I’m only responding to one (minor) part of your whole comment here.
LessWrong has largely failed to track or oppose because a lot of it was justified in terms of suppressing the “far right”
I don’t have that strong of a handle on what was happening with the broader rationality community, but this definitely doesn’t describe my self-narrative.
I wasn’t paying that much attention to this...because it wasn’t promoted to me as an important trend until recent years. I still feel pretty uninformed about what happened (I’ll read that post). I definitely would not have had any reaction like “oh this doesn’t matter much / this is worth it, because it’s punishing the far right.” I have an internal grimace whenever anyone uses the word “misinformation”, because it’s so clearly a framing device that skips over the hard part of epistemology and actually figuring out what’s true.
Rationalists did a better job with covid, but still largely focused on experts being object-level wrong, rather than trying to understand how and why networks of experts could have been so unethical and incompetent.
I’m sympathetic to claims that we didn’t do enough, but Zvi at least wrote a whole sequence on moral mazes, and much of his reporting on covid involvedsociologicaltheorizing like that the CDC was operating on short-term blame-avoidance, and mechanisms of social control?
I wasn’t paying that much attention to this...because it wasn’t promoted to me as an important trend until recent years.
Yes, this is what it looks like when a community’s attention is diverted. Similarly, academics might have said “AGI wasn’t promoted to me as an important trend until recent years”, but in fact plenty of rationalists were trying to promote it, it’s just that academia as a whole was very good at diverting its attention away from weird people saying weird things. Same for LW and right-wing stuff.
I have an internal grimace whenever anyone uses the word “misinformation”, because it’s so clearly a framing device that skips over the hard part of epistemology
This feels directionally correct but far from sufficient. Like, if you were in the USSR and people started talking about misinformation or hate speech, thinking “oh man the authorities are using framing devices that are epistemologically unsound” would radically underestimate the scope of the problem. The thing you actually need to be tracking is the extent to which this is part of an implicitly or explicitly coordinated power play—see Arctotherium’s article for much more.
Re Zvi, yepp, he’s less bad at this than almost all rationalists. But there’s still this basic mental step of thinking “huh, isn’t it weird that the whole system is run by quote lying liars unquote. How did it get that way?” which he doesn’t even attempt as far as I can tell. The proximate mechanism here is that modern people have absorbed a bunch of propaganda about how unethical the past was re race and gender, and have therefore generalized to thinking that if the modern world is dysfunctional in some way, something like that was probably also true in the past. But if you examine even your intuitive mental model of, say, how much people in the past cared about “honor” (e.g. to the point of duelling to the death over it), then you’d notice some confusion about the idea that the West in past centuries was run primarily by the modern variety of lying liars.
Similarly, Eliezer’s stuff on inadequate equilibria is extraordinarily uncurious about the history of civilizational inadequacy.
how much people in the past cared about “honor” (e.g. to the point of duelling to the death over it)
Honor cultures are not generally seen as enlightened liberal Western stuff, so I’m a bit confused by this connection. Would you call gang members shooting each other in the streets over small slights today an example of this good thing you’re pointing at? (EDIT: Oh, I guess you mean specifically that they’re more honest)
I’m only responding to one (minor) part of your whole comment here.
I don’t have that strong of a handle on what was happening with the broader rationality community, but this definitely doesn’t describe my self-narrative.
I wasn’t paying that much attention to this...because it wasn’t promoted to me as an important trend until recent years. I still feel pretty uninformed about what happened (I’ll read that post). I definitely would not have had any reaction like “oh this doesn’t matter much / this is worth it, because it’s punishing the far right.” I have an internal grimace whenever anyone uses the word “misinformation”, because it’s so clearly a framing device that skips over the hard part of epistemology and actually figuring out what’s true.
I’m sympathetic to claims that we didn’t do enough, but Zvi at least wrote a whole sequence on moral mazes, and much of his reporting on covid involved sociological theorizing like that the CDC was operating on short-term blame-avoidance, and mechanisms of social control?
Yes, this is what it looks like when a community’s attention is diverted. Similarly, academics might have said “AGI wasn’t promoted to me as an important trend until recent years”, but in fact plenty of rationalists were trying to promote it, it’s just that academia as a whole was very good at diverting its attention away from weird people saying weird things. Same for LW and right-wing stuff.
This feels directionally correct but far from sufficient. Like, if you were in the USSR and people started talking about misinformation or hate speech, thinking “oh man the authorities are using framing devices that are epistemologically unsound” would radically underestimate the scope of the problem. The thing you actually need to be tracking is the extent to which this is part of an implicitly or explicitly coordinated power play—see Arctotherium’s article for much more.
Re Zvi, yepp, he’s less bad at this than almost all rationalists. But there’s still this basic mental step of thinking “huh, isn’t it weird that the whole system is run by quote lying liars unquote. How did it get that way?” which he doesn’t even attempt as far as I can tell. The proximate mechanism here is that modern people have absorbed a bunch of propaganda about how unethical the past was re race and gender, and have therefore generalized to thinking that if the modern world is dysfunctional in some way, something like that was probably also true in the past. But if you examine even your intuitive mental model of, say, how much people in the past cared about “honor” (e.g. to the point of duelling to the death over it), then you’d notice some confusion about the idea that the West in past centuries was run primarily by the modern variety of lying liars.
Similarly, Eliezer’s stuff on inadequate equilibria is extraordinarily uncurious about the history of civilizational inadequacy.
Honor cultures are not generally seen as enlightened liberal Western stuff, so I’m a bit confused by this connection. Would you call gang members shooting each other in the streets over small slights today an example of this good thing you’re pointing at? (EDIT: Oh, I guess you mean specifically that they’re more honest)