At the rationality meetup today, there was a great newcomer. He’s read up most of Eliezer’s Yudkowsky’s original Sequences up to 2010, and he’s also read a handful of posts promoted on the front page. As a landing pad for the rationalist community, to me, Less Wrong seems to be about updating beyond the abstract reasoning principles of philosophy past, toward realizing that through a combination of microeconomics, probability theory, decision theory, cognitive science, social psychology, and information theory, that humans can each hack their own minds, and notice how they use heuristics, to increase their success rate at which they form functional beliefs, and achieve their goals.
Then, I think about how if someone has only been following the rationalist community of Less Wrong for the last few years, and then they come to a meetup for the first time in 2014, everyone else who’s been around for a few years will be talking about things that don’t seem to fit with the above model of what the rationalist community is about. Putting myself back into a newcomer/outsider perspective, here are some memes that don’t seem to immediately, obviously follow from ‘cultivating rationality habits’:
Citing Moloch, an ancient demon, as a metaphorical source of all the problems humanity currently faces.
How a long series of essays yearning for the days of yore has led to intensely insular discussion of polarizedcontrariansocial movements, This doesn’t square with how Less Wrong has historically avoided political debates because of how they often drift to ideological bickering, name-calling, and signaling allegiance to a coalition. Such debates aren’t usually conducive to everyone reaching more accurate conclusions together, but we’re having them anyway.
I’m not calling for Less Wrong to write a press coverage package, or protocol. However, I want to foster a local community at which I can discuss cognitive science, and the applications of microeconomics of everyday life, without new friends getting hung up on the weird beliefs they associate me with.
Additionally, in growing the local meetup, my friends, and I, in Vancouver, have gone to other meetups, and seeded the idea that it’s worth our friend’s time to check out Less Wrong. We’ve made waves to the point that a local student newspaper may want to publish an article about what Less Wrong is about, and profile some of my friends in particular. However, this has backfired to the point where I meet new people, or talk to old friends, and they’re associating me with creepy beliefs I don’t follow. It sucks that I feel I might have to do damage control for my personal standing in a close-knit community. So, I’m going to try writing another post detailing all the boring, useful ideas on Less Wrong nobody else notices, such as Luke’s posts about scientific self-help, or Scott’s great arguments in favor or niceness, community, and having better debates by interpreting your opponent’s arguments charitably, or the repositories of useful resources.
If you have links/resources about the most boring useful ideas on Less Wrong, or an introduction that highlights, e.g., all the discourse of Less Wrong which is merely the practical applications of scientific insight for everyday life, please share them below. I’ll try including them in whatever guide I generate.
I think one of the things worth noting about LW is that Holden Karnofsky Thoughts on the Singularity Institute is the top rated post. LW is a space where you can argue against the orthodox views if you bring arguments.
This distinguish LW from nearly every other online forum.
I don’t think that online forums need media exposure. The usual way to find an online forum is through a Google search or through a shared link to a discussion.
Holden Karnofsky is a high-status person, which is the most important factor. I don’t think the same criticism by someone else would have received as many upvotes.
Holden Karnofsky is a high-status person, which is the most important factor.
If that would be the case all post by high status people should get a high amount of votes. I think it’s hard to explain via status why Karnofsky’s post got more votes than any single post by Yudkowsky of the sequences.
The big deal is him being a high status outsider who made a contribution with a great deal of effort in it. It can be taken for granted that high-status insiders make many contributions.
It’s about a surrounding society’s measure of status, not about the community’s. Celebrity-outsiders (high status on the outside, indeterminate status on the inside) dropping in at Reddit often get a very positive reception for example. Random-person-outsiders (indeterminate status both outside and inside) get the random person outsider reception. The drop-in celebrities at Reddit probably don’t net the top ratings for the whole site, given how Reddit is huge, but a small forum that doesn’t have that much inside vote activity could easily end up treating an interesting high outside status person dropping in as the most interesting event in the forum history.
It’s about a surrounding society’s measure of status, not about the community’s.
