Fucking Goddamn Basics of Rationalist Discourse

1 min read

finally

Strong downvoted mostly to apply some token resistance in the direction away from "Logan gradient descends into maximal fun-ranty-monkey-engagement-incentives."

why does lesswrong suddenly feel good and homey

(This is a parody post of Basics of Rationalist Discourse [LW · GW] by Duncan Sabien.)

Working on translation into Russian ;)
EDIT: Done

This has a mighty It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers energy.

Parody is great!

3- Performative overconfidence can go suck a bag of dicks.

4- If you're going to talk unfalsifiable twaddle out of your ass, at least fucking warn us first.

These are my favorites, because you don't even have to go looking at the other suggestions to find suggestions they violate. Performative overconfidence about performative overconfidence is a perfect little closed loop of self contradiction, and there's no warning about "talking unfalisifiable twaddle out of your ass" in the course of spouting twaddle out of your ass <3

(And least presumably it is twaddle... I have to admit I'm not sure how exactly I'd falsify a claim that something is "twaddle" or not.)

More seriously, I like how, despite being a dumpster fire of self contradiction, there's still something to admire here in a humanistic sense.  The small clean contrast between the semantic content and the way the rules are instantly violated by exhortations to follow them seems educationally valuable.

Like the story about the logical positivists is that they somehow collapsed under the weight of their own scorn for bullshit, because their tools, taken seriously, and aimed at their tools, found their tools to be full of flaws and to have been admixed with a lot of the bullshit they were trying to escape... 

And yet I love the logical positivists because bullshit is bad, and I have occasionally called myself a neo-logical-positivist because the logical positivists were on the right track and headed towards the correct attractor (even if they weren't there yet in the 1930s).

Similarly, here, despite it being a parody... this is also pointing at the "least wrong attractor". Apparently we are still not there, but hopefully we are closer? :-)

EDIT TO ADD: Obviously I strongly downvoted this. Raemon is wise. Is there some underappreciated high quality thing you've written elswhere on LW that I could go read and give a compensatory upvote?

"Yes; Mr. Strohl? Someone's calling on line 10"

I sometimes enjoy a good rant, but this feels a little too intentionally-confrontational-without-actually-identifying-a-target.  Not quite passive-aggressive, as there's no passive.  More aggressive-but-safe.  3/10, would not like to see more of it.  

That said, I REALLY am looking forward to the future uses, where it becomes a norm to comment on posts with a link to this (rather than Duncan's) and a number.  Take your damned upvote.

11. You don't get to fucking assume any shit on the basis of "but... ah... come on". If you claim X and someone asks why, then congratulations now you're in a conversation. That means maybe possible shit is about to get real, like some treasured assumptions might soon be questioned. There are no sarcastic facial expressions or clever grunts that get you an out from this. You gotta look now at the thing itself.

As a rough heuristic: "Everything is fuzzy; every bell curve has tails that matter."

It's important to be precise, and it's important to be nuanced, and it's important to keep the other elements in view even though the universe is overwhelmingly made of just hydrogen and helium.

But sometimes, it's also important to simply point straight at the true thing.  "Men are larger than women" is a true thing, even though many, many individual women are larger than many, many individual men, and even though the categories "men" and "women" and "larger" are themselves ill-defined and have lots and lots of weirdness around the edges.

I wrote a post that went into lots and lots of careful detail, touching on many possible objections pre-emptively, softening and hedging and accuratizing as many of its claims as I could.  I think that post was excellent, and important.

But it did not do the one thing that this post did, which was to stand up straight, raise its voice, and Just. Say. The. Thing.

It was a delight to watch the two posts race for upvotes, and it was a delight, in the end, to see the bolder one win.

At last, a readable translation into the prestige dialect.

Excellent rant, 10/10. My instinctive pushback:

1. Ugh, you mean, don't say things you believe to be false in the moment you say it. It's okay to fib a bit for effect.
2. You don't know what you saw, and you don't remember what you thought about it in the moment. All you have is slowly fading and constantly reprocessed memories. There is no way to keep it all straight, though you might as well try, subject to acknowledging above caveats.
3. Unless you are you (Logan), or Scott or Eliezer, and maybe a few other people, you tend to feel very sure of something when you state it.
4. Again "unfalsifiable twaddle out of your ass" feels like truth to most people.
5. Yes, try to be accurate, and fail, and hopefully realize that you failed. The Scout mindset is impossibly hard, though it is a noble thing to keep trying.
6. It's not terrible to start with one hypothesis if you can test it. If you are a programmer debugging some algorithm, you check your hypotheses one at a time, usually. Or maybe one subspace of hypotheses at a time.
7. Figuring out which is which is usually the hardest part. Sometimes you can just have a smoke despite all those other smokers dying from lesions.
8. No argument there. (See Duncan's post)
9. It feels like motte and bailey is often figuring out the domain of applicability. "God is love"... with a few provisos that only become clear after extensive discussion. (Also see 1.)
10. Yeah... "my shitty model of you is more accurate than your own". Most of the time we are not even aware that this is what we believe.

