Open thread, Apr. 03 - Apr. 09, 2017

Elo

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Tyler Cowen and Ezra Klein discuss things. Notably:

Ezra Klein: The rationality community.

Tyler Cowen: Well, tell me a little more what you mean. You mean Eliezer Yudkowsky?

Ezra Klein: Yeah, I mean Less Wrong, Slate Star Codex. Julia Galef, Robin Hanson. Sometimes Bryan Caplan is grouped in here. The community of people who are frontloading ideas like signaling, cognitive biases, etc.

Tyler Cowen: Well, I enjoy all those sources, and I read them. That’s obviously a kind of endorsement. But I would approve of them much more if they called themselves the irrationality community. Because it is just another kind of religion. A different set of ethoses. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but the notion that this is, like, the true, objective vantage point I find highly objectionable. And that pops up in some of those people more than others. But I think it needs to be realized it’s an extremely culturally specific way of viewing the world, and that’s one of the main things travel can teach you.

Razib Khan also offers a comment.

1Nate_Rausch9y

A bit tongue-in-cheeck, but how about taking Tyler's unfair label as a proposal? We could start the rationality religion, without the metaphysics or ideology of ordinary religion. Our God could be everything we do not know. We worship love. Our savior is the truth. We embrace forgiveness as the game-theoretical optimal modified tit-for-tat solution to a repeated game. And so on. We thoroughly investigate and aggregate the best knowledge humanity currently has on how to live. And we create Rationality Temples worldwide. There will be weekly congregations, with talks on a sequence, with following discussions, on topics such as signalling, bayesian thinking, cognitive biases. We propose a three step way to heaven on earth: identifying worthwhile causes, charting effective solutions and taking actions to achieve it. Lifetime goal is writing a sequence. Compassion meditation and visualisation prayer once per day. Haha, okay perhaps I'm overdoing it. Using the well-established concepts, rituals and memes of religion is easy to mock, but what if it is also an effective way to build our community and reach our goals?

09eB19y

Bryan Caplan responded to this exchange here