I don’t think Holden Karnofsky is high status as far as society goes. Outside of people with interest in Effective Altruism he’s just a random person running an NGO.
Social status has many dimensions. Credible professionalism and a position to affect an organization with notable resources and visibility are pretty robust ones.
Personally, I upvoted that post for cogency and pertinence. I didn’t know enough about Holden Karnofsky to distinguish him systematically from background until that post.
I’m curious. Who is Holden Karnofsky high-status to, in your opinion? I mean, I acknowledge that this website, and effective altruism, and maybe a subset of the philanthropy community in the United States is very enthusiastic about the work he does. If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t have given Givewell $1000 USD last year.
However, my friends from outside the efficient charity cluster don’t know who he is, and I doubt would update to extolling his greatness as soon as I explained what he does anyway.
Of course status is highly context and group specific. Status is relative, not absolute. He has high status in effective altruism / rationality cluster because he’s probably the most highly accomplished in this group.
No, I don’t think that is the key difference. I think the reason that SIAI (at the time) payed attention to Karnofsky is that he was willing to signal his in-group membership and speak the local jargon, thereby preventing his criticisms from being immediately dismissed (I think MIRI has gotten better about this lately, but they’ve been pitching themselves so high-status that it’s screwing with my intuition about their likely behavior :/ )
Holden Karnofsky is great, and Less Wrong is a great discussion board in a community for being so receptive of arguing against orthodox views. If he identified as a rationalist, I’m sure this community would be fine counting Holden Karnofsky among themselves. However, some media coverage Less Wrong has received is exactly as it is because bloggers, or journalists, or whoever, don’t come to this site to have a dialogue, and for both sides to learn something from each other.
I don’t think that online forums need media exposure. The usual way to find an online forum is through a Google search or through a shared link to a discussion.
I wrote this comment in the moment without lots of forethought, so I didn’t clarify myself enough. I haven’t invited a student journalist to write an article about Less Wrong to get good press coverage because others are worse. The publication is small enough that it wouldn’t get enough traffic to change the outside cultural perspective of Less Wrong’s culture anyway. One of the editors mentioned to this student journalist that I’m an organizer for the local meetup, and he came with me with lots of questions. Before he asked, he mentioned his impression thus far of Less Wrong was that it was full of ‘hyper-rationalist pseudoscience’, and that a typical belief of Less Wrong was of that of a fear-inspiring imaginary counter-factual monster I need not mention by name.
Anyway, in particular, he may want to profile the local meetup. So, I could let him go on impressions he gets from Slate, and RationalWiki, alone, or he could talk to me, and get an impression that Less Wrong is about literally anything else besides fringe transhumanism.
If the article really becomes a thing, I will invite the journalist to interface with Less Wrong as Holden has. If the article is about ‘what is this intellectual community we [the readership] have heard popping up in town, and what do they believe?’, I will now direct him to the Less Wrong survey results. You’ve inspired me to do this with your feedback, ChristianKI, so thanks.
I’m not calling for Less Wrong to write a press coverage package, or protocol.
Why not?
A better Wiki page on the community could be a start. Maybe Wiki’s entry on “Less Wrong” (with a space in between) should redirect there, rather than to Eliezer’s page (as it currently does) and that might attract attention from people who first google the term.
At the time I wrote the original comment, I didn’t want to come across as going on a crusade to change everything out of some sort of over-reaction, so I downplayed what could have been construed as my intentions. However, I don’t see a problem with creating it. I don’t know if I’ll do this myself. What I will do though is post a comment in the next open thread about if there’s any changes Less Wrong members want to see made to the Less Wrong Wiki. It’s a neglected but valuable resource that become even better with more additions.
I’d say that the Moloch thing isn’t that much more weird than our other local eschatological shorthands (“FAI”, “Great Filter”, etc.). That’s just my insider’s perspective, though, so take with many grains of salt.
