Eh, it’s pretty obvious that there is a thing that corresponds to “beliefs of the rationality community” or “broad consensus of the rationality community”, and also pretty obvious that those broadly get a lot of things more right than many other sources of ideas one could listen to. Of course, it might still be fine advice to try really hard to think through things for yourself, but like, calling the existence of such a thing as something that one could even hypothetically assign trust to a “delusion” just seems straightforwardly wrong.
While I agree that it’s a part of shared mapmaking that ‘exists’ (i.e. is a common referent people coordinate around), I do think that the process that determines what’s publicly considered “the beliefs of the rationality community” is fairly different from the actual consensus positions of those LessWrongers and MIRI/CFAR/LW staff (and others) who have shown themselves to be the most surprisingly correct thinkers, and it seems accurate for Zack to make the point that you’ll be subject to systematic error if you make the two things identical in your map of the world.
Oh, yeah, totally. I had understood Zack to make an ontological argument in the first paragraph that such an entity cannot coherently exist, or alternatively that “it is not deserving of anyone’s trust”, both of which seem like statements that are too strong to me, and I think neither correspond to the thing you are saying here. The rest of the comment seems pretty good and I agree with most of it.
Eh, it’s pretty obvious that there is a thing that corresponds to “beliefs of the rationality community” or “broad consensus of the rationality community”, and also pretty obvious that those broadly get a lot of things more right than many other sources of ideas one could listen to. Of course, it might still be fine advice to try really hard to think through things for yourself, but like, calling the existence of such a thing as something that one could even hypothetically assign trust to a “delusion” just seems straightforwardly wrong.
While I agree that it’s a part of shared mapmaking that ‘exists’ (i.e. is a common referent people coordinate around), I do think that the process that determines what’s publicly considered “the beliefs of the rationality community” is fairly different from the actual consensus positions of those LessWrongers and MIRI/CFAR/LW staff (and others) who have shown themselves to be the most surprisingly correct thinkers, and it seems accurate for Zack to make the point that you’ll be subject to systematic error if you make the two things identical in your map of the world.
Oh, yeah, totally. I had understood Zack to make an ontological argument in the first paragraph that such an entity cannot coherently exist, or alternatively that “it is not deserving of anyone’s trust”, both of which seem like statements that are too strong to me, and I think neither correspond to the thing you are saying here. The rest of the comment seems pretty good and I agree with most of it.