Robin

Interesting article. But I do not see how the article supports the claim its title makes.

I think there's a connection between bucket errors and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

Is this an admission that CFAR cannot effectively help people with problems other than AI safety?

I'm not sure what you mean and I'm not sure that I'd let a LWer falsify my hypothesis. There are clear systemic biases LWers have which are relatively apparent to outsiders. Ultimately I am not willing to pay CFAR to validate my claims and there are biases which emerge from people who are involved in CFAR whether as employees or people who take the courses (sunk cost as well as others).

I'd take your bet if it were for the general population, not LWers...

My issue with CFAR is it seems to be more focused on teaching a subset of people (LWers or people nearby in mindspace) how to communicate with each other than in teaching them how to communicate with people they are different from.

I think the Less Wrong website diminished in popularity because of the local meetups. Face to face conversation beats online conversation for most practical purposes. But many Less Wrongers have transitioned to being parents, or have found more professional success so I'm not sure how well the meetups are going now. Plus some of the meetups ban members rather than rationally explaining why they are not welcome in the group. This is a horrible tactic and causes members to limit how they express themselves... which goes against the whole purpose of rationality meetups.

How much will you bet that there aren't better strategies for resolving disagreement?

Given the complexity of this strategy it seems to me like in most cases it is more effective to do some combination of the following:

1) Agree to disagree 2) Change the subject of disagreement 3) Find new friends who agree with you 4) Change your beliefs, not because you believe they are wrong but because other people believe they are wrong. 5) Violence (I don't advocate this in general, but in practice it's what humans do when they have disagreed through history)

Wendy/Walter Carlos

The short example (from somebody who went to college with Scott and took Calc II in the same class with him) is yes. But that's an answer relative to the students of an elite college and only based on the fact that he asked me for to work on math homework with him.

I hope they've managed to advance past "if somebody criticizes your idea, ban them from the group!" because that's what happened to me after a criticized Comfort Zone Expansion.

At that time, though I think much of hypnosis can be explained by the placebo effect.

Maybe Rand is referering to a specific situation where she knows Branden's thought processes and her statements are correct.

It was about arguing with collectivists (AKA people who were sympathetic to the USSR). Whether she was correct about communism being inferior to capitalism isn't easy to analyze objectively but in a sense history has validated her.

In that case, I wouldn't know. But if it's meant generally enough to be a rationality quote - if it's meant to explain why we get angry at dishonest people - then it's just an unsupported claim

It's s... (read more)

I am an intransigent atheist, but not a militant one. This means that I am an uncompromising advocate of reason and that I am fighting for reason, not against religion. I must also mention that I do respect religion in its philosophical aspects, in the sense that it represents an early form of philosophy.

Ayn Rand, to a Catholic Priest.

I'm not entrenched enough in this community to know what's worthy of upvotes and what's not, so I'm selecting quotes that I personally like and seeing how they fare.

Do you remember what you liked about Ayn Rand? I've found that people like her for very different reasons.

You lost me at "junk heap."

Sorry you're so averse to negative descriptions of the average person's philosophy.

There is no conscious choice available to a layperson ignorant of philosophy and logic

Yes there is, they can choose what music, TV, movies, videos etc to buy/view/play.

and such ways of life are perfectly copacetic with small-enough communities

Do you mean communities where the leader knows about philosophy and can order people around?

If anything, it is the careful thinker who is more shackled by self-doubt

It's reasonable to ... (read more)

Would you consider having Less Wrong members record the sequences or do you already have people you've promised to give the job to?

Trying to overcome biases takes effort. Wasted effort is bad. It's better to pursue mixed strategies that aim at instrumental rationality

I think you are assuming hyperbolic discounting/short time preference. It requires a lot of effort to overcome bias, perhaps years. But there are times when it is worth it.

than to aim at the perfection described in the Rand quotation

What perfection? Choosing philosophy? You can always update your philosophy.

This quote was from a speech given to West Point cadets. By no means are they identical but it would be relatively hard to find a group of people more identical (from the perspective of being of the same gender, same age (within a few years) same nationality, and same general ideology).