I believe you’re right. I’m not familiar with the Great Filter being lambasted outside of Less Wrong, but myself, and the people I know personally, have generally discussed the Great Filter less than we have Friendly A.I. On one hand, the Great Filter seems more associated with Overcoming Bias, so coverage of it is tangential to, and having a neutral impact upon, Less Wrong. On the other hand, I spend more time on this website, so my impression could be due to the availability heuristic only. In that case, please share any outside media coverage you know of the Great Filter.
Anyway, I chose Moloch to stay current, and also because citing a baby-eating demon as the destroyer of the world seems even more eschatological than Friendly A.I. So, Moloch strikes me as potentially even more prone to misinterpretation. (un)Friendly A.I. has already been wholly conflated with a scandal about a counterfactual monster that need not be named. It seems to me that that could snowball into misinterpretations of Moloch bouncing across the blogosphere like a game of Broken Telephone until there’s a widely-read article about Less Wrong having gone about atheism, and rationalism, so thoroughly wrong that it flipped back around to ancient religions.
The fact that Less Wrong periodically has to do damage control because there is even anything on this website that can be misinterpreted as eschatology seems demonstrative of a persistent image problem. Morosely, the fact that the outside perspective misinterprets something from this site as dangerous eschatology, perhaps because someone would have to read lots of now relatively obscure blog posts to otherwise grok it, doesn’t surprise me too much.
It seems to me that that could snowball into misinterpretations of Moloch bouncing across the blogosphere like a game of Broken Telephone until there’s a widely-read article about Less Wrong having gone about atheism, and rationalism, so thoroughly wrong that it flipped back around to ancient religions.
This seems pretty unlikely to me. I think the key difference from the uFAI thing is that if you ask a Less Wrong regular “So what is this ‘unFriendly AI’ thing you all talk about? It can’t possibly be as ridiculous as what that article on Slate was saying, can it?”*, then the answer you get will probably sound exactly as silly as the caricature, if not worse, and you’re likely to conclude that LW is some kind of crazy cult or something.
On the other hand, if you ask your LW-regular friend “So what’s the deal with this ‘Moloch’ thing? You guys don’t really believe in baby-easting demons, do you?”, they’ll say something like “What? No, of course not. We just use ‘Moloch’ as a sort of metaphorical shorthand for a certain kind of organizational failure. It comes from this great essay, you should read it...” which is all perfectly reasonable and will do nothing to perpetuate the original ludicrous rumor. Nobody will say “I know somebody who goes on LessWrong, and he says they really do worship the blasphemous gods of ancient Mesopotamia!”, so the rumor will have much less plausibility and will be easily debunked.
* Overall this is of course an outdated example, since MIRI/FHI/etc. have pulled a spectacular public makeover of Friendly AI in the past year or so.
How a long series of essays yearning for the days of yore has led to intensely insular discussion of polarized contrarian social movements, This doesn’t square with how Less Wrong has historically avoided political debates because of how they often drift to ideological bickering, name-calling, and signaling allegiance to a coalition.
Please note that none of those links points to a LessWrong page. They are two personal blogs. Personal blogs don’t have to follow LW policies.
I consider Moldbug almost completely irrelevant for LW. He has a few fans here, but they are a tiny minority (probably fewer than e.g. religious LW members). We don’t consider him a rationalist blogger, and don’t link to him in a list of rationalist blogs.
Scott is a LW member who has posted a few articles here; that is much more relevant. But anyway, SSC is his personal blog. (Also, his articles seem sufficiently sane to me—I would love to see more political debates be done like this.)
I guess we need a definition of some core principles of LW community, so the newcomers know what is canonical and what is not. May I suggest Sequences?
Scott is a LW member who has posted a few articles here
This seems like a significant understatement given that Scott has the second highest karma of all-time on LW (after only Eliezer). Even if he doesn’t post much here directly anymore, he’s still probably the biggest thought leader the broader rational community has right now.
I should have provided more context to assuage confusion. The Talon is an alternative social justice publication at a local university. Their editorial board overlaps with the skeptic community in Vancouver itself, which is quite insular, which overlaps with the rationality meetup in Vancouver, too.
