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sophia_xu's Shortform

by sophia_xu
18th Mar 2021
1 min read
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This is a special post for quick takes by sophia_xu. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
sophia_xu's Shortform
8sophia_xu
4supposedlyfun
1sophia_xu
6sophia_xu
3sophia_xu
4Eli Tyre
1Sheikh Abdur Raheem Ali
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[-]sophia_xu4y80

New sequence idea: bridging humanities lingo to the aspiring-rationalist community.

Observation: many of our current humanities lingo (e.g. that of critical theory, postmodernism, contemporary feminism) get underrepresented or misrepresented in the lesswrong community. To verify: do a search of the terms above and see.

Observation: some people (such as philosophers on r/askphilosophy) outside of the lesswrong community view this place in a bad light because they thought we aren't taking the previous debates in philosophy on the same problems seriously.

Common knowledge: more (and more diverse) discussion almost always leads to better models of reality.
 

Common heuristic: use of different languages with different context shape how we view the same topic.


Hypothesis: A metaphorical bridge that connects the humanities language (and context) to that of us can help us make sense of a lot of points and discourse (often implicit, as a characterization of humanities subjects).

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[-]supposedlyfun4y40

I'm slowly working on a frontpage generally arguing that Critical Theory has value. My hypothesis is that some of the community will be allergic to it because it's associated with "SJW" issues and bad academia but that more of the community will thoughtfully engage if I present it in aspiring-rationalist terms, especially foundational ones like falsifiability and making beliefs pay rent.   

I'd be willing to help workshop entries in your sequence along those lines. And if you want to steal my particular idea for part of your sequence, go for it--the work is going slowly.

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[-]sophia_xu4y10

I'm slowly working on a frontpage generally arguing that Critical Theory has value.

Hey I'm open if you want to co-write something!

I agree with your assessment that concepts within fields like Critical Theory was not discussed in the aspiring-rationalist context enough. I think most aspiring rationalists would be interested in these alternative maps, if it wasn't presented as totally disconnected to our original maps.

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[-]sophia_xu3mo60

Thinking of starting an exobrain working group to focus on augmenting individual agency/intelligence with AI or even just software systems.

Interest areas:

  • information/knowledge acquisition (better deep research, feed reader/information diet optimization, augmented reading/research workbench)
  • augmented thinking (e.g. RoamResearch with AI justifier, counter-argument-producer, implicit assumption surfacer)
  • personal behavioral analysis (activities tracking/insights, tracking ideas/tasks/projects, augmented life goals reflection)
  • augmented agency (delegating tasks to AI agents, having AI make lower-entropy decisions when doing computer tasks)
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[-]sophia_xu3mo30

Comment under this if interested :)

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[-]Eli Tyre3mo40

Interested, though not particularly hopeful about any of these things proving really helpful (at least not yet, I bet I could see things that would change my mind).

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[-]Sheikh Abdur Raheem Ali3mo10

This sounds cool!

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