I’m very sorry that we seem to be going around in circles on this one. In many ways, the whole point of that call to doing “post-rationality” was indeed an attempt to better engage with the sort of people who, as you say, “have epistemology as a dumpstat”. It was a call to understand that no, engaging in dark side epistemology does not necessarily make one a werewolf that’s just trying to muddy the surface-level issues, that indeed there is a there there. Absent a very carefully laid-out argument about what exactly it is that’s being expected of us I’m never going to accept the prospect that the rationalist community should be apologizing for our incredibly hard work in trying to salvage something workable out of the surface-level craziness that is the rhetoric and arguments that these people ordinarily make. Because, as a matter of fact, calling for that would be the quickest way by far of plunging the community back to the RationalWiki-level knee-jerk reflex of shouting “werewolf, werewolf! Out, out out, begone from this community!” whenever we see a “dark-side-epistemology” pattern being deployed.
(I also think that this whole concern with “safety” is something that I’ve addressed already. But of course, in principle, there’s no reason why we couldn’t simply encompass that into what we mean by a standard/norm being “ineffective”—and I think that I have been explicitly allowing for this with my previous comment.)
I does seem weird why so little communication is achieved with so many words.
I might be conflicted with interpreting messages in opposite directions on different layers.
> Clearly, if we retroactively tried to apply the argument “we (RationalWiki/the rationalist community) should be a lot more pro-theist than we are, and we cannot allow this to be debated under any circumstances because that would clearly lead to very bad consequences”, we would’ve been selling the community short.
This seem like a statement that argument of “we should be pro-teist & can not allow debate because bad consequence” would have been an error. If it would have been presented as proposal it would have indeed been an argument. “can not allow debate” would seem like a stance against being able to start arguments. It seems self-refuting and in general wanting censorship of censorship which I have very thought time on whether it’s for or against censorship. Now the situation would be very different if there was a silent or assumed consensus that debate could not be had, but it’s kinda differnt if debate and decision not to have debate is had.
I lost how exactly it relates to this but I realised that the “look these guys spreading known falsehoods” kind of attitude made me not want to engage socially probably by pattern-matching to a sufficiently lost soul to not be reachable within discussion timeframe. And I realised that the standard for sanity I was using for that comparison came from my local culture and realised that the “sanity waterline” situation here might be good enough that I don’t understand other peoples need for order. And the funny thing being that there is enough “sanity seeking” within religious groups that I was used for veteran religious persons to guide novice religious persons away from those pitfalls. If someone was praying for a miracle for themselfs that would be punished and intervened and I kinda knew the guidance even if I didn’t really feel “team religion”. Asking for mysterious power for your personal benefit is magic. It’s audacious to ask for that and it would not be good for the moral development of the prayer to grant that prayer. That is phrased in terms of virtue instead of epistemology. But never the less it’s insanity by other conceptualization. The other kind of argumentation avenue that focuses that prayer doesn’t work seemed primitive by comparison. I was way too intune in tracking how sane vs insane religion works to really believe a pitting of reason vs religion (I guess reading there is that kind of pitting present in parents of this comment, I think I am assuming that other people might have all of their or essentially all of their religion pool insane so that their opinion of religion as insane is justified (and even came up with stories why it could be so because of history)).
I guess part of what sparked me initially to write was that “increasing description length” of things that worsens overall utility seemd like making non-sense harder to understand. My impression was that it’s the goal to make nonsense plainly and easy so. There is some allusion that there is some kind of zero-sum going on with description lengths. But my impression was that people have a hard time processing any kind of option and that shortening of all options is on the table.
I had some idea about how if a decison procedure is too reflex like it doesn’t ever enter into concious mind to be subject to critique. But negating a unreflective decision procedure is not intelligence. So what you want is have it enter into concious thought where you can verify it’s appropriateness (where it can be selectively allowed). If you are suffering from an optical illusion you do not close your eye but critically evaluate what you are seeing.