There has been some ideological bickering, name-calling, and signaling allegiance to a coalition of classic skeptic community v. Less Wrong perspectives on the Internet, and at various meetups, maybe at pubs, in Vancouver. I myself, among others, may not have engaged in discussions, or debates, as judiciously as would have been prudent. This also involved arguments over articles written on Slate Star Codex, which ‘social justice warriors’, as some call them(selves), find upsetting.
However, none of us here on Less Wrong knew there was enough chatter going around that the first time I meet a journalist, he knew who I was, and asked him why my friends held such peculiar beliefs that are out of line with mainstream scientific consensus if we’re ‘rationalists’. He was a friendly guy I actually like, but his misconceptions seemed worrisome, if he wanted to profile people I know personally. I don’t want a schism rising in my neck of the woods where my friends and I are seen as kooky neckbeards as soon as we enter a public space.
Yeah, when someone is very famous on LW, then even if they publish something on their private blog, it feels like an “idea connected with LW”, especially if the readerships overlap. :(
No idea what to do about this. I support Scott’s right to write whatever he wants on his blog; and the rules of LW do not apply for his blog. On the other hand, yes, people will see the connection anyway. It’s like when someone is a celebrity, they lose their private life, because everything they do is a food for gossip.
(Heck, Scott doesn’t even write under the same name on LW and SSC. But everyone knows anyway. What a horrible thing; not only one has to hide their true name, but even keep their individual pseudonyms hidden from each other.)
why my friends held such peculiar beliefs that are out of line with mainstream scientific consensus if we’re ‘rationalists’.
Uhm, I missed the connection somewhere. As far as I know, social justice warriors are not mainstream scientific consensus. And Scott doesn’t blog about many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics. :)
Okay, now seriously. I think you maybe overestimate the mainstream status of SJWs. What’s upsetting for them, is not necessarily upsetting for an average person. And optimizing for them… pretty much means following their doctrines, or avoiding discussing any social issues.
(Connotationally: I am not saying “upsetting SJWs is okay”, although I am also not saying it isn’t. Just that SJWs are not mainstream. So do we worry about the image in the eyes of mainstream, or in the eyes of SJWs?)
Right, obviously, I should have thought of this. The skeptic movement tends to be alternative, and socially liberal, and Vancouver city is full of skeptics who are also activists. ‘Vancouver Rationalists’ overlaps with the ‘Vancouver Skeptics’, and sometimes we talk to them without always being humble enough. Among these people are a few friends.
Let’s put ourselves in their shoes
We’re a bunch of people who feel (society is) threatened by others’ abuse of social privilege. Not always, and not by most of them, but we notice much of this type of abuse is at the hands of white males. Now we notice a bunch of one type of white male showing up at our safe spaces, often talking about this online community of (mostly) the one same type of white males. This community of (mostly) white males seems to disdain political activism and seem like they might be the same type of male jerks at college who say women can’t do math and science. And this online community believes they’re so good at science they can figure out even what Ph.D’s can, which doesn’t line up with skepticism. And the most popular white male blogger in this community should be allowed a safe space where anyone can say triggering things without using trigger warnings, they think we’re too politically correct, and they think there’s not enough evidence behind our activism.
...and back in our own shoes
Imagining the above, which even if it’s oversimplifying, makes it seems how some poor communication begetting tension seem obvious for Vancouver, if not other places.
*(a better, in a sensitive way, word than ‘warrior’)
However, I want to foster a local community at which I can discuss cognitive science, and the applications of microeconomics of everyday life, without new friends getting hung up on the weird beliefs they associate me with.
I am not quite sure what are you saying here. It does sound like you want LW to change so that it becomes more acceptable to your new friends and that seems to me a strange way to approach things.
For the last few years, my friend Eric and I have been part of the skeptic community in Vancouver. He had been involved with the rationalist community for a couple of years before I was, and then I eventually came around. After having each gone to CFAR workshops, Eric, a couple other CFAR alumni friends, and myself returned to Vancouver inspired and excited to seed a community as vibrant as that in the Bay Area. So, we go to other meetups for skeptics, and the like, and discuss their ideas, and tell them if they want to expand the sort of thinking going on at skeptics meetups to novel topics, to join us at our Less Wrong meetup.
