Thanks a lot! It’s a good comment by Scott on Sailor Vulcan’s post. I have added it and your other links to the page’s “see also” on my site.
I like this paragraph in particular. It captures the tension between the pursuit of epistemic and instrumental rationality:
I think my complaint is: once you become a self-help community, you start developing the sorts of epistemic norms that help you be a self-help community, and you start attracting the sort of people who are attracted to self-help communities. And then, if ten years later, someone says “Hey, are we sure we shouldn’t go back to being pure truth-seekers?”, it’s going to be a very different community that discusses the answer to that question.
I think we have an example of the first part because it has happened with the postrationalists. As a group, postrationalists are influenced by LW but embrace weaker epistemic norms for what they consider practical reasons. A major theme in “a postrationalist syllabus” is superficially irrational beliefs and behaviors that turn out to be effective, which (generalizing) postrationalists try to harness. This exacerbates the problem of schools proliferating without evidence, as reflected in this joke.
I just imagined a possible April Fools article that I am too lazy to actually write, but the idea is that it would announce a new (fictional) feature of the Less Wrong website—you can write posts and comments using two different colors: everything written in black is supposed to be epistemically rational, and everything written in blue is supposed to be instrumentally rational. The new rule is that you should upvote black texts if they are true, and downvote them if they are false, but you should upvote blue texts if they are useful to believe, and downvote them if they are harmful to believe. So it is okay to write something like “Jesus loves you and has a personal plan for you” as long as you write it in blue font. By using both colors, we can achieve the epistemic and instrumental rationality at the same time. (There is a new option in settings for the post-rationalists that sets blue as their default font color.)
Thanks a lot! It’s a good comment by Scott on Sailor Vulcan’s post. I have added it and your other links to the page’s “see also” on my site.
I like this paragraph in particular. It captures the tension between the pursuit of epistemic and instrumental rationality:
I think we have an example of the first part because it has happened with the postrationalists. As a group, postrationalists are influenced by LW but embrace weaker epistemic norms for what they consider practical reasons. A major theme in “a postrationalist syllabus” is superficially irrational beliefs and behaviors that turn out to be effective, which (generalizing) postrationalists try to harness. This exacerbates the problem of schools proliferating without evidence, as reflected in this joke.
I just imagined a possible April Fools article that I am too lazy to actually write, but the idea is that it would announce a new (fictional) feature of the Less Wrong website—you can write posts and comments using two different colors: everything written in black is supposed to be epistemically rational, and everything written in blue is supposed to be instrumentally rational. The new rule is that you should upvote black texts if they are true, and downvote them if they are false, but you should upvote blue texts if they are useful to believe, and downvote them if they are harmful to believe. So it is okay to write something like “Jesus loves you and has a personal plan for you” as long as you write it in blue font. By using both colors, we can achieve the epistemic and instrumental rationality at the same time. (There is a new option in settings for the post-rationalists that sets blue as their default font color.)