How do you and/or LWers distinguish among science, pseudoscience and crackpottery?

Such a question demands a serious and principled answer, which I won't give. But it's a cultural fact about this place that parapsychology (and all other standard skeptics' whipping-boys) will be regarded as pseudoscience, and something like the eight-circuit model as too incoherent to even count as pseudoscience. There are thousands of people here, so there are all sorts of ideological minorities lurking in the woodwork, but the preferred view of the universe is scientifically orthodox, laced with a computer scientist's version of platonism, and rounded out with a Ray Kurzweil concept of the future.

How do you and/or LWers distinguish mystical mental states from mind-as-computation mental states (that looks like cognitive reductionism from my perspective)

Mysticism isn't a topic that LW has paid any attention to. I think it would mostly be filed under "religious mental disorder", except that, because of the inevitable forays into reality-as-computer-program and all-is-mathematics, people keep reinventing propositions and attitudes which sound "mystical". This is a place where people try to understand their subjectivity in terms of computation, and it's natural that they would also do this for mystical subjectivity, and they might even regard an evocative computational metaphor as a plausible theory for the cognitive neuroscience of mysticism. For example... maybe mystical states are what happens when your global cognitive workspace is populated with nothing but null pointers! You could turn that into a physical proposition about cortical columns and neural activation patterns. That's the sort of "theory of mysticism" I would expect a LWer to invent if they took up the topic.

These are topics in which I deviate somewhat from the LW norm. My trademark spiel is all about qualia-structures in quantum biology, not universe as Turing machine. Also, LW isn't all scientific reductionism, there are many other things happening here at the same time. In framing RAW vs LW as tolerance for mystical nondualism versus preference for atheist naturalism, I'm just singling out the biggest difference in sensibility.

Yes but:

• RAW was chronically skeptical of everything, LW believes very strongly in the "reality-tunnel" of natural science.
• RAW was very interested in parapsychology and the "eight-circuit model", to LW that's all pseudoscience and crackpottery.
• RAW had an interest in mystical states of consciousness and nondualist ontology, LW in mind-as-computation and atheist naturalism.

Eliezer's general ideas are the sort of thing that Wilson would have partly assimilated into his personal mix (he would have loved the site's name), and partly rejected as "fundamentalist materialism". Also, LW has a specific futurist eschatology, in which the fate of the world is decided by the value system of the first AI to bootstrap its way beyond human intelligence. There are people here who seriously aspire to determine safe initial conditions for such an event, and related concepts such as "paperclip maximizer" and "timeless decision theory" (look them up in the LW wiki) are just as pervasive here, as are the distinctive concepts of LW discourse about general rationality.

Yes but:

• RAW was chronically skeptical of everything, LW believes very strongly in the "reality-tunnel" of natural science.
• RAW was very interested in parapsychology and the "eight-circuit model", to LW that's all pseudoscience and crackpottery.
• RAW had an interest in mystical states of consciousness and nondualist ontology, LW in mind-as-computation and atheist naturalism.

Eliezer's general ideas are the sort of thing that Wilson would have partly assimilated into his personal mix (he would have loved the site's name), and partly rejected as "fundamentalist materialism". Also, LW has a specific futurist eschatology, in which the fate of the world is decided by the value system of the first AI to bootstrap its way beyond human intelligence. There are people here who seriously aspire to determine safe initial conditions for such an event, and related concepts such as "paperclip maximizer" and "timeless decision theory" (look them up in the LW wiki) are just as pervasive here, as are the distinctive concepts of LW discourse about general rationality.

Korzybski and E-Prime are not well-known on LW. LW's ideal of rationalism is an AI which reasons perfectly using the available evidence and whose actions really are optimal for its particular goals. The Sequences are full of introspective tips and behavioral tests for telling whether you're on the right track, so in that sense the philosophy has been given a human form, but the rational ideal which LW humans seek to approximate is described mathematically and computationally, in formulae due to Bayes, Solomonoff, and others. It's a different culture and a different sensibility to what you find in RAW.

By the way, Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza aren't so bad, especially if you remember that they created the ideas that we now associate with them. Who wouldn't want to be a creator and a discoverer on that level? Their shortcomings are your opportunity.

I know about Korzybski and his general semantics, but very little about the actual substance of the stuff. Beyond E-Prime, which seems cutesy but too flimsy for any serious lifting. My brain keeps wanting to slot him up in that weird corner of mid-20th century American ideaspace that spawned Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard. He has the pulp science fiction connection, the cranky outsider contrarian fans who think the system as the end-all of philosophy, and yet his stuff seems mostly ignored by contemporary academia. None of this is an actual indictment, but with no evidence to the contrary, it does keep me from being very interested.

Korzybski and E-Prime are not well-known on LW.

Well, I mean... "the map is not the territory" is Korzybski. Eliezer just sucked at citing clearly.

Korzybski and E-Prime are not well-known on LW. LW's ideal of rationalism is an AI which reasons perfectly using the available evidence and whose actions really are optimal for its particular goals. The Sequences are full of introspective tips and behavioral tests for telling whether you're on the right track, so in that sense the philosophy has been given a human form, but the rational ideal which LW humans seek to approximate is described mathematically and computationally, in formulae due to Bayes, Solomonoff, and others. It's a different culture and a different sensibility to what you find in RAW.

By the way, Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza aren't so bad, especially if you remember that they created the ideas that we now associate with them. Who wouldn't want to be a creator and a discoverer on that level? Their shortcomings are your opportunity.

I'm a little puzzled as to why the question contains the phrase "how you came to identify as rationalist." My introduction to what I think this site means by rationalism (not the "rationalism" of Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza I HOPE) was through Robert Anton Wilson's books Quantum Psychology and Prometheus Rising (although this just watered some seeds planted earlier). R.A.W. led me to Korzybski and his famous "is of identity" polemics. So why does a site which attributes much of its influence to Korzybksi as me a question that (apparently) flies in the face of Korzybskian rationality? I'm not trying to be contentious. I'm sure there's a perfectly REASONABLE explanation which I'll patiently await.

DeeElf

Just joined. Into: Hume, Nietzsche, J.S. Mill, WIliam James, Aleister Crowley, Wittgenstein, Alfred Korzybski, Robert Anton Wilson, Paul K. Feyerabend, etc.... DeeElf

The link "Crowley on Religious Experience" doesn't work. Why?