Suspended Reason

This piece was written and privately circulated within rationalist circles in 2021. Recently, @Benquo penned a response, and @Chris_Leong recommended that I submit the original text to LessWrong, where it might reach a wider audience. This text serves two purposes: (1) Developing rationalist concepts like "combat epistemology" (or soldier vs....

The Age of Fighting Sail is a book about the War of 1812, written by a novelist of Napoleonic naval conflicts, C.S. Forester. On its face, the concept is straightforward: A man who made his name writing historical fiction now regales us with true tales, dramatically told. History buff dads...

I want to talk about two ethical modes that my correspondence has danced around, but never fully dealt with. They are both long-termist, and taken seriously, they both threaten to make ethics obsolete, or subordinate to strategy. The first I call “persistence ethics”; the second I refer to as “ecological...

Status: Vaguely culture-war, but trying to stay meta. I wanna talk about two blogposts, Seph's "War Over Being Nice" and Alastair's "Of Triggering & the Triggered." Each lays out the same erisological idea: that there are two distinct modes or cultures of running discourse these days, and that understanding this...

Jonathan Livengood is a current associate professor of philosophy at Urbana-Champaign, who hung around the first iteration of LessWrong in the late 2000s and early 2010s as a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, where he was writing a dissertation on causal inference under John Norton, Peter Spirtes, and...

Alternate titles: * The Public-Private Information Gap Rules Everything Around Me * Baudrillard’s Simulacra, Steelmanned * “Have your cake and eating it too” * The Precarity of Prestige Economies * “Goodhart’s is just a subset, mannn.” * “Costly signals are just a subset, mannn.” * The Tragedy of Appearances *...

Almost a decade ago, Luke Muehlhauser ran a series "Rationality and Philosophy" on LessWrong 1.0. It gives a good introductory account, but recently, still dissatisfied with the treatment of the two groups' relationship, I've started a larger "Meta-Sequence" project, so to speak, treating the subject in depth. As part of...