Camille B.

Attitudes about Applied Rationality

tl;dr: within the LW community, there are many clusters of strategies to achieve rationality: doing basic exercices, using jargon, reading, partaking workshops, privileging object-level activities, and several other opinions like putting an accent on feedback loops, difficult conversations or altered states of consciousness. Epistemic status: This is a vague model to help me understand other rationalists and why some of them keep doing things I think are wrong, or suggest me to do things I think are wrong. This is not based on real data. I will update according to possible discussions in the comments. Please be critical. [Update : The term "Theory" is replaced with the term "Attitude" in the following paragraphs] Spending time in the rationalist community made me realize that there were several endeavors at reaching rationality that seemed to exist, some of which conflicted with others. This made me quite frustrated as I thought that my interpretation was the only one. The following list is an attempt at distinguishing the several approaches I've noticed, which I will call Attitudes (in lack of a better name). Of course, any rationalist will probably have elements of all attitudes at the same time. See each attitude as the claim that a particular set of elements prevails above others. Referring to one attitude usually goes on par with being fairly suspicious of others. Finally, remember that these categories are an attempt to distinguish what people are doing, not a guide about what side you should pick (if the sides exist at all). I suspect that most people end up settling on one attitude for practical reasons, more than because they have deeply thought about it at all. Basics Attitude Proponents of the Basics Attitude put a high emphasis on activities such as calibration, forecasting, lifehacks, and other fairly standard practices of epistemic and instrumental rationality. They don't see any real value in reading extensively LessWrong or going to workshop

112Feb 3, 2024

Camille B.

Message

Paris (Laplace)
Conversational Rationality, Cyborgism, AIS via Debate, Translating between philosophical traditions.
I sometimes write poems.

382

Basics of How Not to Die

One year ago, we nearly died. This is maybe an overdramatic statement, but long story short, nearly all of us underwent carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning[1]. The benefit is, we all suddenly got back in touch with a failure mode we had forgotten about, and we decided to make it a...

Jan 31107

World Citizen Assembly about AI - Announcement

tl;dr: A large amount of citizen assemblies about AI will soon be run, called “Global coalition for inclusive AI”. A window is about to open for a short amount of time informing politicians and the public about what citizens think of AI in general. I'm suggesting funders should reevaluate the...

Feb 11, 202526

Basics of Handling Disagreements with People

Epistemic Status: This is a collection of useful heuristics I’ve gathered from a wide range of books and workshops, all rather evidence-based (robustness varies). These techniques are designed to supplement basics of rationalist discourse, helping facilitate interactions—mostly with those unfamiliar with rationalist thought, especially on entry-level arguments. They may also...

Nov 12, 202434

Effectively Handling Disagreements - Introducing a New Workshop

On May 25th, 2023, someone posted a review of How Minds Change on LessWrong. It talked about Street Epistemology, Deep Canvassing, and Smart Politics, ways of handling disagreements that open the possibility of rational belief progression through amicable discussions. Summarized quickly, they rely on active listening, sharing personal stories and...

Apr 15, 202437

Attitudes about Applied Rationality

Feb 3, 2024112

Running your own workshop on handling hostile disagreements

tl;dr: this is a guide for running a productive disagreement workshop. Decide of modalities, choose a few techniques, study, practice, make some post-workshop materials and be cautious. Epistemic Status: Quickly written. Literally reporting what I started doing, this is just a first iteration and it will probably evolve in the...

Nov 8, 202312

Categories of Arguing Style : Why being good among rationalists isn't enough to argue with everyone

tl;dr : We overgeneralize the way we personally come up with concepts. People, notably outside of LW and inside of Academia, argue by referring themselves to diverse and starkly different ways of coming up with concepts, which are different enough for us to misinterpret them. We should not expect people...

May 7, 202316

LESSWRONG
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LESSWRONG
LW

Camille B.

Camille B.

Camille B.

Attitudes about Applied Rationality

Basics of How Not to Die

Effectively Handling Disagreements - Introducing a New Workshop

Basics of Handling Disagreements with People

Camille B.

Basics of How Not to Die

World Citizen Assembly about AI - Announcement

Basics of Handling Disagreements with People

Effectively Handling Disagreements - Introducing a New Workshop

Attitudes about Applied Rationality

Running your own workshop on handling hostile disagreements

Categories of Arguing Style : Why being good among rationalists isn't enough to argue with everyone

Attitudes about Applied Rationality

Basics of How Not to Die

Effectively Handling Disagreements - Introducing a New Workshop

Basics of Handling Disagreements with People

Basics of How Not to Die

World Citizen Assembly about AI - Announcement

Basics of Handling Disagreements with People

Effectively Handling Disagreements - Introducing a New Workshop

Attitudes about Applied Rationality

Running your own workshop on handling hostile disagreements

Categories of Arguing Style : Why being good among rationalists isn't enough to argue with everyone