"We've always been at war with Eastasia."

“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. Here, as so often in this world, persistence is the first and most important requirement for success..”

I think -- I suspect -- at least, I hope -- that if we narrowly scope the definition of "empirical truth" to narrow standards of involving observation, testing, and resting as much as possible on mathematics and hard science, and only making highly parameterized statements when dealing with more subjective issues -- in this case, I think we'll be allowed to have "empirical truth" stand as it is.

In regards to ‘empirically true’, don’t people already refer to this as ‘scientifically true’. People also refer to facts, opinions and beliefs and these seem similar to your empirical/affective/spiritual truth.

But consider instead, "Shakespeare is truth" or "I've been living a lie." What are these?

Language is not logic. Words are just wind and people can say whatever they want. I assume this holds for other languages as well, but English involves metaphors, understatement, overstatement, hyperbole etc.  When people say things, they are not always meant to be assertions. The words might just be for rhetorical effect and meant as an attempt to draw attention to something. For example, I would guess that saying “Shakespeare is truth” is meant to allude to the meaningfulness of Shakespeare writings. Another example might be that you say you are starving when you are actually just hungry. This is a hyperbole or Auxesis it is not meant to be taken literally, but is meant to draw attention to the fact that you are hungry.

That's not to say there won't be heated disagreements by experts in a field about what the empirical is -- such is normal and productive -- but ideally we can stop much of the wasted energy that comes from when a rationalist is making an argument about empirical truth, the other party is making an argument about affective truth, and both sides are getting frustrated.

I find it easier to use something like this baloney detection kit. It’s normally pretty easy to tell when people are arguing about beliefs rather than facts.

"Many Are Cold But Few Are Frozen"

;)

Is it possible to make the book available on Google Play Books? What might be reasons not to include the book there?

Somehow your post is worse than your original comment. It has the same content, but is long-winded and states well-known generic truisms like “there are sometimes dishonest ideologically charged crap passing as science”. Your article would benefit with actual evidence or at least more elaborate examples.

In other words, I do not criticize the content, I agree with the idea. I just find the article rambling, with statements like “However, venal influences are nevertheless far from nonexistent, and a fascinating question is under what exact conditions researchers are likely to fall under them and get away with it.” Yes, it's a fascinating question, now can you answer it? And saying “far from nonexistent” is the same as saying “it exists”, and this could be said of so many things, it yields little new information.

You say macroeconomics is bunk. But how exactly? How do you know it's bunk, can you give me an outline, or direct me to some other high-level review of its fiasco? How to proceed from that? I remember how a comment on LW explained in a few paragraphs how praxeology works and how it ultimately makes Austrian economics decidedly unempirical. It was amazing, and something like that would greatly improve your article. Or sociobiology: what should I know about sociobiology to avoid getting into the trap of unsound theories? What are good examples of ideologically motivated fraud?

Also, Moldbug's article on CS is great for your emotional health, and I really-really liked it, but its arguments are crap. Type theory is bunk because Benjamin Pierce wrote 2 books — how the hell is that a good argument? And currying is such a simple concept I have no idea what he complains about, it can be explained on a piece of paper to anybody who knows 1 year undergrad discrete math. And lambda calculus, which underpins functional programming, is so simple, you can learn it from a Wikipedia page in half an hour. Also, his argument against research in, say, Haskell can be easily refuted by the following argument. CS research is supposed to be impractical, because it's scientists wandering in dark territories, trying to bump into something very good. If they do, this goodness trickles down to the practical programming. Now witness how mainstream languages gradually move towards functional programming.

"In particular, if you are from a small nation that has never really been a player in world history, your local historians are likely to be full of parochial bias motivated by the local political quarrels and grievances..."

Describes Ireland pretty well.

Pardon I didn't notice your comment earlier - unfortunately, you don't get notices when someone replies to top-level articles as it's done for replies to comments.

The difference you have in mind is basically the same as what I meant when I wrote about areas that are infested with a lot of bullshit work, but still fundamentally sound. Clearly CS people are smart and possess huge practically useful knowledge and skills -- after all, it's easy for anyone who works in CS research in an institution of any prominence to get a lucrative industry job working on very concrete, no-nonsense, and profitable projects. The foundations of the field are therefore clearly sound and useful.

This however still doesn't mean that there aren't entire bullshit subfields of CS, where a vast research literature is produced on things that are a clear dead-end (or aimed at entirely dreamed-up problems) while everyone pretends and loudly agrees that great contributions are being made. In such cases, the views expressed by the experts are seriously distant from reality, and it would be horribly mistaken to make important decisions by taking them at face value. People who work on such things are of course still capable of earning money doing useful work in industry, but that's only because the sort of bullshit that they have to produce must be sophisticated enough and in conformity with complex formal rules, so in order to produce the right sort of bullshit, you still need great intellectual ability and lots of useful skills.

You may be right that I should have perhaps made a stronger contrast between such fields and those that are rotten to the bottom.

One marker to watch out for is a kind of selection effect.

In some fields, only 'true believers' have any motivation to spend their entire careers studying the subject in the first place, and so the 'mainstream' in that field is absolutely nutty.

