All of Bo2's Comments + Replies

This is a general point concerning Robin's and Eliezer's disagreement. I'm posting it in this thread because this thread is the best combination of relevance and recentness.

It looks like Robin doens't want to engage with simple logical arguments if they fall outside of established, scientific frameworks of abstractions. Those arguments could even be damning critiques of (hidden assumptions in) those abstractions. If Eliezer were right, how could Robin come to know that?

It's impossible for me to imagine a tiered system that wouldn't degenerate into a status competition. Can you think of examples of one that hasn't?

The main blog and the community site mustn't be seen as different tiers of the same thing, instead they must be seen as serving different purposes.

I think that the community should emphasize that it is a community of wannabe-rationalists whose goal is to self-improve, overcome bias and learn the secrets of the Bayes or whatever. Just as this blog does. I think that that would weed out the likes of the Rational Response Squad, which is an example of what we don't want a rationalist community to be like!

At the same time I don't think that a rationalist community should be any more elitist than necessary. It should fulfill part of the same purpose as your planned popular book.

If you are constantly surprised by solutions that are high in you preference ordering but low in your search ordering, that is a problem with your search ordering. If your search ordering is correct, creativity is useless.

If your search ordering is your preference ordering, either you're looking at a very simple problem or you have godlike intellect. In the first case, creativity is unneeded. In the second, no solution will appear creative to you, but your solutions will tend to appear very creative to mere mortals.

Creativity is having a good search ordering.

The concept of different epistemological magisteria. E gave an example of it in this post (and also in the post about scientists outside the laboratory), but his example is just the tip of the iceberg. This failure of rationality doesn't manifest itself explicitly most of the time, but is engaged in implicitly by almost everybody that I know that isn't into hardcore rationality.

It's definitely engaged in by people who are into, or at least cheer for, science and (traditional) rationality and/or philosophy. It's the double standard between what epistemologi... (read more)