We have also reached out to some local university clubs, the local Bitcoin scene, and the life extension community. This has gone phenomenal. I feel like we’re finally putting all the pieces of the correct contrarian cluster puzzle together. ‘Hanging out with my closest friends’, and ‘learning important things with others’ are synonymous in my social life.
However, with the few skeptics groups, with a misplaced explanation of a technological singularity here, and a heated debate on cryonics my other friend had over there, I’ve meet people at parties asking me why I hold peculiar beliefs that I don’t hold. The freethought community in Vancouver is very insular, as over half the city, by census data, identifies as not belonging to a major religious denomination. We got too enthusiastic in growing the meetup, turned some people off, and gossip started. If an article is written poorly, than not for all of Less Wrong, but for my friends, and I, in particular the pattern could become crystallized that we’re kooks only pretending to be freethinkers. This wouldn’t bode well, but in collaboration, I can help decrease distrust, and strengthen bonds between two communities that seem like they should be allies rather than enemies. This doesn’t affect the whole community, maybe just my corner of it. Suggestions are welcome.
Well, my original post started out with one thesis that morphed into another by the time I finished writing it. At this point, with what I’ve learned in dialogue with other users, is that, of course I can’t change Less Wrong. I didn’t want to in the first place, anyhow. However, what’s going on is that Less Wrong was my impetus in generating a conundrum I may now mitigate, and I thought I’d return to Less Wrong to ask for its advice on handling the issue. This makes sense all the more because the community can share with me their maybe similar impressions, or experiences, because the community is made of people.
In this regard, this is how I should have thought from the beginning. What others I know personally think of Less Wrong is a feature, but not the source, of my problem.
If an article is written poorly, than not for all of Less Wrong, but for my friends, and I, in particular the pattern could become crystallized that we’re kooks only pretending to be freethinkers.
Well, I have the same opinion of most of the people calling themselves “freethinkers”.
At the rationality meetup today, there was a great newcomer. He’s read up most of Eliezer’s Yudkowsky’s original Sequences up to 2010, and he’s also read a handful of posts promoted on the front page. As a landing pad for the rationalist community, to me, Less Wrong seems to be about updating beyond the abstract reasoning principles of philosophy past, toward realizing that through a combination of microeconomics, probability theory, decision theory, cognitive science, social psychology, and information theory, that humans can each hack their own minds, and notice how they use heuristics, to increase their success rate at which they form functional beliefs, and achieve their goals.
Then, I think about how if someone has only been following the rationalist community of Less Wrong for the last few years, and then they come to a meetup for the first time in 2014, everyone else who’s been around for a few years will be talking about things that don’t seem to fit with the above model of what the rationalist community is about. Putting myself back into a newcomer/outsider perspective, here are some memes that don’t seem to immediately, obviously follow from ‘cultivating rationality habits’:
Citing Moloch, an ancient demon, as a metaphorical source of all the problems humanity currently faces.
How a long series of essays yearning for the days of yore has led to intensely insular discussion of polarized contrarian social movements, This doesn’t square with how Less Wrong has historically avoided political debates because of how they often drift to ideological bickering, name-calling, and signaling allegiance to a coalition. Such debates aren’t usually conducive to everyone reaching more accurate conclusions together, but we’re having them anyway.
Some of us reversing our previous opinions on what’s fundamentally true, or false.
Less Wrong is also welcomes discussion of contrarian, and controversial, ideas, such as cryopreservation, and transhumanism. If this is the first thing somebody learns about Less Wrong through the grapevine, the first independent sources they may come across may be rather unflattering of the community as a whole, and disproportionately cynical about what most of us actually believe. Furthermore, controversy attracts media coverage like moths to a flame, which hasn’t gone to well for Less Wrong, and which falsely paints divergent opinions as our majority beliefs.