Should we have a rewrite the Rationalist Basics Discourse contest?

Not that I think anything is gonna beat this. But still :D

Ps: can be both content and/or style

Damn good post. Pretty fucking funny, too.

Bowdlerized version follows:

1. Don't utter falsehoods
2. Senses aren't reliable
3. Don't comment on matters outside your area of expertise
4. Please state beforehand that what you're saying is opinion, not fact
5. Try to work with others to discover the truth
6. Beware of confirmation bias and don't cherry-pick your "evidence" to support your pet theory/hypothesis
7. All arguments boil down to a modus ponens, you better know how it works
8. Allow people to recalibrate based on new information/evidence
9. Moving to a more-easily defendable position when attacked for holding a stronger view is the Motte & Bailey fallacy.
10. Please follow the above guidelines for the sake of sexual intercourse

(Porting and translating comment here, because this post is great):

Goddamn I wish people would just tell me when the fuck they're not willing to fucking budge. It's a fucking waste of time for all parties if we just play ourselves to exhaustion. Fuck, it's okay to not update all at once, goddamn Rome wasn't built in a day.

Every time I think about rational discourse I think of this post. And I smile and chuckle a little.

I keep meaning to write a little followup titled something like:

An overlooked goddamn basic of rational discourse: Be Fucking Nice.

If you're fucking irritating, people are going to be irritated at the points you're making too, and they'll find reasons to disbelieve them. This is goddam motivated reasoning, and it's the bias fucking ruining our goddamn civilization. Don't let it ruin your rational fucking discourse.

Being fucking nice does not mean saying you agree when you goddamn don't. It means being pleasant to talk to. So suck it up and figure out how to be goddamn fucking nice.

Brief argument at Motivated reasoning/confirmation bias as the most important cognitive bias [LW(p) · GW(p)]

Upvoted for quality parody. I read this as a probably much-needed rebuke of some internal community drama somewhere (just an initial impression that might well be uninformed), but taken purely at face-value, I'm not sure I agree with the overall thrust of the post and associated commentary, at least when presented as basics of rationalist discourse (although I might be biased, as I am in favour of turning the Sequences into a series of belligerent TikToks myself, which I noticed a reference to in the comments; I can only assume this has been a recurring suggestion).

Specifically, I think there is a distinction that needs to be made between good epistemic hygiene and associated pro-social norms of discourse within the rationalist community (in which careless usage of terms like "gaslighting" would be clearly harmful and inappropriate, to pluck an example that particularly resonated with me from Duncan Sabien's original post), and instrumentally rational techniques best employed when interfacing outside the community (including performative overconfidence and hyperbole). Some of the communication strategies slated here are simply methods of winning, so I would suggest a distinction between "suggested basics of discourse between rationalists to maintain community cohesion and foster a high-trust environment" and "basics of discourse as (potentially 'dark') arts used by rationalists."

The LessWrong Review [? · GW] runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2024. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.

Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?

The best part about this post is that you get to see how quickly everyone devolves into serious, rational discourse. 

Sorry, this is cringy. 

I would find this simply unfunny if it was the basics of black nationalist or nazi bodybuilder discourse, but lets face it, lesswrongers are not black nationalists or nazi bodybuilders. The aesthetics of an object should ideally reflect its true nature; the minimalistic and monochromatic design of this website reflects the nature of this movement well. This post, not so much. 

This is not Reddit. I don't think posts solely for the sake of humor deserve this many upvotes, particularly not when they're full of inappropriate, unprofessional language like this. I strong downvoted and I'd rather never see anything like this on LessWrong again.

Who's the intended audience of this post? 

If it's for "internal" consumption, summary of things [LW · GW]we already knew in the form of list of sazens [LW · GW], but perhaps need a refresher, then it's great.

But if it's meant to actually educate anyone, or worse, become some kind of manifesto cited by New Your Times to show what's going on in this community, then I predict this is not going to end well.

The problem, as I see it, is that in the current way this website is setup, it's not up to author to decide who's the audience.

Interactions with irrationalists are always a waste of time, but you don't know whether someone is a rationalist or an irrationalist until you become a rationalist yourself. It's the rationalist who sets certain guidelines and the ones enforcing them during the interaction. Until you become a rationalist yourself, your interactions with irrationalists are just the process of learning the ropes if you are consciously or subconsciously working toward becoming a better rationalist, or you don't really care either way and interactions with irrationalist is just a hobby that gets your socks off. Let the people who want to just waste time, waste their time with others just like them.

A lot of new rationalists often forgets how much time they have in an average day and will happily guide irrationalists toward better thinking and processes. They often make the assumption that others want to become rationalists because they've experienced becoming rationalists themselves. A lot of irrationalists merely just want to make a statement and have others agree with the statement: "I am valid" Go ahead and tell them that they are valid and move on.