Less Wrong has been significantly influenced by the skeptic movement.
It’s not clear to me that this is true. Instead of speaking about how one needs high standards of evidence the “official”-epistomology of LessWrong is Bayesianism that doesn’t have a concept of standard of evidence.
Instead of treating things as not passing a standard of evidence the Bayesian way is to treat something as providing a low amount of evidence that doesn’t cause a large update.
When I look at arguments people make on LessWrong I seldom see anybody referencing standards of evidence.
Ideal Bayesian reasoners can put low real numbers such as 0.000001% on some piece of evidence: organic brains can’t.
Real Bayesians have to round off to zero , ie. treat some things as not evidence at all.
And they do: Even though lesswrongians don’t often engage in explicit discussion of what is or isn’t evidence, they still have firm and fairly uniform opinions about it. You can see what happens to people with variant epistemologies by reading less wrong: they get downvoted, told they are not a good fit, etc.
I’m always skeptical of the official narratives of what people in a movement believe (yes I know, ironic to write this in a thread about post-skepticism)
If you look at big issues for this community like dealing with Xrisk where low probabilities are involved the standard skeptic response is to see the evidence for the Xrisks not being up to the standards of evidence.
The sequences make arguments about taking positions on topics like cryonics or the Many World Hypothesis that don’t fall in line with those of the skeptic community but are taking based on different epistemics.
You had people in the skeptic community nominating Elon Musk for the Luddite Award. It makes a lot of sense from the perspective of the skeptic community to do that and at the same time it’s very hard from a LessWrong perspective to see that nomination making sense.
Those are excellent points. Maybe it doesn’t apply to the community as a whole, but I still think there are a greater proportion of people with the archetypal skeptical mindset in the LW community than the general population. But in any case, my aim was to discuss the limits of skepticism; how widespread it is on LW is a side point.
It’s not clear to me that this is true. Instead of speaking about how one needs high standards of evidence the “official”-epistomology of LessWrong is Bayesianism that doesn’t have a concept of standard of evidence.
Except that it does because there are things that individual Bayesians won’t accept as evidence
Instead of treating things as not passing a standard of evidence the Bayesian way is to treat something as providing a low amount of evidence that doesn’t cause a large update.
When I look at arguments people make on LessWrong I seldom see anybody referencing standards of evidence.
Ideal Bayesian reasoners can put low real numbers such as 0.000001% on some piece of evidence: organic brains can’t.
Real Bayesians have to round off to zero , ie. treat some things as not evidence at all.
And they do: Even though lesswrongians don’t often engage in explicit discussion of what is or isn’t evidence, they still have firm and fairly uniform opinions about it. You can see what happens to people with variant epistemologies by reading less wrong: they get downvoted, told they are not a good fit, etc.
I’m always skeptical of the official narratives of what people in a movement believe (yes I know, ironic to write this in a thread about post-skepticism)
If you look at big issues for this community like dealing with Xrisk where low probabilities are involved the standard skeptic response is to see the evidence for the Xrisks not being up to the standards of evidence.
The sequences make arguments about taking positions on topics like cryonics or the Many World Hypothesis that don’t fall in line with those of the skeptic community but are taking based on different epistemics.
You had people in the skeptic community nominating Elon Musk for the Luddite Award. It makes a lot of sense from the perspective of the skeptic community to do that and at the same time it’s very hard from a LessWrong perspective to see that nomination making sense.
Those are excellent points. Maybe it doesn’t apply to the community as a whole, but I still think there are a greater proportion of people with the archetypal skeptical mindset in the LW community than the general population. But in any case, my aim was to discuss the limits of skepticism; how widespread it is on LW is a side point.