I’m very sorry that we seem to be going around in circles on this one. In many ways, the whole point of that call to doing “post-rationality” was indeed an attempt to better engage with the sort of people who, as you say, “have epistemology as a dumpstat”. It was a call to understand that no, engaging in dark side epistemology does not necessarily make one a werewolf that’s just trying to muddy the surface-level issues, that indeed there is a there there. Absent a very carefully laid-out argument about what exactly it is that’s being expected of us I’m never going to accept the prospect that the rationalist community should be apologizing for our incredibly hard work in trying to salvage something workable out of the surface-level craziness that is the rhetoric and arguments that these people ordinarily make. Because, as a matter of fact, calling for that would be the quickest way by far of plunging the community back to the RationalWiki-level knee-jerk reflex of shouting “werewolf, werewolf! Out, out out, begone from this community!” whenever we see a “dark-side-epistemology” pattern being deployed.
(I also think that this whole concern with “safety” is something that I’ve addressed already. But of course, in principle, there’s no reason why we couldn’t simply encompass that into what we mean by a standard/norm being “ineffective”—and I think that I have been explicitly allowing for this with my previous comment.)
I does seem weird why so little communication is achieved with so many words.
I might be conflicted with interpreting messages in opposite directions on different layers.
> Clearly, if we retroactively tried to apply the argument “we (RationalWiki/the rationalist community) should be a lot more pro-theist than we are, and we cannot allow this to be debated under any circumstances because that would clearly lead to very bad consequences”, we would’ve been selling the community short.
This seem like a statement that argument of “we should be pro-teist & can not allow debate because bad consequence” would have been an error. If it would have been presented as proposal it would have indeed been an argument. “can not allow debate” would seem like a stance against being able to start arguments. It seems self-refuting and in general wanting censorship of censorship which I have very thought time on whether it’s for or against censorship. Now the situation would be very different if there was a silent or assumed consensus that debate could not be had, but it’s kinda differnt if debate and decision not to have debate is had.
I lost how exactly it relates to this but I realised that the “look these guys spreading known falsehoods” kind of attitude made me not want to engage socially probably by pattern-matching to a sufficiently lost soul to not be reachable within discussion timeframe. And I realised that the standard for sanity I was using for that comparison came from my local culture and realised that the “sanity waterline” situation here might be good enough that I don’t understand other peoples need for order. And the funny thing being that there is enough “sanity seeking” within religious groups that I was used for veteran religious persons to guide novice religious persons away from those pitfalls. If someone was praying for a miracle for themselfs that would be punished and intervened and I kinda knew the guidance even if I didn’t really feel “team religion”. Asking for mysterious power for your personal benefit is magic. It’s audacious to ask for that and it would not be good for the moral development of the prayer to grant that prayer. That is phrased in terms of virtue instead of epistemology. But never the less it’s insanity by other conceptualization. The other kind of argumentation avenue that focuses that prayer doesn’t work seemed primitive by comparison. I was way too intune in tracking how sane vs insane religion works to really believe a pitting of reason vs religion (I guess reading there is that kind of pitting present in parents of this comment, I think I am assuming that other people might have all of their or essentially all of their religion pool insane so that their opinion of religion as insane is justified (and even came up with stories why it could be so because of history)).
I guess part of what sparked me initially to write was that “increasing description length” of things that worsens overall utility seemd like making non-sense harder to understand. My impression was that it’s the goal to make nonsense plainly and easy so. There is some allusion that there is some kind of zero-sum going on with description lengths. But my impression was that people have a hard time processing any kind of option and that shortening of all options is on the table.
I had some idea about how if a decison procedure is too reflex like it doesn’t ever enter into concious mind to be subject to critique. But negating a unreflective decision procedure is not intelligence. So what you want is have it enter into concious thought where you can verify it’s appropriateness (where it can be selectively allowed). If you are suffering from an optical illusion you do not close your eye but critically evaluate what you are seeing.