As an apostate, I see in this line of thought the issues I saw with rationalism as religion value system and metanarrative in general. As, additionally, a sometime heretic, I sympathize with this description of the experience of heresy; while the unpleasant experience of having to navigate the stifling and occasionally totally wrong norms of the overworld is (I now believe) to some extent a natural and inevitable part of the human condition, awakening to this is deeply unpleasant for those who made it to adulthood without realizing it. Even more so, perhap...
(This post is important enough that I'm breaking my commitment not to post until a certain time in the future.)
The model here strikes me as the correct *sort* of model, but deserving of substantial complication. Two complications in particular seem clear and relevant to me.
First, will the smart sincere idealists be simply *misled?* Given that this hypothetical imperfect rationalist space exists within Green territory, deviations from the Overton ratio will be punished by Greens *both inside and outside* the rationalist space; as such, it could (entire...
We already know from history that that regimes may become so... self-serving and detached from reality, as one could put it... that they'll feel the need to actively select against smart, sincere idealists or any permutation thereof.
Coincidentally, I was reading this excellent article about the mindset behind Leninism, and I felt like this passage was particularly insightful:
...In his history of Marxism, Kołakowski explains some puzzling aspects of Bolshevik practice in these terms. Everyone understands why Bolsheviks shot liberals, socialist revolutiona
What's the value proposition of enlightenment?
If I have a choice between taking up organized religion and going to church or taking up spirituality and following empirical instructions to scale the mountain of enlightenment, why should I do the latter instead of the former?
What's the common theme in all these books? I don't see it. Impro contains some useful exercises, although I think most of the value in the book would come from people getting together IRL and actually doing them, and I haven't heard of anyone doing this. (I tried to...
The Wikipedia article on it does.
These are good questions.
0. Are "we" the sort of thing that can have goals? It looks to me like there are a lot of goals going around, and LW isn't terribly likely to agree on One True Set of Goals, whether ultimate or proximate.
I think one of the neglected possible roles for LW is as a beacon -- a (relatively) highly visible institution that draws in people like-minded enough that semirandom interactions are more likely to be productive than semirandom interactions in the 'hub world', and allows them to find people sufficiently l...
I'm not a biologist, but I think it would be pretty difficult to tell whether fruits are intended to encourage animals to eat them or to protect the inner seed. But the energy in an avocado is primarily stored as fats, and it's generally thought that they were eaten by now-extinct Central American megafauna. (And it's common to stick avocado seeds with toothpicks to get them to sprout...)
There's also the chili pepper, but I don't know if anyone's studied digestion of pepper seeds in birds (which aren't sensitive to capsai...
It started as the leftist alternative to Conservapedia.
How do we (second) convince others, and (first) establish for ourselves, that we’re different? What can we offer to prospective joiners that cannot be offered by other movements (i.e., what can we offer that constitutes an unfalsifiable signal that we are the “true path” to the “good ending”, so to speak)?
I came to this article having just read one about Donald Trump's response to the 9/11 attacks, which mentioned that Trump saw them from the window of his apartment. The WTC attacks happened at around 9 AM, the start of the standard workday; but he h...
I don't think the orthogonality thesis can be defined as ~[moral internalism & moral realism] -- that is, I think there can be and are philosophers who reject moral internalism, moral realism, *and* the orthogonality thesis, making 66% a high estimate.
Nick Land doesn't strike me as a moral internalist-and-realist (although he has a Twitter and I bet your post will make its way to him somehow), but he doesn't accept the orthogonality thesis:
Even the orthogonalists admit that there are values immanent to advanced intelligence, most import...
While you can't just try to transfer the effect of Coca-Cola's branding to your new product, I think you can, in fact, try to compete on branding.
La Croix did this. It's just flavored seltzer, the same as the 59c store-brand bottles, but it became wildly successful. What's more, it had been around for a while before becoming successful.
The first MAI study identified a highly-attractive target segment of prospective sparkling water users not at all interested in the Perrier brand and its “snobbish / expensive / for spec...
