or remember which users have been friendly or hostile to me. I never even met any of my employers. I just get an urge to nitpick, or shout into the void, or point out facts, or read interesting articles, and so I come here.