Gnostic Rationality

Ultimately it's all about the same stuff, but explained from different perspectives as I develop a deeper understanding that lets me see it in different ways. I find I often knew things I didn't know I knew when I hope ideas up to different lights, and I view doing this as a key process for developing understanding.

I think that's fair. I wanted to write this in one sitting so didn't take the time to develop the why here, only reference other places where I point at the why. I didn't write it to be an advertisement, although to be fair literally everything anyone writes is working to spread ideas, even if only weakly. Mostly it was that this connection to the doxa/episteme/gnosis categories became clear enough to me that I wanted to express it.

I'm personally fine with this association and in fact even find it somewhat fitting, though only in a very tenuous way.

Yep, sounds like you got it. It's like when you quit grad school because you realize you were only staying for sunk costs, or start exercising because you believe in its benefits, and you don't have to go through the motion of explicitly figuring this out and then willing yourself into doing it. You knew it, maybe you double check your work to make sure the dark, unobserved processes of your brain didn't make a mistake, and then you just do it because it's the most natural thing in the world, like taking a sip of water when you're thirsty.

Mmmm, these aren't orthogonal dimensions within rationality. We wouldn't call a person who happened to win all the time because they made the right choices without being able to explain why a rationalist; we'd probably just say they are wise or have good judgement.

By "rational" and "rationality" I want to point at the same thing Eli(ezer) does, which he also called the "winning Way". It's something like "the ability to take action that you are happy with" although I'd probably describe it in technical terms as "axiologically aligned intention".

Rationality is an almost inherently epistemic notion because such alignment requires logical reasoning to judge, and in fact understanding how this works thoroughly rigorously seems to be the core of the AI safety problem. Thus even if someone could be accidentally rational without being a rationalist, this is something that is only interesting to those with sufficient epistemic rationality to assess it, and thus there's not really a strong sense in which you can have someone with lots of gnosis of rationality who doesn't also have episteme of it because they wouldn't know rationality in any sense well enough to have gnosis of it.

I'm missing a lot of context here. How is this post connected to the other things you're referring to as a "cancer" and what is wrong with those things and this post?

Meta note: I don't like that your comment has a lot of "this is bad" but not a lot of why.

edit: To be clear, I'm genuinely curious. This post is also extremely confusing and bizarre, so I would appreciate hearing your take on it as someone who is skeptical but also seems to understand what it's pointing at.

I'd mostly rather not respond to this, but others have made the case that defending the conversational norms we'd like to see in the community is worth the fight, so I will.

We've previously gotten to the heart of our disagreement in other forums, PDV, as being about, as I would put it, the primacy of epistemology, namely that I believe we cannot develop a fundamentally "correct" epistemology while you believe that we can. If I am mischaracterizing this, though, please correct me as this discussion happened before the time of the double crux so we lacked a formal process to ensure our good faith. I'm happy to engage in a double crux now to see what shakes out of it, especially since I always seem to figure out new things from dialogue with you. If that's something you'd like to do feel free to kick it off with a separate top-level comment on this post or as its own post.

But good faith is really why I think it necessary to write a response. I will leave it for others to judge my success, but I always strive to give my interlocutors the benefit of the doubt, to disagree in good faith, and do whatever I can to be maximally charitable to positions I think are confused. I'm willing to bet some people would even accuse me of performing too much hermeneutics on the arguments of others so that I can interpret them in ways that I can agree with. It's thus sort of hard for me to even conclude this, but your responses to me often appear to be given in bad faith.

For example, above you accuse me and my "whole crowd" of "feeling superior and ignoring counterargument". You say we are "a cancer in the rationalist community". As best I can tell this is a position based on sentiment, and I've been happy to admit since the very first time I publicly posted about these ideas I've been aware that they risk creating negative sentiment and I'm still working out how to talk about them without doing that. Certainly sentiment is important for a lot of things, but one thing it's not really important for is developing what we might call here "rational" episteme, i.e. the sort of classical, logical arguments of rationalism. Yet your comments are not directly a criticism of the sentiment I am creating, but instead seem directed at assessing the truth of my arguments. Thus I'm left with little choice but to consider these statements in the class of ad hominem.

Now I'm not opposed to ad hominem and snark per se: it can be fun and I'm happy to be knocked down for my mistakes. But you present them as if they are part of your argument for why I am wrong and this is, as far as I can tell, contra the values you seem to be yourself favoring (a cluster we might call generically "LW rationality"). And unfortunately doing this is not simply noise to be filtered out from the rest of the argument: it creates an example of it being okay to respond to arguments via the social side channel rather than addressing the ideas head-on. And this behavior creates the sort of environment that makes people hesitant to speak for fear of social reprisal.

I am sufficiently esteemed by myself and others to weather such remarks, but directed at those with less power and esteem this behavior would be read as bullying, and I at least don't want LW to be the sort of place where that's okay, especially since I suspect that sort of behavior is much of what killed LW 1.0 because it's the kind of thing that made me lose interest in LW 1.0.

So I'm happy to engage in discussion around whether there is a difference between episteme and gnosis (the Anglo-Austrian-Analytic stance says "practically, no", the Continental stance says "yes"), around how the presentation of my ideas may produce negative sentiment, and even around how these ideas impact the rationalist mission (though I don't think that's well defined and agreed upon). Really I'm happy to discuss anything in good faith! What I'm not happy to do is let slide arguments presented in what I must reluctantly conclude are bad faith because it is a weed in the garden we are trying to tend here.

There are places for bad faith, for trolling, for bullying. I would like LW to not be one of those places.

David Chapman, once you talk to him and actually double-crux, is much more sensible than your reading of him. He was an AI researcher himself.

His popular writing has a vibe of "nerds and I F*ing Love Science fans: you aren't so great!" that can be off-putting. If you ignore the implicit insult, assume it can't hurt you, and try to figure out what he literally believes is true, it's not actually irrationalist.

I disagree. they seem to be vaguely trying to gesture at something that I would simply put as "use system 1 well". they're just trying speak the language of system 1 to communicate the concept, and getting lost in concept space when attempting to.