Guarding Against the Postmodernist Failure Mode

As an outsider, here are some criticisms (below). I've read all of HPMOR and some of the sequences, attended a couple of meetups, and am signed up for cryonics. But, I have little interest in reading more of the sequences and no interest in more in-person meetings.

• Rationality doesn't guarantee correctness. Given some data, rational thinking can get to the facts accurately, i.e. say what "is". But, deciding what to do in the real world requires non-rational value judgments to make any "should" statements. (Or, you could not believe in free will. But most LWers don't live like that.) Additionally, huge errors are possible when reasoning beyond limited data. Many LWers seem to assume that being as rational as possible will solve all their life problems. It usually won't; instead, a better choice is to find more real-world data about outcomes for different life paths, pick a path (quickly, given the time cost of reflecting), and get on with getting things done. When making a trip by car, it's not worth spending 25% of your time planning to shave off 5% of your time driving. In other words, LW tends to conflate rationality and intelligence.

• In particular, AI risk is overstated There are a bunch of existential threats (asteroids, nukes, pollution, unknown unknowns, etc.). It's not at all clear if general AI is a significant threat. It's also highly doubtful that the best way to address this threat is writing speculative research papers, because I have found in my work as an engineer that untested theories are usually wrong for unexpected reasons, and it's necessary to build and test prototypes in the real world. My strong suspicion is that the best way to reduce existential risk is to build (non-nanotech) self-replicating robots using existing technology and online ordering of materials, and use the surplus income generated to brute-force research problems, but I don't know enough about manufacturing automation to be sure.

• LW has a cult-like social structure. The LW meetups (or, the ones I experienced) are very open to new people. Learning the keywords and some of the cached thoughts for the LW community results in a bunch of new friends and activities to do. However, involvement in LW pulls people away from non-LWers. One way this happens is by encouraging contempt for less-rational Normals. I imagine the rationality "training camps" do this to an even greater extent. LW recruiting (hpmor, meetup locations near major universities) appears to target socially awkward intellectuals (incl. me) who are eager for new friends and a "high-status" organization to be part of, and who may not have many existing social ties locally.

• Many LWers are not very rational. A lot of LW is self-help. Self-help movements typically identify common problems, blame them on (X), and sell a long plan that never quite achieves (~X). For the Rationality movement, the problems (sadness! failure! future extinction!) are blamed on a Lack of Rationality, and the long plan of reading the sequences, attending meetups, etc. never achieves the impossible goal of Rationality (impossible because "is" cannot imply "should"). Rationalists tend to have strong value judgments embedded in their opinions, and they don't realize that these judgments are irrational.

• LW membership would make me worse off. Though LW membership is an OK choice for many people needing a community (joining a service organization could be an equally good choice), for many others it is less valuable than other activities. I'm struggling to become less socially awkward, more conventionally successful, and more willing to do what I enjoy rather than what I "should" do. LW meetup attendance would work against me in all of these areas. LW members who are conventionally successful (e.g. PhD students at top-10 universities) typically became so before learning about LW, and the LW community may or may not support their continued success (e.g. may encourage them, with only genuine positive intent, to drop out of their PhD program, go to "training camps" for a few months, then try and fail to start a startup, increasing the likelihood that they'll go back and work for LW at below-market rates and earn less money for the rest of their life due to not having the PhD from the top-10 school). Ideally, LW/Rationality would help people from average or inferior backgrounds achieve more rapid success than the conventional path of being a good student, going to grad school, and gaining work experience, but LW, though well-intentioned and focused on helping its members, doesn't actually create better outcomes for them.

I desperately want to know the truth, and especially want to beat aging so I can live long enough to find out what is really going on. HPMOR is outstanding (because I don't mind Harry's narcissism) and LW is is fun to read, but that's as far as I want to get involved. Unless, that is, there's someone here who has experience programming vision-guided assembly-line robots who is looking for a side project with world-optimization potential.

