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OrphanWilde comments on [Link] Lifehack Article Promoting LessWrong, Rationality Dojo, and Rationality: From AI to Zombies - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (71)
You're creepy and artificial. Ella is creepy and artificial. This post is creepy and artificial. The About Us page of Intentional Insights is -very- creepy and artificial. And what makes this all bizarre is that the creepy and artificial is recursive - there's something creepy and artificial about the way you're creepy and artificial, in that it is so transparent and obvious that it cannot possibly be unintentionally transparent and obvious. The way you keep selling yourself, selling your company (which itself is selling you), selling merchandise selling your company selling yourself...
Well, knock it off. I don't know if you're a spider in a human suit, or a human in a spider-in-a-human-suit suit, or a spider in a human-in-a-spider-in-a-human-suit-suit suit, but at a certain level it stops mattering. If you're a naive innocent playing at Dark Arts, you're reading as a narcissistic con artist, and not even a terribly good one. If you're a sociopath playing as a naive innocent playing at Dark Arts in order to do something more elaborate that probably only vaguely involves Less Wrong, well, that's just ridiculous, so quit that. And if you're actually a con artist, you're terrible at whatever con you're trying to execute here and should go do something with social media, which actually looks like your skill set.
I can understand your dislike of Gleb's approach and even see many of your concerns as justified; do you really think your actions in this thread are helping you get what you want though? They certainly won't make Gleb himself listen to you, and they also don't make you sympathetic to onlookers. To the extent that you have issues with Gleb's actions, it seems like pointing them out in a non-abusive way for others to judge would be far more effective.
Yes.
I tried two other tactics first. I addressed him as a fellow rationalist, and also as a fellow user of Dark Arts, and he was completely unresponsive to those tactics.
This way is better. It starts the weight of public opinion in the correct place, and allows him to prove his guilt or innocence on his merits.
There is an important discussion we could have had about this topic, but your comment is absolutely not the way to do it. You just wrote "I despise you" in many words.
So what? LW isn't a "safe space".
That may be the case. But even Lukeprog preferred to be given feedback in a nice wrapping, because after all we are still primates and will appreciate it more.
Maybe my standards are skewed, but nobody called anyone a fucking moron or expressed a desire to see him die in a fire.
If it's left to a random person to say something, what they say might just fall short of the idealized version of the discussion you never actually started. And he's been selling here for a year and a half.
And if you're also Villiam_Bur, you've been here since his beginning, when you chewed somebody out and deleted their account for (I assume, since the comment is deleted, but the context suggests it) accusing him of buying upvotes off some site. I'll dryly observe that some priors really should have been updated based on that very uncommon accusation.
What you described feels kinda familiar, but my memory refuses to bring more details now. Sorry.
So, as you already know, I opened the discussion explicitly.
(Yes, I am Viliam Bur. Recently I decided to be a bit more careful about using my name online; no big security, just a little trivial inconvenience. The date of changing the username is more or less the date when I de facto stopped being a moderator.)
I'm quite disheartened by your response. I really don't know your issues about me. The article from Intentional Insights are quite helpful to improve rational thinking. I do believe if we think rationally, we think logical and put our actions into logical manner. When we think and rationalize our every actions and set aside overwhelming emotions, I'm quite sure that we lead our life satisfactorily.
I do not know your propositions that gave you an insight that I'm a narcissist in any way or a sociopath. What are your sylogism of your attacks.
My point of view if we learned froma science-based research organization on how to improve thinking, chances are we think and act in a logical way.
If we learn to think logical. We act logical. We know that are actions may affect other people and so the society. If the people in the world would think and act like this, I can see a better world without a narcisist, extremist, sociopath and people that speak, act and attack from all presumptions.
I am Ella and I'm nothing against you and I'm a fan and a believer of the studies from a science based organization, Intentional Insights,
Ella, sorry that my introduction of you to Less Wrong coincided with this burst of negativity against Intentional Insights and that you're caught in the backlash. Hope the actions of this one person don't cause you to disengage from Less Wrong altogether. There are many really smart people here with wise things to say!
Are you sure you aren't "sad"?
Could you give an example or two of how you're thinking more rationally and how your life is better as a result?
I don't find it creepy, and it seems quite genuine to me. However, this is a not-uncommon complaint about thoughtful living and use of system 2 for topics that are typically chosen purely by system 1. To some, the ability to dispassionately consider possible futures is kind of freaky, bordering on alien.
