Not looking at the world in a probabilistic way

Philosophy has long had the hope that eventually, somehow, it would find a set of elegant axioms from which the rest would regrow, like what happened in math. Several branches of philosophy think they did collapse it to a set of elegant axioms (though upon inspection, they actually let the complexity leak back in elsewhere). I think there's a fear, not entirely unjustified, that if you let probabilistic reasoning into two many places then this closes off the possibility of reaching an axiomatization or of ever reaching firm conclusions about interesting questions. Today, it's been long enough to know that the quest for axiomatization was doomed from the start - or at least, the quest for an axiomatization that wasn't itself a probabilistic thing. So allowing probabilistic reasoning shouldn't seem like a big scary concession anymore, but on the other hand, it's still difficult and most philosophers aren't dual-classed into maths.

Using personal preference or personal intuitions as priors instead of some objective measure along the lines of Solomonoff Induction

Unfortunately, Solomonoff Induction falls off the table as soon as the questions get interesting. As a next-best-thing, intuition is not all that bad. I'd criticize a lot of philosophy, not for grounding ideas in intuition, but for treating intuition as a black box rather than as something which can be studied and debugged and improved. Most LW-style philosophy does bottom out at intuition somewhere, it just does a better-than-usual job of patching over intuition's weaknesses.

Moral realism

When you're getting started on learning game theory, there is a point where it looks like it might be building towards an elegant theory of morality, something that would reproduce our moral intuitions and being a great Schelling point and ground morality really well. Then it runs into roadblocks and doesn't get there, so we're stuck with a hodgepodge metaethics where morality depends on an aggregation of many peoples' preferences but there are different ways to aggregate one persons' preferences and different ways to aggregate groups' preferences and some preferences don't count and it's all very unsatisfying. But if you haven't hit that wall yet or you're very optimistic or you're limiting yourself to sufficiently simple trolley problems, then moral realism seems like a thing.

Mathematical Platonism

This is a trap door into silly arguments about subtleties of the word "exist" which are cleanly and completely separated from all predictions. But if you want to engage with ideas like a mathematical multiverse, you do end up needing to think about subtleties of the word "exist", and math ends up looking more fundamental than physics.

Libertarian free will (I'm looking for arguments other than those from religion)

I'm not sure what libertarian free will is in relation to the rest of the ideas about free will, but I find thinking about free will gets a lot easier if you first acknowledge that our intuitions are guided by the idea of ordinary freedom (ie, whether there's a human around with a whip), and then go a step further and just think about ordinary freedom instead.

The view that there actually exist abstract "tables" and "chairs" and not just particles arranged into those forms

These ideas come back in slightly different forms when you start considering mathematical multiverses and low-fidelity simulations of the universe. For example, if you accept the simulation argument, and further suppose that the simulation would not be full-fidelity but would be designed to make this fact hard to notice, then you get the conclusion that certain abstract objects exist and their constituent particles don't.

The existence of non-physical minds (I'm looking for arguments other than the argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness)

The idea of minds as cognitive algorithms leads to something sort-of like this; in that framing, minds are physical objects with a dual existence in platonic math-realm that diverges if physics causes a deviation from the algorithm.

I am not quoting Gleb, I'm rephrasing his comment in my own words and from my own point of view. I think this is his original comment, but he repeated this in other places as well.

I am not sure there is agreement about the direction of improvement.

Gleb has posted how he finds it difficult to write sleazy scummy content, but overpowers his reluctance and through great personal sacrifice does write it. I would expect that "improvement" for him means more concentrated snake oil or, perhaps, less personal discomfort with producing it.

I don't think this is what Elo would consider "improvement".

I am unsure; I believe Ra asked for evidence of what Gleb had said followed by Gleb declaring his academic status as evidence enough to be an authority on <the issue>. This led Ra to criticize his academic status.

While it is true that Gleb is an academic; it is also true that "because I said so" is not a good enough answer to a request for more information(especially not here on LW) (I am unsure if the request was polite or not)(I am also unsure of the exact wording of Gleb's response). I am unsure as to the state of that whole thread;

Ra could probably compile the best history as he is right in the thick of it.

