Thoughts on "Operation Make Less Wrong the single conversational locus", Month 1

Since you can embed Markdown in HTML, you might find that you don't need to convert the posts.

It's very possible that I'm confused here, or missing a cool technical trick. (And also maybe we should have separate Markdown and html editors, instead of forcing everyone to use one, which would also make it trivial to import all the old posts while still moving future posts mostly to Markdown.)

Is this something you need more people to help with?

More people would be appreciated! Email me for details.

We picked Telescope because it has a threaded commenting system, as opposed to systems like Discourse.

I wouldn't have come up with #2 and #3, but those are definitely related to the issue.

I bet Islamists don't think of it.

I think this makes grossly false assumptions about how human psychology actually works.

Imagine applying that logic to, for example, computer games. Hey, let's get rid all achievements and ranks that are handed out willy nilly to people who just turn up and play the game. Instead, you will now only get any recognition for your efforts if you are a lot better than average.

It's funny how successful games almost always hand out lots of 'inflationary' gold stars just for turning up and playing. To build the user-base, you give people rewards for their efforts, not punishments for falling in the bottom 90%.

Even if it were, we should not go from "we will lose this war" to "we should behave now as if the war has already been lost".

It's awesome that you guys are really considering ways to incorporate changes people want.

I wonder, since you're going to have to put a lot of work into the refurbishing project and resources are finite, would it be worth generating some kind of survey for members to take about what kind of features/alterations/options they'd most like to see? I ask because it occurs to me that soliciting ideas in open threads, while absolutely useful as far as encouraging discussion and exchange of ideas goes, might present a patchy or unduly-slanted picture of what the majority of members want. Prolific commenters (like me!) might dominate the discussion, or certain ideas might look more important because they generate a lot of discussion. A survey of some sort might give you clearer data.

That's not to say you should necessarily do things because the majority want them, this isn't a democracy as far as I'm aware and some popular requests might be unworkable. It just could be useful to know. Of course you're better placed to determine if it's worth the effort.

(Also, this isn't in any way prompted by Raemon's point about the link posts - it was your reply about possible implementation options that put it my head).

I am not saying that it is a wrong or worthless idea, just that comparing "having this 'one weird trick' and applying it to everything" with the whole body of knowledge and attitudes is a type error.

It seems like you are making that error. I'm not seeing anybody else making it.

There's no reason to assume that the word postrational is only about Kegan's ideas. The most in depth post that tried to define the term (https://yearlycider.wordpress.com/2014/09/19/postrationality-table-of-contents/) didn't even speak of Kegan directly.

Calling the stage 5 a tool or "weird trick" also misses the point. It's not an idea in that class.

Knowing about rationalism plus feeling superior to rationalists :-).

EDITED to add: I hope my snark doesn't make gworley feel blown-back-at, silenced, and intolerably stressed. That's not at all my purpose. I'll make the point I was making a bit more explicitly.