LessWrong people seem to go to some pains to coin new language only when old language is insufficient

The pains don't always stretch to learning philosophy, which EY hasn't done, and advises against, with the result that LW jargon in fact often does reinvent philosophical jargon.

on LessWrong people seem to go to some pains to coin new language only when old language is insufficient

Are you sure? One of the biggest problems with LW is inventing jargon for philosophical ideas that have had names for a couple of thousand years. This is problematic if the interested reader wants to learn more.

Organisation A can be like organisation B in every way except their doctrine. It has been remarked, not least by rationalwiki that LW is like Any Rand's Objectivism, although doctrinally they are poles apart.

It is perfectly possible for an organisation to pay lip service to outreach without making the changes and sacrifices needed for real engagement.

I suspect the answer is "no". But I don't know why you would correct for intelligence &c. in your analysis. Attracting a group of intelligent people is kinda hard to pull off and of course many, many tradeoffs will be made to make it possible.

Wasn't the B.s.l.sk an inadvertent self-Sokal.....a bunch of self declared rationalists taking an absolutely ridiculous idea much too seriously?

contrarians

How much of EYs material has been retracted or amended under critique? AFAICT , the answer is none.

On the subject of people opening discussions about whether LW is a cult, I'd like to suggest that while it is useful to notice, that metric alone is not enough to determine whether LW has become a cult: We could easily wind up constantly opening discussions about whether LW is a cult, patting ourselves on the back for having opened the discussion at all, and then ending the discussion.

Incidentally on a somewhat unrelated note about cultishness, I don't know how other LWers feel about it, but when I personally think about the subject I feel a really, really strong pull towards concluding outright that LW is not a cult and calling it settled, both because it feels less scary and takes less work than having to constantly guard against cultishness (reading some of EYs writing on how cultishness is something that needs to be constantly guarded against terrified me). I doubt I'm the only one to feel that way so it's something I thought would be good to mention.

True. CFAR is anything but insular. Their (excellent) workshops are based on outside research and they do very well to reach out to outsiders. They have Slovic and Stanovich as advisors, Kahneman has visited them, etc.

A couple questions- what portion of the workshop attendees self-selected from among people who were already interesting in rationality, compared to the portion that randomly stumbled upon it for some reason?

And even if it were from outsiders... I suppose that guards against the specific post-modernist failure mode. I think the checking by having to explain to outsiders isn't the most important thing that checks engineering, though: the most important one is having to engineer things that actually work. So rationality producing people who are better at accomplishing their goals would be the ideal measure.

What's the outsider feedback on those been like?

(To change my mind on this, find me an online community of enthusiastic amateur postmodernists who aren't trying to make it in academia or anything.)

Critics. Art, literary, music. Postmodernism is largely art criticism purporting to take everything as a text.

It could be argued that the neoreactionaries are an example. (Moldbug especially.)

I honestly don't understand Postmodernism well enough to know if this is it (and not sure if it's even understandable enough for that), but I've encountered ideas that sound similar to what I've heard of post-modernism from undergraduate students in my college's philosophy club.

Specifically there are several people with a tendency to say things along the lines of "but how do we really know what's real or what's not", "can we really trust our senses", etc. with regards to every single discussion that comes up, making it essentially impossible to come to any actual conclusions in any discussion. Although one of them did actually accept the idea of discussing what the world would be like if our senses were reasonably accurate, but not without pointing out what a huge assumption that was. (now, actually, I think it makes a lot of sense to talk about what facts and truth are occasionally, but being able to just say "X is true" when you have 99.9999% confidence of it is a fairly useful shorthand.)

(another thing which I'm not sure is the same or not was one of the people in the club who said something about someone believing "things that are true for him", although I didn't discuss that enough to get any real understanding on what they meant by that. Nor do I actually remember the question that led to that or the discussion following it, I think the topic diverged. In fact I think it diverged into me asking if their attitude was postmodernism and them not having any better an understanding of postmodernism than I did.)

Is that similar to post-modernist ideas? Because I honestly have no idea if it is or not, and would be interested in any insights from someone who knows what post-modernism is.

So what's Analytical Philosophy.