Kawoomba comments on Why Don't Rationalists Win? - LessWrong

6 Post author: adamzerner 05 September 2015 12:57AM

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Comment author: btrettel 11 September 2015 08:19:35PM 0 points [-]

RationalWiki discusses a few:

Another problem of LessWrong is that its isolationism represents a self-made problem (unlike demographics). Despite intense philosophical speculation, the users tend towards a proud contempt of mainstream and ancient philosophy[39] and this then leads to them having to re-invent the wheel. When this tendency is coupled with the metaphors and parables that are central to LessWrong's attraction, it explains why they invent new terms for already existing concepts.[40] The compatibilism position on free will/determinism is called "requiredism"[41] on LessWrong, for example, and the continuum fallacy is relabeled "the fallacy of gray." The end result is a Seinfeldesque series of superfluous neologisms.

In my view, RationalWiki cherry picks certain LessWrongers to bolster their case. You can't really conclude that these people represent LessWrong as a whole. You can find plenty of discussion of the terminology issue here, for example, and the way RationalWiki presents things makes it sound like LessWrongers are ignorant. I find this sort of misrepresentation to be common at RationalWiki, unfortunately.

Comment author: Kawoomba 11 September 2015 08:56:48PM 15 points [-]

Their approach reduces to an anti-epistemic affect-heuristic, using the ugh-field they self-generate in a reverse affective death spiral (loosely based on our memeplex) as a semantic stopsign, when in fact the Kolmogorov distance to bridge the terminological inferential gap is but an epsilon.

Comment author: Good_Burning_Plastic 18 September 2015 08:30:13PM 3 points [-]

You know you've been reading Less Wrong too long when you only have to read that comment twice to understand it.

Comment author: XFrequentist 12 September 2015 07:08:50PM 1 point [-]

I got waaay too far into this before I realized what you were doing... so well done!

Comment author: Kawoomba 12 September 2015 08:22:30PM 0 points [-]

What are you talking about?

Comment author: nyralech 13 September 2015 05:00:20PM 0 points [-]

I'm afraid I don't know what you mean by Kolmogorov distance.