Once a company reaches a monopoly position, its incentive structure is to suppress all innovation that does not improve its core business.
Once an actor reaches uncontested dominance, its incentive structure is to suppress all change that does not improve its position.
In my more paranoid moments, I suspect there's something like this going on in general: American power actors want stagnation and fear change, because change can be destabilizing and they're what would be destabilized. This is obviously true in the case of cultural power, but I'm not sure how it would extend beyond that.
You're just not going to convince me that playful cover for hitting people out of the blue is OK.
Yes, that's the operative filter.
I have a pretty different class background from most LW posters (think "banlieue"), and "social ownership of the micro" reads to me like the fable of the princess and the pea. The egalitarianism of the lower classes is that, since not everyone can insist that the single pea be removed from under their twenty mattresses, no one is allowed to -- and instead, you're required to become the sort of...
For instance coca cola was made with actual coca (the plant cocaine alkaloids are derived from) and sold as a cure for headaches.
Coca tea is still in use in parts of South America. I've been told it isn't really comparable to cocaine. Wikipedia is under the impression that there's about 6x as much cocaine in a cup of coca tea as a line.
I've never had coca tea, but I can buy that doing cocaine is a little like what snorting 600mg of pure caffeine would be like for someone with no prior exposure to caffeine. (I don't recommend either...
I'm truly baffled that people would become very self-conscious of all the small unease of everyday life and then choose to elevate them as major inconveniences. It's a bit like discovering who holds your chains and redoubling in bondage and obedience to this silent master.
Nobles can take offense at peasants, but peasants can't take offense at nobles.
Peasants are expected to take care not to offend nobles, but nobles aren't expected to take care not to offend peasants.
Maybe it's a bit like that.
(More generally, we can imagine a sort...
Decreasing general propensity for violence, increasing refinement of social control technologies, increasing class stratification, the replacement of liberal with progressive justifications for institutions (e.g. the state), and internet communication technology (most notably, Google and social media) will result in the emergence of an ethic of nobility and peasantry, unless the current sharp correction goes through. The new noble class will not correspond well to any existing economic class, which will be a source of conflict for as long as this remains t...
This seems to imply that you think the current amount of “social capital” that people are being “awarded” is inaccurate (in the sense of being incommensurate with their achievements, or… something like that?). Is this, indeed, what you meant? And if so, on what do you base this?
I'm not ialdabaoth, but "social capital isn't awarded commensurately with achievement" seems accurate.
We're more like a social group than a corporation. Corporations have well-defined goals, metrics, and so on that they can take into account when awarding pe...
Suppose a group performs some task which is not a one-off, but iterated (or performs tasks sufficiently similar to some previous tasks). Practice makes perfect (in various ways which needn’t be enumerated here), and thus the “amount of leadership” required to complete the task will decrease over time. Will the “amount of leadership” required to apportion rewards also decrease over time? Why or why not?
V'q thrff gung vg qbrf. Vs abguvat ryfr, cerprqrag graqf gb pneel abamreb jrvtug.
My day job is, essentially, "grunt". I work with about 30 other people. I can immediately think of two leader-types among the grunts -- three if I count someone who recently quit. I used to work a different shift, and there were no leader-types among the grunts there. There are a few more people who I'm pretty sure could be leader-types if they wanted to, but don't want to.
Small sample size, I know, but one ought to test these things against daily life, and by that test 1/30 seems to be in the right ballpark.
That said, things like grunt...
Not IME.
Incidentally, tobacco products aren't an unqualified vice the way alcohol is sometimes argued to be. (I also disagree with that assessment WRT alcohol, but the benefits are smaller and the harms are larger there than they are with tobacco.) They're better seen as general-purpose OTC psych meds -- they're surprisingly good at ameliorating a wide variety of flavors of things being a bit shit -- that have the unfortunate side-effect of dramatically increasing the likelihood that you get cancer.
Absent alternatives, this is probably a wo...