I’m not calling for Less Wrong to write a press coverage package, or protocol. However, I want to foster a local community at which I can discuss cognitive science, and the applications of microeconomics of everyday life, without new friends getting hung up on the weird beliefs they associate me with.
Additionally, in growing the local meetup, my friends, and I, in Vancouver, have gone to other meetups, and seeded the idea that it’s worth our friend’s time to check out Less Wrong. We’ve made waves to the point that a local student newspaper may want to publish an article about what Less Wrong is about, and profile some of my friends in particular. However, this has backfired to the point where I meet new people, or talk to old friends, and they’re associating me with creepy beliefs I don’t follow. It sucks that I feel I might have to do damage control for my personal standing in a close-knit community. So, I’m going to try writing another post detailing all the boring, useful ideas on Less Wrong nobody else notices, such as Luke’s posts about scientific self-help, or Scott’s great arguments in favor or niceness, community, and having better debates by interpreting your opponent’s arguments charitably, or the repositories of useful resources.
If you have links/resources about the most boring useful ideas on Less Wrong, or an introduction that highlights, e.g., all the discourse of Less Wrong which is merely the practical applications of scientific insight for everyday life, please share them below. I’ll try including them in whatever guide I generate.
I think one of the things worth noting about LW is that Holden Karnofsky Thoughts on the Singularity Institute is the top rated post. LW is a space where you can argue against the orthodox views if you bring arguments. This distinguish LW from nearly every other online forum.
I don’t think that online forums need media exposure. The usual way to find an online forum is through a Google search or through a shared link to a discussion.
Holden Karnofsky is a high-status person, which is the most important factor. I don’t think the same criticism by someone else would have received as many upvotes.
If that would be the case all post by high status people should get a high amount of votes. I think it’s hard to explain via status why Karnofsky’s post got more votes than any single post by Yudkowsky of the sequences.
The big deal is him being a high status outsider who made a contribution with a great deal of effort in it. It can be taken for granted that high-status insiders make many contributions.
How many online community are there that considers outsiders to be high status to an extend that the highest rated post is by an outsider?
It’s about a surrounding society’s measure of status, not about the community’s. Celebrity-outsiders (high status on the outside, indeterminate status on the inside) dropping in at Reddit often get a very positive reception for example. Random-person-outsiders (indeterminate status both outside and inside) get the random person outsider reception. The drop-in celebrities at Reddit probably don’t net the top ratings for the whole site, given how Reddit is huge, but a small forum that doesn’t have that much inside vote activity could easily end up treating an interesting high outside status person dropping in as the most interesting event in the forum history.
I don’t think Holden Karnofsky is high status as far as society goes. Outside of people with interest in Effective Altruism he’s just a random person running an NGO.
Social status has many dimensions. Credible professionalism and a position to affect an organization with notable resources and visibility are pretty robust ones.
Givewell has 1 million in revenue per year. There are plenty of organisations of that size. I don’t think it’s a large amount of resources.
Personally, I upvoted that post for cogency and pertinence. I didn’t know enough about Holden Karnofsky to distinguish him systematically from background until that post.
I’m curious. Who is Holden Karnofsky high-status to, in your opinion? I mean, I acknowledge that this website, and effective altruism, and maybe a subset of the philanthropy community in the United States is very enthusiastic about the work he does. If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t have given Givewell $1000 USD last year.
However, my friends from outside the efficient charity cluster don’t know who he is, and I doubt would update to extolling his greatness as soon as I explained what he does anyway.
Of course status is highly context and group specific. Status is relative, not absolute. He has high status in effective altruism / rationality cluster because he’s probably the most highly accomplished in this group.
