LessWrong House Style (2023)
LessWrong House Style (2023)
https://nonesense.substack.com/p/lesswrong-house-style
Given that they are imbeciles given, occasionally, to dangerous ideas, I think it’s worth taking a moment now and then to beat them up. This is another such moment.
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That sounds like a religion insisting it isn’t one
I think it is a little bit more complicated, Im one of the few mentioning this however, so it isnt a common idea I think. I think it isnt directly a cult/religion, but stealing the language of Silicon Valley, it is a cult incubator. Reading these things, having these beliefs about AGI and rationality makes you more susceptible to join or start cult like groups. The less wrong article "every cause wants to be a cult" doesnt help for example, neither does it when they speak highly of the methods os scientology. The various spinoffs and how many of these groups act cultlike and use cultlike shit makes me think this.
So it is worse in a way.
There's also the communal living, the workplace polyamory along with the prominence of the consensual non-consensual kink, the tithing of the bulk of your earnings and the extreme goals-justify-the-means moralising, the emphasis on psychedelics and prescription amphetamines, and so on and so forth.
Meaning, while calling them a cult incubator is actually really insightful and well put, I have a feeling that the closer you get to TESCREAL epicenters like the SFB the more explicitly culty things start to get.
Yeah but tescreal is a name we give them, themselves organise in different groups (which fit into the term yes). They have different parts pf the tescreal, but it all ends up in culty behaviour, just a different cult.
Btw see also love bombing with Quantum Scott. There was also the weird LW people who ended up protesting other LW people in the crazy way (didnt it include robes or something, I dont recall much). Or calling Scottstar the rightful caliph when Yud was posting less.
So my point is more they morph into different cults, and wonder how much they use this lack of singular cult as a way to claim they are not a cult. Or whatever rot13ed word they used for cult.
E: not that all this really matters in the grand scheme of things. just a personal hangup.
whatever rot13ed word they used for cult.
It's impossible to read a post here without going down some weird internet rabbit hole isn't it? This is totally off topic but I was reading the comments on this old phyg post, and one of the comments said (seemingly seriously):
It's true that lots of Utilitarianisms have corner cases where they support action that would normally considered awful. But most of them involve highly hypothetical scenarios that seldom happen, such as convicting an innocent man to please a mob.
And I'm just thinking, riight highly hypothetical.
It is a peculiar sort of faith movement, where the central devotional practice is wandering around pulling made-up probability estimates out of one's ass
and then posting walls of text about them not merely burying the lede but quite fully conspiring to eliminate the evidence and all witnesses in the same go, as a starting condition
They do seem to worship Bayes
Edit: I want to qualify that I'm a big fan of Bayes Theorem — in my field, there's some awesome stuff being done with Bayesian models that would be impossible to do with frequentist statistics. Any scorn in my comment is directed at the religious fervour that LW directs at Bayesian statistics, not at the stats themselves.
I say this to emphasise that LWers aren't cringe for being super enthusiastic about maths. It's the everything else that makes them cringe
The particular way they invoke Bayes' theorem is fascinating. They don't seem to ever actually use it in any sort of rigorous way, it's merely used as a way to codify their own biases. It's an alibi for putting a precise percentage point on your vibes. It's kind of beautiful in a really stupid sort of way.
They take a theory that is supposed to be about updating one's beliefs in the face of new evidence, and they use it as an excuse to never change what they think.
It's the Bayesian version of Zeno's paradox. Before one can update their beliefs, one must have evidence of an alternative proposition. But no one piece of evidence is worth meaningfully changing your worldview and actions. In order to be so it would need to be supported. But then that supporting evidence would itself need to be supported. And so on ad infinitum.
They seem to believe that stereotypes often have a grain of truth to them, and it's thus ok to believe stereotypes.
"which stereotypes?"
"oh, you know the ones"I would say it goes further and that they have a (pseudo?)magical trust in their own intuitions, as if they are crystal clear revalations from the platonic realms.
I will always remember Sam Bankman Fried saying it's obvious that Shakespeare can't be the greatest author ever because it's unlikely. Just because something's unlikely doesn't mean it's impossible! You need to independently evaluate the evidence!
Also I feel like the logic he based that on was just dumb. Like, some writer out of the last several centuries is going to be the best for whatever given metric. We shouldn't be surprised that any particular individual is the best any more than another. If anything the fact that people still talk about him after the centuries is probably the strongest argument in favor of his writing that you could make.
But of course Sam's real goal was to justify the weird rationalist talking point that reading is overrated because podcasts exist or something.