This seems transparently... failing to notice the entire west coast exists?
It exists, but it's less populous.
The Northeast and South together (by Census Bureau definitions) contain 55% of the population of the US. The West contains 24%, and the Midwest contains 21%.
But the West extends as far east as Colorado, and also contains Alaska and Hawaii, which should be excluded here; and the Midwest contains states like Ohio and Michigan, which aren't all that far out.
Unfortunately, Wolfram Alpha can't tell me how many people live within whatever...
To be a little cynical, Berkeley has the community-hub advantage of imposing a strong selection effect: it's far from everything that isn't the West Coast, it's hideously expensive, and as a city it isn't all that great -- I know New Yorkers who tried to move out there and came back with a litany of horror stories to rival those of my friends in Baltimore. So only the hardcore (or people competent enough to land a SF tech industry job) move out there.
The East Coast, on the other hand, has a lot of nice cities and, for most Americans, i...
I'd be interested in a dedicated version of Shortform Feeds.
The blogosphere equivalent of this was the main/sideblog setup -- think SSC and Scott's Tumblr. This seemed to work well for a lot of people, myself included: if you have something that isn't quite substantial enough for a 'main' post, a quote from a book that you might want to link to later, or something like that, you just put it on your sideblog.
This might have been what Main vs. Discussion was intended to be on old LW, but it obviously didn't work out like that:...
Should we be focusing on a second hub that aims to rival Berkeley in it's size and awesomeness?
I take Amazon's HQ2 as evidence that this general class of structure is workable.
I'd like to see one on the East Coast, but people here tend to end up in Berkeley.
I think creating a hub requires there to be a critical mass of Serious Organizations™ that give an outlet for people who have ramped up the agency-ladder to "community leader", who are then looking to move into "do something that seems more directly impactful than community leadership".
NYC used to have MetaMed, Givewell and Leverage. Boston has FLI, although I'm not sure what the current state of that is. The problem is networking effects compound (i.e. network effects dragged Givewell and Leverage over to the Bay)
I tentatively thi...
You use an example like the moon-landing where there's no value in believing in it
There's some value in believing in it. If you don't believe in it and it comes up, people might look at you funny.
One interesting difference between what we may as well call "epistemicists" and "ultra-instrumentalists" is that ultra-instrumentalists generally weight social capital as more important, and individual intellectual ability as less important, than epistemicists do. See here: most of the reputed benefits of belief in Mormonism-the...
Are you sure? I’ve met a lot of people (“average people”, not rationalists) who take the view of “yeah, he can talk real impressively, but it’s all bullshit, no doubt”. Many people like “simple talk”, i.e. speech that simply lays out facts, and are suspicious of impressive/skillful rhetoric.
Then the skilled orator will take that into account, speak simply, and avoid impressive or skillful rhetoric.
Marketers have noticed that some people are suspicious of slick corporate brands, but they haven't conceded those customers to local producers and small bus...
There is a courage that goes beyond even an atheist sacrificing their life and their hope of immortality. It is the courage of a theist who goes against what they believe to be the Will of God, choosing eternal damnation and defying even morality in order to rescue a slave, or speak out against hell, or kill a murderer...
I'm a little late here, but this sounds a lot like Corneliu Codreanu's line that the truest martyr of all is one who goes to Hell for his country.
Weber called it "charismatic authority", so there's another search term.
There's a project Scott proposed something like eight years ago that got started last weekend because someone posted a bounty on it.
Even if the bounty is just beer money, being able to profit financially by doing something feels qualitatively different from doing it for free.
A centralized registry of bounties would be useful. And there might even be a startup idea in there -- it's essentially Wesearchr for outsourcing instead of far-right gossip journalism.
Right -- there are reasons why good art is mostly not outsider art. And I've completely dropped hobbies that I had been spending a lot of time on once I didn't have time to keep up with the associated communities.