I'd like to be able to engage with the fear and negative reaction, but instead I tend to just dismiss it. Sorry.
He comes across as genuine?
He comes across to me as somebody who is so obviously not genuine that I'm left wondering whether his lack of genuineness is genuine. Have you looked at Intentional Insight's About Us page?
I wonder if we mean different things by "genuine". I find it quite easy to believe that his actual desires and his stated goals are the same, and I find him relatively transparent in his theories about how to other-optimize.
I'll gladly admit that it's not my thing, but that's different from thinking that it's evil or creepy.
I generally try to be consistent between my actual desires, my stated goals, and my actions, which exhibit my revealed preferences.
I would probably characterise International Insights as cargo cult marketing, blindly following the Three-Ring Binder[1]. It says "advertise on the social networks" so, by golly, we'll advertise on the social networks! etc.
They built the sticks-and-mud control tower and are doing the parade ground drill. The airplanes with cargo should arrive any time now.
[1] "You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder - its DNA - xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left-turn lane." -- Neil Stephenson, Snow Crash.
Actually, we do have some airplanes arriving, if we equate airplanes to getting the rationality message out there to broad audiences, which is the whole point of Intentional Insights. A clear example is the placement of the above article in Lifehack, where it has been shared over 1K times, or this presentation to a humanist community group in Columbus, or this article in Salon. Our Advisory Board has attracted experts in the field of judgment and decision-making, education, and social work. We are doing exactly what we set out to do, so I think we can reasonably state that the airplanes are arriving.
And yes, we are using a Three-Ring Binder used by self-improvement groups and marketing gurus. That's the strategies we chose to follow in order to get rationality out to a broad audience. So we are not blindly following that model, but quite intentionally and agentively, using the kind of methods that will achieve our goals.
Yeeeup.
I was giving him too much credit. He's not intentionally bad at this, he's -oblivious- to how bad he is at this.
I'm sad you feel this way. As I stated below, the "About Us" page lists testimonials of people who benefited from Intentional Insights content, and experts who endorse the content. This is pretty standard for nonprofit websites. Do you complain about CFAR's testimonials?
Just to be clear: is InIn a nonprofit?
... Aha, this page on the website says it's a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. It might be worth making that more explicit somewhere easier to find, because one thing I thought on looking over the website was "huh, that's interesting: they seem to be trying hard to give the impression of being a nonprofit without actually saying in so many words that they are; I wonder why".
Thanks for pointing that out. The curse of knowledge is such a powerful fallacy, and we fell prey to it.
I had the website revised to insert mentions of InIn being a nonprofit on the front page, and on the About Us page. Here's the link to our Guidestar profile for anyone interested.
I'm not crazy about Gleb, but he doesn't ping my emotional immune system the way he does yours. I'm inclined to think there's some pattern-matching going on, and people are carrying different sets of patterns.
I'm not saying that you or I are necessarily right or wrong, but it's really hard to convey to someone else what's going on with that sort of pattern-matching. Just asserting that your pattern-match is completely obvious doesn't work.
One of my best friends is revolted by LW. We've spent some time on what the issue is, and we haven't been able to figure it out.
Wow, that's pretty hard-core stuff. I see that you have some issues with what I'm doing, and I'm sad to see that. My aim is to be as transparent about what I'm doing as possible - raise the sanity waterline for the broad population out there.
Ella is an aspiring rationalist who was introduced to Less Wrong through Intentional Insights content and is enthusiastic about rationality. She is from Albay in the Phillipines, which might the cause for your perception of her - please don't judge people by their ability to write well in English. In fact, many of the people who engage with Intentional Insights content are from developing countries, as we collaborate with international skeptic and reason-oriented organizations such as Atheist Alliance International.
Sad to see you being so disparaging to aspiring rationalist newbies. I suggest you consider carefully the impact of your words and actions, and how they come off to others, especially newcomers. Thanks!
The extent of Ella's interactions with LW to this point have been entirely praising how you and your writings have somehow mysteriously improved her rationality - if she's an aspiring rationalist, she should spend less of her time considering how great you are, and spend more of it examining her own mind.
Her comments share a lot in common with the compliments of yourself filling Intentional Insight's About Us page, really.