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JenniferRM comments on Leaving LessWrong for a more rational life - Less Wrong Discussion
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If you'll permit a restatement... it sounds like you surveyed the verbal output of the big names in the transhumanist/singularity space and classified them in terms of seeming basically "correct" or "mistaken".
Two distinguishing features seemed to you to be associated with being mistaken: (1) a reliance on philosophy-like thought experiments rather than empiricism and (2) relatedness to the LW/MIRI cultural subspace.
Then you inferred the existence of an essential tendency to "thought-experiments over empiricism" as a difficult to change hidden variable which accounted for many intellectual surface traits.
Then you inferred that this essence was (1) culturally transmissible, (2) sourced in the texts of LW's founding (which you have recently been reading very attentively), and (3) an active cause of ongoing mistakenness.
Based on this, you decided to avoid the continued influence of this hypothetical pernicious cultural transmission and therefore you're going to start avoiding LW and stop reading the founding texts.
Also, if the causal model here is accurate... you presumably consider it a public service to point out what is going on and help others avoid the same pernicious influence.
My first question: Am I summarizing accurately?
My second question assumed a yes and seeks information relevant to repair: Can you spell out the mechanisms by which you think mistake-causing reliance on thought experiment is promoted and/or transmitted? Is it an explicit doctrine? Is it via social copying of examples? Is it something else?
This is certainly not correct. It was more like "providing evidence-based justifications for their beliefs, or hand-waving arguments." I'm not commenting on the truth of their claims, just the reported evidence supporting them.
I don't association with LW/MIRI cultural subspace is a bad thing. I'm a cryonicist and that is definitely also very much in line with LW/MIRI cultural norms. There are just particular positions espoused by MIRI and commonly held in this community which I believe to be both incorrect and harmful.
Other than the above, yes, I believe you have summarized correctly.
It isn't LW-specific. The problem lies actually with non-analytic, or at the very least casual philosophy, which unfortunately has become the norm for debate here, thought it is not at all confined to LW. Reasoning by means of loose analogies and thought experiments is dangerous, in no small part because it is designed to trigger heuristics of proof-by-comparison which is in fact an insufficient condition to change one's mind. Finding a thought experiment or analogous situation can give credibility to a theory. In the best case it takes a theory from possible to plausible. However there is a gulf from plausible to probable and/or correct which we must be careful not to cross without proper evidence.
The solution to this, in the sciences, is rigorous peer review. I am honestly not sure how that transfers to the forum / communal blog format.