The only explanation I caught wind of for the parking lot incident was that it had something to do with tulpamancy gone wrong. And I recall SSC attributing irreversible mental effects to hallucinogens and noting that a lot of the early proponents of hallucinogens ended up somewhat wacky.
But maybe it really does all work out such that the sorts of things that are popular in upper-middle-class urban twenty-something circles just aren't anything to worry about, and the sorts of things that are unpopular in them (or worse, popular elsewhere) just are. What a coincidence!
Microculture and cohesion? Did you go to any particularly cohesive summer camps when you were young? If not, you might want to talk to someone who did.
I went to a few different CTY sites, and found that 1) my ranking of sites by quality matched up almost perfectly with the consensus, 2) these matched up almost perfectly with the extent to which the traditions (i.e. microculture) existed.
One thing that stands out to me is that I went to one site at which the traditions had almost completely died out. (Siena, if anyone out there remembers better than I do.) ...
Your line of reasoning re: Aumann feels akin to "X billionaire dropped out of high school / college, erg you can drop out, too". Sure, perhaps some can get by with shoddy beliefs, but why disadvantage yourself?
If people are pretty good at compartmentalization, it's at least not immediately clear that there's a disadvantage here.
It's also not immediately clear that there's a general factor of correctness, or, if there is, what the correctness distribution looks like.
It's at least defensible position that there is a gener...
I'm not sure how to square "rejecting religion is the preschool entrance exam of rationality" with "people are pretty good at compartmentalizing". Certainly there are parts of the Sequences that imply the insignificance of compartmentalization.
I personally recall, maybe seven years ago, having to break the news to someone that Aumann is an Orthodox Jew. This was a big deal at the time! We tend to forget how different the rationalist consensus is from the contents of the Sequences.
Every once in a while someone asks me or someone I...
Small groups have a bigger problem: they won't be very well documented. As far as I know, the only major source on the Junto is Ben Franklin's autobiography, which I've already read.
Large groups, of course, have an entirely different problem: if they get an appreciable amount of power, conspiracy theorists will probably find out, and put out reams of garbage on them. I haven't started trying to look into the history of the Freemasons yet because I'm not sure about the difficulty of telling garbage from useful history.
One thing I'd like to see is more research into the effects of... if not secret societies, then at least societies of some sort.
For example, is it just a coincidence that Thiel and Musk, arguably the two most interesting public figures in the tech scene, are both Paypal Mafia?
Another good example is the Junto.
Let’s say you are trying to understand what Aristotle would think about artificial intelligence. Should you spend time reading and trying to understand Aristotle’s works, or can you talk to modern Aristotelian scholars and defer to their opinion?
How much can a tradition tell you about the opinions of its founders?
To what extent do the various traditions of Christianity fit your definition of a living tradition? How much of the content of the most 'living' Christian traditions comes from Jesus, and to what extent does this content reflect Jesus&#x...
Not to sound glib, but what good is LW status if you don't use it to freely express your opinions and engage in discussion on LW?
Getting laid, for one thing.
And, you know, LW is a social group. Status is its own reward. High-status people probably feel better about themselves than low-status people do, and an increase in status will probably make people feel better about themselves than they used to.
Eric Hoffer was a longshoreman who just happened to write wildly popular philosophy books, but I think he'd agree that that's not terribly usual.
This is at least in the same ballpark as something I've been trying to figure out how to articulate for a while.
There's some relation between people and what I hope we don't end up calling "punk objects". (Punk, of course, was all about DIY. In Communist countries, punks set up their own record-printing shops, and printed records on anything they could get their hands on -- most memorably, used X-ray film.) And there's a quality about the people who cultivate these sorts of relations. This might be what Heinlein was talking ab...
What does "deal with Being directly" mean?
Assuming that the instrumental utility of religion can be separated from the religious parts is an old misconception. If all you need is a bit of sociological knowledge, shouldn't it be possible to just engineer a cult of reason? Well, as it turns out, people have been trying for centuries, and it's never really stuck. For one thing, there are, in startup terms, network effects. I'm not saying you should think of St. Paul as the Zuckerberg of Rome, but I've been to one of those churches where they dropped all the wacky supernatural stuf...
