MathOverflow also has a much more well-defined subject. Math has a major advantage: Disagreement cannot occur unless something has gone drastically wrong. In contrast, rationalists who don’t have the same priors or have access to different evidence sets can disagree. (Aumann’s agreement theorem is a statement about the limiting behavior). Thus, it is easier to run a group for professionals (and I’m not completely sure what the analogous category for professional rationalists would be. There may not be any useful corresponding category).
Regarding Math is also deeper than rationality. There are subjects in math where to even understand the basics one needs to have spent years studying them. Rationality doesn’t have that sort of problem. So it isn’t at all clear to me what LessWrong would gain by sending anyone away.
There are subjects in math where to even understand the basics one needs to have spent years studying them
Rationality as taught here is a young and undisciplined field, probably equivalent of high school math curriculum. It’s not that there couldn’t be advanced things to learn, rationality as a field has not had it’s Laplace’s, Gauss’s, Leibniz’s, Euler’s...
Hrm, Laplace at least seems to have been a Laplace of rationality, and I think we might underestimate the strength of a lot of historical rationalists in general. Gautama Buddha is the extreme case, but it’s hard to know what the hell happened there. So I agree that it’s undisciplined, especially in the sense that it has few explicit disciples, but I’m not sure about its ‘youth’, as the foundations of epistemology seem to have been being pioneered since the dawn of humanity, and it’s hard to talk about the instrumental rationality of agents that seem to not have anything very obvious or tangible to be optimizing for (hence the self-understanding-oriented epistemology).
MathOverflow also has a much more well-defined subject. Math has a major advantage: Disagreement cannot occur unless something has gone drastically wrong. In contrast, rationalists who don’t have the same priors or have access to different evidence sets can disagree. (Aumann’s agreement theorem is a statement about the limiting behavior). Thus, it is easier to run a group for professionals (and I’m not completely sure what the analogous category for professional rationalists would be. There may not be any useful corresponding category).
Regarding Math is also deeper than rationality. There are subjects in math where to even understand the basics one needs to have spent years studying them. Rationality doesn’t have that sort of problem. So it isn’t at all clear to me what LessWrong would gain by sending anyone away.
Rationality as taught here is a young and undisciplined field, probably equivalent of high school math curriculum. It’s not that there couldn’t be advanced things to learn, rationality as a field has not had it’s Laplace’s, Gauss’s, Leibniz’s, Euler’s...
Hrm, Laplace at least seems to have been a Laplace of rationality, and I think we might underestimate the strength of a lot of historical rationalists in general. Gautama Buddha is the extreme case, but it’s hard to know what the hell happened there. So I agree that it’s undisciplined, especially in the sense that it has few explicit disciples, but I’m not sure about its ‘youth’, as the foundations of epistemology seem to have been being pioneered since the dawn of humanity, and it’s hard to talk about the instrumental rationality of agents that seem to not have anything very obvious or tangible to be optimizing for (hence the self-understanding-oriented epistemology).