• Reading "post-rationalist" stuff, I genuinely do often get the impression that people become "post-rationalists" when they have been exposed to rationalism but find rationalists a group they don't want to affiliate with (e.g., because they seem disagreeably nerdy).
• As shev said, post-rationalists' complaints about rationalism do sometimes look rather strawy; that's one thing that gives me the trying-to-look-different vibe.
• The (alleged) differences that aren't just complaints about strawmen generally seem to me to be simply wrong.
• Here's the first Google hit (for me) for "post-rationalist": from The Future Primeval, a kinda-neoreactionary site set up by ex-LWers. Its summary of how post-rationalists differ from rationalists seems fairly typical. Let's see what it has to say.
  • First of all it complains of "some of the silliness" of modern conceptions of rationalist. (OK, then.)
  • Then it says that there's more to thinking than propositional belief (perhaps there are rationalists who deny that, but I don't think I know any) and says that post-rationalists see truth "as a sometimes-applicable proxy for usefulness rather than an always-applicable end in itself" (the standard rationalist position, in so far as there is one, is that truth is usually useful and that deliberately embracing untruth for pragmatic reasons tends to get you in a mess; rationalists also tend to like truth, to value it terminally).
    • So here we have one implicit strawman (that rationalists think propositional belief is everything), another implicit strawman (that rationalists don't recognize that truth and usefulness can in principle diverge), something I think is simply an error if I've understood correctly (the suggestion that untruth is often more useful than truth), and what looks like a failure of empathy (obliviousness to the possibility that someone might simply prefer to be right, just as they might prefer to be comfortable).
  • Then it suggests that values shouldn't be taken as axiomatic fundamental truths but that they often arise from social phenomena (so far as I can tell, this is also generally understood by rationalists).
  • Then we are told that "some rationalists have a reductionistic and mechanistic theory of mind" (how true this is depends on how those weaselly words "reductionistic" and "mechanistic" are understood) and think that it's useful to identify biases and try to patch them; post-rationalists, on the other hand, understand that the mind is too complex for that to work and we should treat it as a black box.
    • Here we may have an actual point of disagreement, but let's proceed with caution. First of all, the sort of mechanistic reductionism that LW-style rationalists fairly universally endorse is in fact also endorsed by our post-rationalists, in the same paragraph ("while the mind is ultimately a reducible machine"). But I think it's fair to say that rationalists are generally somewhat optimistic about the prospects of improving one's thinking by, er, "overcoming bias". But it is also widely recognized that this doesn't always work, that in many cases knowing about a bias just makes you more willing to accuse your opponents of it; I think there's at least one thing along those lines in the Sequences, so it's not something we've been taught recently by the post-rationalists. So I think the point of disagreement here is this: Are there a substantial number of heuristics implemented in our brains that, in today's environment, can be bettered by deliberate "system-2" calculation? I do think the answer is yes; it seems like our post-rationalists think it's no; but if they've given reasons for that other than handwaving about evolution, I haven't seen them.
  • They elaborate on this to say it's foolish to try to found our practical reasoning in theory rather than common sense and intuition. (This is more or less the same as the previous complaint, and I think we have a similar disagreement here.)
  • And then they list a bunch of things post-rationalists apparently have "an appreciation for": tradition, ritual, modes of experience beyond detached skepticism, etc. (Mostly straw, this; the typical rationalist position seems to be that these things can be helpful or harmful and that many of their common forms are harmful; that isn't at all the same thing as not "appreciating" them.)
• So, a lot of that does indeed seem to consist of strawmanning plus feeling superior. Not, of course, all of it; but enough to (I think) explain some of the negative attitude gworley describes getting from rationalists.

While rationality is nominally that which wins, and so is thus complete, in practice people want consistent, systematic ways of achieving rationality, and so the term comes to have the double meaning of both that which wins and a discovered system for winning based around a combination of traditional rationality, cognitive bias and heuristic research, and rational agent behavior in decision theory, game theory, etc.

I see post-rationality as being the continued exploration of the former project (to win, crudely, though it includes even figuring out what winning means) without constraining oneself to the boundaries of the latter. I think this maybe also better explains the tension that results in feeling a need to carve out post-rationality from rationality when it is nominally still part of the rationalist project.

This is the first I heard of that... I'm not sure the legitimacy of that in the eyes of long-time users.

I get the impression that SSC comments have managed to do rational debate better than LW does. People who do bad things there are reliably purged by Scott. The topics are interesting which keeps smart people coming.

Take a population of smart people and regularly cull the most dark-arts/mudslinging/anti-epistemology few %.

I don't like the SSC comments much because I feel like most of what I say there gets ignored and buried, but I definitely think that SSC is very good at dealing with politics.

I'm having trouble parsing the intended meaning. Can you clarify?

and there was a tiny group of people posting messages like "having Trump elected increased value of funds in sectors A, B, C, and decreased value of funds in sectors X, Y, Z, so by hedging against this outcome I made N% money".

Funnily enough, I heard rumors that George Soros placed a big bet on the markets going down after the election and lost very very badly.

I think it is a rather unsympathetic strawman characterization of what they rationalist political debate would be. Even if one could make money off of purely thinking -- and I don't want to debate the efficient market hypothesis here -- I would hope that the purpose of the debate would be over rational government policies that address the underlying concerns of all sides. For example, what underlying fears and insecurities lead to support for trumps anti-immigration, anti-Muslim position? What legitimate basis exists, charitably, for these fears? What potential policy could both address these underlying concerns, and be supported by both parties and independents? More to the point, what additional data would be useful to have, in the form of polls that are not currently being conducted or some such?

Nate Silver's 538 blog is an example of such a rationalist resource, but he only covers politics during election season and there isn't much community building going on.