That does seem to be a popular option for people around here who have the right matrilineage for it.
Right, that's a possible response: the sacrifice of epistemic rationality for instrumental rationality can't be isolated. If your epistemic process leads to beneficial incorrect conclusions in one area, your epistemic process is broadly incorrect, and will necessarily lead to harmful incorrect conclusions elsewhere.
But people seem to be pretty good at compartmentalizing. Robert Aumann is an Orthodox Jew. (Which is the shoal that some early statements of the general-factor-of-correctness position broke on, IIRC.) And there are plenty of very instr...
A correct epistemological process is likely to assign very low likelihood to the proposition of Christianity being true at some point. Even if Christianity is true, most Christians don't have good epistemics behind their Christianity; so if there exists an epistemically justifiable argument for 'being a Christian', our hypothetical cradle-Christian rationalist is likely to reach the necessary epistemic skill level to see through the Christian apologetics he's inherited before he discovers it.
At which point he starts sleeping in on Sund...
But the thing we're interested in is instrumental rationality, not epistemic rationality.
Ironically, this sentence is epistemically true but instrumentally very dangerous.
See, to accurately assess which parts of epistemic rationality one should sacrifice for instrumental improvements requires a whole lot of epistemic rationality. And once you've made that sacrifice and lost some epistemic rationality, your capacity to make such trade-offs wisely in the future is severely impaired. But if you just focus on epistemic rationality, you can get qui...
Have you been following the arguments about the Sequences? This issue has been covered fairly thoroughly over the last few years.
The problem, of course, is that the Sequences have been compiled in one place and heavily advertised as The Core of Rationality, whereas the arguments people have been having about the contents of the Sequences, the developments on top of their contents, the additions to the conceptual splinter canons that spun off of LW in the diaspora period, and so on aren't terribly legible. So the null hypothesis is the contents of the...
I wouldn't use rejection of religion as a signal -- my guess is that most people who become atheists do so for social reasons. Church is boring, or upper-middle-class circles don't take too kindly to religiosity, or whatever.
And is our community about epistemic rigor, or is it about instrumental rationality? If, as they say, rationality is about winning, the real test of rationality is whether you can, after rejecting Christianity, unreject it.
Jordan Peterson is controversial, but "controversial" is an interesting word. Is Paul Krugman controversial?
I've gotten a much more negative reception to fuzzy System 1 stuff at IRL LW meetups than online -- that could be what's going on there.
And it's possible for negative reception to be more psychologically impactful and less visible to outsiders than positive reception. This seems especially likely for culture war-adjacent topics like Jordan Peterson. Even if the reception is broadly positive, there might still be a few people who have very negative reactions.
(This is why I'm reluctant to participate in the public-facing community nowada...
I just want to make it clear that sending other users on the page insulting or threatening messages is not cool, and that if anyone else ever experiences that, please reach out to me and I will be able to give you a bit of perspective and potentially take action against the person sending the messages (if they’ve done that repeatedly).
Abstract instances of the crab-boiling effect can arise from changes that are above the sensory threshold. All that's necessary is for acclimatization to outpace innovation. Each individual step (and these abstract instances are often stepwise rather than continuous) can still register as weird, but if you get used to it before the next step happens, your 'weirdness threshold' doesn't continuously increase.
We've all seen Back to the Future, right? In 1955, Ronald Reagan was a supporting actor who'd just become the host of some...
I don't think "non-straightforward or dishonest language" enters into it very much, but I don't have the clusters you have. I know cis women with "male-pattern" personalities and interests and trans women with "female-pattern" personalities and interests. (Not really any cis men with "female-pattern" personalities and interests, but society does its best to ensure that doesn't happen.) In some online spaces where I don't share demographic information, people sometimes take me for a member of the opposite sex. "Male-pattern" and "female-pattern" are culture... (read more)