Once upon a time I stumbled upon LessWrong. I read a lot of the basic material. At the time I found them to be worldview-changing. I also read a classic post with the quote
“I re-read the Sequences”, they tell me, “and everything in them seems so obvious. But I have this intense memory of considering them revelatory at the time.”
and thought “Huh, they are revelatory. Let’s see if that happens to me”.
(And guess what?)
There are these moments where I notice that something has changed. I remember reading some comment like “Rationalists have this typical mind fallacy, where they think that people in Debates and Public Conversations base and update their beliefs on evidence”. That kind of moments remind me that oh right, everyone is not on board with The Truth being Very Important, they just don’t really care that much, they care about some other things.
And I swear I haven’t always had a reflex of focusing on the truth values of statements people say. I have also noticed that most of the time the lens of truth-values-of-things-people-say is just a wrong frame, a wrong way of looking at things.
Which is to say: Quaker isn’t the default. By default truth is not the point.
(Which in turn makes me appreciate more those places and times where truth is the point.)
PS: Your recent posts have been good, the kind of posts why I got into LessWrong in the first place.
Once upon a time I stumbled upon LessWrong. I read a lot of the basic material. At the time I found them to be worldview-changing. I also read a classic post with the quote
and thought “Huh, they are revelatory. Let’s see if that happens to me”.
(And guess what?)
There are these moments where I notice that something has changed. I remember reading some comment like “Rationalists have this typical mind fallacy, where they think that people in Debates and Public Conversations base and update their beliefs on evidence”. That kind of moments remind me that oh right, everyone is not on board with The Truth being Very Important, they just don’t really care that much, they care about some other things.
And I swear I haven’t always had a reflex of focusing on the truth values of statements people say. I have also noticed that most of the time the lens of truth-values-of-things-people-say is just a wrong frame, a wrong way of looking at things.
Which is to say: Quaker isn’t the default. By default truth is not the point.
(Which in turn makes me appreciate more those places and times where truth is the point.)
PS: Your recent posts have been good, the kind of posts why I got into LessWrong in the first place.