Case examples include philosophy of religion, New Testament studies, Historical Jesus studies, and Quranic studies. These fields differ from, say, cryptozoology in that the biggest names in the field, and the biggest papers, are published by very smart people in leading journals and look all very normal and impressive but those entire fields are so incredibly screwed by the selection effect that it's only "radicals" who say things like, "Um, you realize that the 'gospel of Mark' is written in the genre of fiction, right?"

I would probably use different words, but I believe I fit Jonah's description. Before finding LW, I felt strongly isolated. Like, surrounded by human bodies, but intellectually alone. Thinking about topics that people around me considered "weird", so I had no one to debate them with. Having a large range of interests, and while I could find people to debate individual interests with, I had no one to talk with about the interesting combinations I saw there.

I felt "weird", and from people around me I usually got two kinds of feedback. When I didn't try to pretend anything, they more or less confirmed that I am weird (of course, many were gentle, trying not to hurt me). When I tried to play a role of someone "less weird" (that is, I ignored most of the things I considered interesting, and just tried to fit)... well, it took a lot of time and practice to do this correctly, but then people accepted me. So, for a long time it felt like the only way to be accepted would be to supress a large part of what I consider to be "myself"; and I suspect that it would never work perfectly, that there would still be some kind of intellectual hunger.

Then I found LW and I was like: "whoa... there actually are people like me! too bad they are on the other side of the planet though". Then I found some of them living closer, and... going to meetups feels incredibly refreshing. First time in my life, I don't have to suppress anything, to play any role. I just am... in an environment that feels natural. I finally started understanding how people can enjoy having social contacts.

Now let's imagine that in a parallel universe, those LessWrongers who live in a city near to mine, would instead be my neighbors since my childhood, or that we would be classmates at high school. I believe my life would be very different. (I believe there are people like this in my city, but the problem is finding those few dozen individuals among the hundreds of thousands, especially when there is no word in a public vocabulary to describe "us".)

I can't the article now, but I believe it was written by Lewis Terman, where he observed how successful are highly intelligent people. He found a difference between those who were "intelligent people in an intelligent environment" and those who were "isolated intelligent people". The former were usually very successful in life: they could talk with their parents and friends as equals, share their algorithms for life success, fit into their environment. The latter felt isolated, and often burned out at some moment of their lives. The conclusion was that for a highly intelligent person, having similarly highly intelligent family and friends makes a huge difference in their lives. -- When you observe the difference between "academia" and "LessWrong", it may be related to this.

It is easier to be academically successful when your parents are. You can pick good habits and strategies from them; you can debate your work and problems with them. If you are the only academically inclined person in the family, you lead a double life: the "real life" outside of school, and the "academic life" inside. The more you focus on your work, the more it feels like you are withdrawing from everything else. On the other hand, if you come from the same culture, focusing on the work makes you fit into the culture.

I am going to break a taboo here, but I don't know how to tell it otherwise. I have IQ about four or five sigma above the average. The difference between me and the average Mensa member is larger that the difference between Mensa and the general population. Many people in Mensa seem kind of dense to me, and average people, those are sometimes like five-years old children. (I believe for many people on LessWrong it feels the same.) Sure, intelligence in not everything: other people have skills and traits that I lack, sometimes have more success than me, and I admire that. It's just... so difficult to talk with them like with adult people. But when I go to LW meetup, it's like "whoa... finally a group of adult people, how amazing!".

But I'm already an old man, relatively speaking. Now I am 39; I found LW when I was 35. Finally I have a company of my peers (still not in my own city), but it can't fix the three decades of my life that already passed in isolation. It can make my life better, but I will always have the emotional scars of chronic loneliness. Oh, how much I envy those lucky kids who can go to LW meetups as teenagers. Makes me wonder how much my own life could be different; I probably wouldn't recognize myself.

Of course, this is just one data point; I don't know how typical or atypical I am within the LW community.

I'm not a Friendliness researcher, but I did once consider whether trying to slow down AI research might be a good idea. Current thinking is probably not, but only because we're forced to live in a third-best world:

First best: Do AI research until just before we're ready to create an AGI. Either Friendliness is already solved by then, or else everyone stop and wait until Friendliness is solved.

Second best: Friendliness looks a lot harder than AGI, and we can't expect everyone to resist the temptation of fame and fortune when the possibility of creating AGI is staring them in the face. So stop or slow down AI research now.

Third best: Don't try to stop or slow down AI research because we don't know how to do it effectively, and doing it ineffectively will just antagonize AI researchers and create PR problems.

There are some people, who honestly think Friendliness-researchers in MIRI and other places actually discourage AI research. Which sounds to me ridiculous, I've never seen such attitude from Friendliness-researchers, nor can even imagine that.

Why is this so ridiculous as to be unimaginable? Isn't the second-best world above actually better than the third-best, if only it was feasible?

Regarding sleeping a lot and waking up tired: Is it possibly some degree of sleep apnea? As of a few months ago I had this problem.

Then I tried those breathing strips (despite my skepticism) that help prevent snoring. If I snore now it's at a much lower volume. The quality of sleep is vastly improved for me too. I generally wake refreshed after ~7 hours. The difference is like, ahem, night and day.