Wes F

[mirror of my blog post at https://livingwithinreason.com/p/the-algorithm-rewards-engagement] If you’re on Twitter, you know that one of the favorite pastimes on Twitter is complaining about the “for you” feed, which is the one where you get served an infinite scroll of algorithmically chosen content. People complain about it constantly. “It’s goal...

This is a description for first-time glowfic readers who are unfamiliar with the format. A glowfic is a fictional story written by multiple authors who roleplay as the characters. A typical glowfic will appear on glowfic.com and looks like an internet forum where fictional people will post comments back and...

Cross-posted from Living Within Reason > In philosophy, the Principle of Charity is a technique in which you evaluate your opponent’s position as if it made the most amount of sense possible given the wording of the argument. That is, if you could interpret your opponent’s argument in multiple ways,...

Originally posted at Living Within Reason. Last week, Jacob Falkovich, of the Putanumonit blog, put up a post trying to figure out why rationalists are disproportionately polyamorous. He notes that about 5% of Americans engage in consensual nonmonogamy, while 17% of Americans in the 2014 Less Wrong survey indicated that...

(The following are our suggestions for what kind of information is best to include in the welcome post of your group, feel free to replace them with whatever you think is best) What kind of events does your group usually run? What does it usually do? How frequently does your...

Originally posted at Living Within Reason Epistemic status: moderately certain, but open to being convinced otherwise tl;dr: any ethical system that relies on ethical intuitions is just egoism that's given a veneer of objectivity. UTILITARIANISM RELIES ON MORAL INTUITIONS Most rationalists are utilitarians, so much so that most rationalist writing...