It could certainly be said that adressing the arguments is the most significant thing, not the person who made it. If the arguments are not clear enough to address; That would lead to asking for more evidence and lead us to here and now. I am unclear as to all the details to be able to understand this all.

Yes! This appears true. Not all despair fits into this model (some people fail to get the upswings), but I think a large fraction does. There's one important, non-obvious corollary: not only should you not resist the slide into despair or try to never have it, but you should optimize what you do in that time! If, for example, you respond to the feeling of despair by drinking alcohol, you'll probably never get to have the thoughts that mood had to offer.

This thread from last August pre-dates this entire incident, and it calls for the banning of VoiceOfRa. That thread also presents evidence that VoiceOfRa is the same person as Eugene_Nier, who was previously banned for retributive mass-downvoting. Reviewing VoiceOfRa's comment history since then, I found rather a lot of abuse in the past month. Each of those links is an unrelated interaction with a different person. I also note that some comments in his history have numbers of upvotes that seem implausible.

I'm not going to second the call for a ban; it'd be kind of pointless. But, VoiceOfRa, I am going to politely ask you to step back and reconsider what you're doing here. Some of your posts offer a useful alternate perspective, which no one else is bringing. But sometimes you seem to get angry, and... there's a line between debating and attacking and you end up on the wrong side of it. This causes the other person to get defensive, and it ends up exploding into hundreds of low-quality comments. People who skim the site looking for high-quality conversation see that, and they leave. There's an art to avoiding this trap, and I admit to having fallen into it in the past, but I really want to see less of it.

FWIW, "my" version was intended to be neutral (it says what InIn is trying to do and the criticisms that have been made on LW, and adds that it isn't known how correct either "side" is about InIn's effectiveness) and Gleb has said on the article's talk page that he's OK with it.

It was made in response to Richard Kennaway's post about the edit war, in the hope of stopping it by having an InIn article that demonstrably isn't just promotional puffery. [EDITED to add: that is not an accusation that Gleb's version was just promotional puffery; but clearly it looked that way to VoiceOfRa, and probably to others too.]

So far as I can tell, the wiki weirdness is a combination of suboptimal cache-control headers and the odd way deletion is implemented, and is not a consequence of hacking or other abuse.

Thanks for clarifying the deletion history, much appreciated.

From my own perspective, I do feel attacked, by someone who has also engaged in ad hominem attacks against me and likely sock puppetry. It's been a pretty negative experience, and I'm trying to treat is as a "comfort zone expansion" opportunity.

I'd welcome you rewriting the wiki article since it seems that your comment received a lot of upvotes, indicating community support for your perspective.

Background: I'm a returning LW old hat and CFAR alum and worked briefly on the LW codebase a long time ago, but am not a moderator or authority of any kind; this is my summary based on publicly-accessible data.

The edit history is not inaccessible. What happens is that whenever an article gets deleted, all of its history entries move to https://wiki.lesswrong.com/index.php?title=Delete&action=history.

Gleb Tsipursky co-founded an organization called Intentional Insights, and is doing rationality training/outreach through it. He's been posting rationality materials on Less Wrong. He created an LW Wiki page for the org in March and made occasional updates, and on November 19 it had this text. That looks pretty reasonable, although I'd remove the language suggesting a possible CFAR collaboration unless it progresses past the "has talked with" stage. On November 29 and 30 VoiceOfRa deletes it and Gleb Tsipursky restores it, then Gjm wrote an alternative article which is intensely critical and based mostly on this thread.

That thread is too involved for me to do more than lightly skim it right now, but I will highlight this comment by jsteinhart:

My main update from this discussion has been a strong positive update about Gleb Tsipursky's character. I've been generally impressed by his ability to stay positive even in the face of criticism, and to continue seeking feedback for improving his approaches.

The content of the Less Wrong Wiki is pretty inconsequential; if not for this post it wouldn't be seen. But fights like this can be very destructive to motivation, and if I were in Gleb's shoes I'd be feeling unjustly attacked. I'd prefer to see that stopped, and replaced with something more constructive.