Open Thread, May 1-14, 2013

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Okay. This may not be the kind of thing you had in mind, but the way I personally think about things:

is probably not focused enough on emotions. I'm not very good at dealing with emotions, either myself or other people's, and I imagine that someone who was better would have very different thoughts about how to deal with people both on the small scale (e.g. interpersonal relationships) and on the large scale (e.g. politics).
may overestimate the value of individuals (e.g. in their capacity to affect the world) relative to organizations.

The way this community thinks about things:

is biased too strongly in directions that Eliezer finds interesting, which I suppose is somewhat unavoidable but unfortunate in a few respects. For example, Eliezer doesn't seem to think that computational complexity is relevant to friendly AI and I think this is a strong claim.
is biased towards epistemic rationality when I think it should be more focused on instrumental rationality. This is a corollary of the first bullet point: most of the Sequences are about epistemic rationality.
is biased towards what I'll call "cool ideas," e.g. cryonics or the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. I've been meaning to write a post about this.
is hampered by a lack of demographic diversity that is probably bad for cognitive diversity (my impression is that LW is overwhelmingly male, white, 18-24 years old, etc.).

Atheism and skepticism in general:

is likely to be another form of belief as attire in practice. As in, I think many people who identify very strongly as atheists or skeptics are doing it to signal tribal affiliation more than anything else.

It takes incredible strength to recognize flaws in your entire way of thinking

Eh, does it? I think it just requires a cultural meme about criticism being a good thing. LW has this, maybe too much of this, and my impression is that so does Judaism (based on e.g. avoiding your belief's real weak points). This is some evidence that you are thinking reasonably but it isn't extremely strong evidence.

For example, Eliezer doesn't seem to think that computational complexity is relevant to friendly AI

Could you elaborate?

1[anonymous]13y

These are good, thank you. About epistemic vs. instrumental rationality, though: I had never heard those terms but it seems like a pretty simple difference of what rationality is to be used for. The way I understand it, Less Wrong is quite instrumentally focused. There are many posts as well as sequences (and all of HPMOR) about how to apply rationality to your everyday life, in addition to those dealing only with technical probabilities (like Pascal's Mugging—not realistic). Personally I'm more interested in the epistemic side of things and not a fan of assurances that these sequences will substantially improve your relationships or anything like that. But that's just me.

2Nornagest13y

That usually gets you a culture of inconsequential criticism, where you can be as loudly contrarian as you want as long as you don't challenge any of the central shibboleths. This is basically what Eliezer was describing in "Real Weak Points", but it shows up in a lot of places; many branches of the modern social sciences work that way, for example. It gets particularly toxic when you mix it up with a cult of personality and the criticism starts being all about how you or others are failing to live up to the Great Founder's sacrosanct ideals. I'm starting to think it might not be possible to advocate for a coherent culture that's open to changing identity-level facts about itself; you can do it by throwing out self-consistency, but that's a cure that's arguably worse than the proverbial disease. I don't think strength of will is what's missing, though, if anything is.

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