I was around back in the day, and can confirm that this is nonsense. NRX evolved separtely. There was a period where it was of interest and explored by a number of LW contributors, but I don't think any of the thought leaders of either group were significantly influential to the other.

There is some philosophical overlap in terms of truth-seeking and attempted distinction between universal truths and current social equilibria, but neither one caused nor grew from the other.

Who's bankrupt? Peter Thiel or Gawker?

Hi, I'm curious what rationalists (you) think of this video if you have time:

Why Rationality Is WRONG! - A Critique Of Rationalism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaV6S45AD1w 1 h 22 min 47 s

Personally, I don't know much about all of the different obstacles in figuring out the truth so I can't do this myself. I simply bought it because it made sense to me, but if you can somehow go meta on the already meta, I would appreciate it.

And it seems the community is not interested enough to counter the ten or so accounts which do this... :(

They probably could, but that ends up being a very toil-based setup as new targets are found and selected. I wouldn't consider this anything more than a short term stopgap.

As an example, even if Elo was protected, it's pretty clear the eugine is willing to downvote anyone who comments on Elo material.

I definitely think we should ban downvotes, at least temporarily. Also, it is clear that Eugene has an army of automated sockpuppet accounts that are repeatedly downvoting this entire thread. At a later stage something should be done about this, for example limiting the ability of people to spam accounts (e.g. the google "I'm not a robot" button) and limiting the ability of new accounts to downvote. Perhaps only accounts that have made a discussion post with a few upvotes should be allowed to downvote at all, and even then with limits per week and per user to be downvoted, and also perhaps there should be a per-user limit on downvoting of sufficiently old comments, so that even with an army of bots you cannot mass downvote people by attacking all their old content.

Overall it seems we have given out downvoting privileges like candy and now we are reaping the consequences...

We won the war against Eugene... for a brief instant.

I'm keeping score and calculating the number of downvotes/upvotes on the comment where I requested help against Eugene Nier downvotes campaign.

Well, there was a moment where 14 people upvoted and 20 puppets downvoted. Now we are at a point where 21 people upvoted and 30 puppets downvoted. This means that at least we forced Eugene to increase the count of his puppets to fight back. I count this as score for LW :)

makelwniceagain

Elon Musk almost terminated our simulation.

Simulation is a simulation only if everybody is convinced that they are living real life. Bostrom proved that we are most likely live in a simulation, but not much people know about it. Elon Musk tweeted that we live with probability 1000000 to 1 in simulation. Now everybody knows. I think that it was 1 per cent chance that our simulation will terminate after it. It has not happen this time, but there may be some other threshold after which it will be terminated, like finding more proves that we are in a simulation or creation of an AI.

PSA:

I just realized that /u/Elo's posts haven't been showing up in /r/Discussion because of all the downvoting from Eugene_Nier's sockpuppet accounts. So, I've gone back to read through the sequence of posts they're in the middle of. You may wish to do the same.

Meta:

I was going to leave this as a comment on Filter on the way in, Filter on the way out..., but I figured it's different enough to stand on it's own. It’s also mostly a corollary though, and just links Elo’s post to existing ideas without saying much new, and so probably isn’t worth it’s own top-level post. This isn’t likely to be actionable either, since I basically come to the conclusion that it’s ok to take down the Chesterton Fence that LW has already long ago taken down.

This might be a good comment to skim rather than read, since the examples are mostly to completely define precisely what I’m getting at, and you're likely already familiar with them. I've divided this into sections for easy skimming. I’m posting only because I thought the connections were small but interesting insights.

Also meta: this took about 2.5 hrs to write and edit.

TL;DR of Elo’s “Filter on the way in, Filter on the way out...” post:

Elo proposes that nerd culture encourages people to apply tact to anything they hear, and so it becomes less necessary to be tiptoe around sensitive issues for fear of being misunderstood. Nerds have a tact filter between their ears and brain, to soften incoming ideas.

"Normal" culture, on the other hand, encourages people to apply tact to anything they say, and so it becomes less necessary to constantly look for charitable interpretations, for fear of a misunderstanding. Non-nerds have a tact filter between their brain and mouth, to soften outgoing ideas.

They made several pretty diagrams, but they all look something like this:

speaker’s brain -> [filter] -> speaker’s mouth -> listener’s ears -> [filter] -> listener’s brain

The thing I want to expand Elo’s idea to cover:

What’s going on in someone’s head when they encounter something like the trolley problem, and say “you can’t just place a value on a human life”? EA’s sometimes get backlash for even weighing the alternatives. Why would anyone refuse to even engage with the problem, and merely empathize with the victims? After all, the analytic half of our brains, not the emotional parts, are what solves such problems.

I propose that this can be thought of as a tact filter for one’s own thoughts. If that’s not clear, let me give a couple rationalist examples of the sort of thing I think is going on in people’s heads, to help triangulate meaning:

• HPMOR touches on this a couple times with McGonagall. She avoids even thinking of disturbing topics.

• Some curiosity stoppers/semantic stopsigns are due to avoiding asking one’s self unpleasant questions.

• The idea of separate magisteria comes from an aversion to thinking critically about religion.

• Several biases and fallacies. The just world fallacy is result of an aversion to more accurate mental models.

• Politics is the mindkiller, so I’ll leave you to come up with your own examples from that domain. Identity politics is especially ripe with examples.

Filter on the way in, Filter on the way out, Filter while in, Filter while out:

So, I propose that Elo’s model can be expanded by adding this:

Some subcultures encourage people to apply tact to anything they think, and so it becomes less necessary to constantly filter what we say, for fear of a misunderstanding. Such people have a tact filter between different parts of their brain, to filter the internal monologue.

That corollary doesn’t add much that hasn’t already been discussed to death on LW. However, we can phrase things in such a way as to put people at ease, and encourage them to relax their internal and/or outgoing filters, while maintaining their ingoing filter. Adapting Elo's model to capture this, we get this:

future speaker’s thought -> [filter] -> speaker’s cashed thoughts -> [filter] -> speaker’s mouth -> listener’s ears -> [filter] -> listener’s thoughts -> [filter] -> past listener’s cashed thoughts

Note that both the speaker and the listener have internal filters. We can think or hear something, and then immediately reject it for being horrible, even if it’s true.

Ideally, everyone would avoid filtering their own ideas internally, but apply tact when speaking and listening, and then strip any filters from memes they encounter while unpacking them. Without this model, perhaps us endorsing removing the 2 internal filters was a bit of a Chesterton Fence.

However, with the other 2 filters firmly in place, we should be able to safely remove the internal filters in both the thoughts of the speaker and listener. If the listener believes the filter between the speaker and their mouth is clouding information transfer, they might even ask for Crocker's rules. This is dangerous though, since removing redundant backup leaves only their own ear->brain filter as a single point of failure.

Practical applications:

To encourage unconstrained thinking in others, perhaps we can vocally strip memes passed to us of obfuscating tact if there is a backup filter in place and if we’ve already shown that we agree with the ideas. (If we don’t agree, obviously this would look like an attack on their argument, and would backfire.)

That sounds like something out of the boring advice repository, but providing social proof is probably much more powerful than merely telling people that they shouldn’t filter their internal monologue. It probably doesn’t feel like censorship from the inside. If we want to raise the sanity waterline, we’ll have to foster cultures where we all provide positive reinforcement for each other’s good epistemic hygiene.

I'm not sure that it is so much a cultural thing, as it is a personal deal. Popular dudes who can always get more friends don't need to filter other people's talky-talky for tact. Less cool bros have to put up with a lot more and. "Your daddy loves us and he means well..." kind of stuff. Not just filter but positively translating.