I was mostly attracted to LW for epistemic rationality, and I think epistemic rationality (rather than life advice or creativity) is LW’s main advantage compared to all other online communities. It was also the subject of many posts by Eliezer, including the sequence Mysterious Answers which the wiki calls “probably the most important core sequence”. But your list doesn’t mention it, and indeed it doesn’t get much discussion on LW lately, though people like Abram and Scott Garrabrant (and me) are trying. I wonder how things ended up like this.
This comment made me update hard on epistemic rationality being an important thing we should continue to discuss more. I’m also not sure what to do about it.
I suppose because so much of the low hanging fruit has already been picked. The greatest limiting factor on most people here is not their epistemics. Though we definitely need some people to keep working on this irregardless.
It seems to me that the limiting factor is still epistemic rationality (or rather, relative power of epistemic rationality vs other factors), and moreover we are regressing. For example, old LW was able to say confidently that religion isn’t true and move on from that. We can’t do anything like that today.
I would be surprised if you could not say religion isn’t true and move on from that.
Also, I generally agree with your perspective that the best content on LW is about epistemic rationality (and usually tends more towards theoretical rationality than practical rationality, if I use the distinction Scott introduced below). And am interested in incentivizing more content in that direction.
I also think a lot of the best content on LW was of the form of fact-posts and cross-pollination of a large swath of separate existing bodies of knowledge (in the style of Sarah Constantin’s fact posts, Luke’s literature reviews and Scott’s analysis of various theoretical topics), which doesn’t really fit into any of the categories and is more related to something like “empirical big-picture studies on how the world functions”.
Do you suppose this could be a tension between epistemic and instrumental rationality, where ‘religion’ is recast as ‘social organization for value promotion and individual welfare’, rather than as assertions about the factual nature of the doctrine? It’s entirely possible I am simply missing the pro-faith posts/comments because I am dismissing them at a level beneath the one that I notice, but I have observed two things in the community over time:
1) In the Sequences, religion was specifically cited as worthy of emulation: directly related to this post and the Meta-tations post was the comparison with explanation-less contributions at temple, and also the comparison to the Catholic Church in the context of charity.
2) I noticed posts which simply re-cast religious preferences in the language of instrumental rationality, which appeared to boil down to asserting that belief-in-belief was rational.
In the old LW immediately before I made the switch to LW2, there were posts appearing which expressly advocated supernatural practices as instrumentally rational, with little disagreement. That was when I personally jumped ship for LW2.
I was mostly attracted to LW for epistemic rationality, and I think epistemic rationality (rather than life advice or creativity) is LW’s main advantage compared to all other online communities. It was also the subject of many posts by Eliezer, including the sequence Mysterious Answers which the wiki calls “probably the most important core sequence”. But your list doesn’t mention it, and indeed it doesn’t get much discussion on LW lately, though people like Abram and Scott Garrabrant (and me) are trying. I wonder how things ended up like this.
This comment made me update hard on epistemic rationality being an important thing we should continue to discuss more. I’m also not sure what to do about it.
I suppose because so much of the low hanging fruit has already been picked. The greatest limiting factor on most people here is not their epistemics. Though we definitely need some people to keep working on this irregardless.
It seems to me that the limiting factor is still epistemic rationality (or rather, relative power of epistemic rationality vs other factors), and moreover we are regressing. For example, old LW was able to say confidently that religion isn’t true and move on from that. We can’t do anything like that today.
I would be surprised if you could not say religion isn’t true and move on from that.
Also, I generally agree with your perspective that the best content on LW is about epistemic rationality (and usually tends more towards theoretical rationality than practical rationality, if I use the distinction Scott introduced below). And am interested in incentivizing more content in that direction.
I also think a lot of the best content on LW was of the form of fact-posts and cross-pollination of a large swath of separate existing bodies of knowledge (in the style of Sarah Constantin’s fact posts, Luke’s literature reviews and Scott’s analysis of various theoretical topics), which doesn’t really fit into any of the categories and is more related to something like “empirical big-picture studies on how the world functions”.
We can’t? Do you have in mind the Mythic Mode post or something like that?
Do you suppose this could be a tension between epistemic and instrumental rationality, where ‘religion’ is recast as ‘social organization for value promotion and individual welfare’, rather than as assertions about the factual nature of the doctrine? It’s entirely possible I am simply missing the pro-faith posts/comments because I am dismissing them at a level beneath the one that I notice, but I have observed two things in the community over time:
1) In the Sequences, religion was specifically cited as worthy of emulation: directly related to this post and the Meta-tations post was the comparison with explanation-less contributions at temple, and also the comparison to the Catholic Church in the context of charity.
2) I noticed posts which simply re-cast religious preferences in the language of instrumental rationality, which appeared to boil down to asserting that belief-in-belief was rational.
In the old LW immediately before I made the switch to LW2, there were posts appearing which expressly advocated supernatural practices as instrumentally rational, with little disagreement. That was when I personally jumped ship for LW2.
Very interested in links of the last type.