No, I don’t think that is the key difference. I think the reason that SIAI (at the time) payed attention to Karnofsky is that he was willing to signal his in-group membership and speak the local jargon, thereby preventing his criticisms from being immediately dismissed (I think MIRI has gotten better about this lately, but they’ve been pitching themselves so high-status that it’s screwing with my intuition about their likely behavior :/ )
Holden Karnofsky is great, and Less Wrong is a great discussion board in a community for being so receptive of arguing against orthodox views. If he identified as a rationalist, I’m sure this community would be fine counting Holden Karnofsky among themselves. However, some media coverage Less Wrong has received is exactly as it is because bloggers, or journalists, or whoever, don’t come to this site to have a dialogue, and for both sides to learn something from each other.
I wrote this comment in the moment without lots of forethought, so I didn’t clarify myself enough. I haven’t invited a student journalist to write an article about Less Wrong to get good press coverage because others are worse. The publication is small enough that it wouldn’t get enough traffic to change the outside cultural perspective of Less Wrong’s culture anyway. One of the editors mentioned to this student journalist that I’m an organizer for the local meetup, and he came with me with lots of questions. Before he asked, he mentioned his impression thus far of Less Wrong was that it was full of ‘hyper-rationalist pseudoscience’, and that a typical belief of Less Wrong was of that of a fear-inspiring imaginary counter-factual monster I need not mention by name.
Anyway, in particular, he may want to profile the local meetup. So, I could let him go on impressions he gets from Slate, and RationalWiki, alone, or he could talk to me, and get an impression that Less Wrong is about literally anything else besides fringe transhumanism.
If the article really becomes a thing, I will invite the journalist to interface with Less Wrong as Holden has. If the article is about ‘what is this intellectual community we [the readership] have heard popping up in town, and what do they believe?’, I will now direct him to the Less Wrong survey results. You’ve inspired me to do this with your feedback, ChristianKI, so thanks.
Why not?
A better Wiki page on the community could be a start. Maybe Wiki’s entry on “Less Wrong” (with a space in between) should redirect there, rather than to Eliezer’s page (as it currently does) and that might attract attention from people who first google the term.
At the time I wrote the original comment, I didn’t want to come across as going on a crusade to change everything out of some sort of over-reaction, so I downplayed what could have been construed as my intentions. However, I don’t see a problem with creating it. I don’t know if I’ll do this myself. What I will do though is post a comment in the next open thread about if there’s any changes Less Wrong members want to see made to the Less Wrong Wiki. It’s a neglected but valuable resource that become even better with more additions.
Awesome. Thanks for taking the initiative!
The Boring Advice Repository obviously.
And the repository repository, (which, sadly, does not contain itself)
I’d say that the Moloch thing isn’t that much more weird than our other local eschatological shorthands (“FAI”, “Great Filter”, etc.). That’s just my insider’s perspective, though, so take with many grains of salt.
I believe you’re right. I’m not familiar with the Great Filter being lambasted outside of Less Wrong, but myself, and the people I know personally, have generally discussed the Great Filter less than we have Friendly A.I. On one hand, the Great Filter seems more associated with Overcoming Bias, so coverage of it is tangential to, and having a neutral impact upon, Less Wrong. On the other hand, I spend more time on this website, so my impression could be due to the availability heuristic only. In that case, please share any outside media coverage you know of the Great Filter.
Anyway, I chose Moloch to stay current, and also because citing a baby-eating demon as the destroyer of the world seems even more eschatological than Friendly A.I. So, Moloch strikes me as potentially even more prone to misinterpretation. (un)Friendly A.I. has already been wholly conflated with a scandal about a counterfactual monster that need not be named. It seems to me that that could snowball into misinterpretations of Moloch bouncing across the blogosphere like a game of Broken Telephone until there’s a widely-read article about Less Wrong having gone about atheism, and rationalism, so thoroughly wrong that it flipped back around to ancient religions.
The fact that Less Wrong periodically has to do damage control because there is even anything on this website that can be misinterpreted as eschatology seems demonstrative of a persistent image problem. Morosely, the fact that the outside perspective misinterprets something from this site as dangerous eschatology, perhaps because someone would have to read lots of now relatively obscure blog posts to otherwise grok it, doesn’t surprise me too much.
This seems pretty unlikely to me. I think the key difference from the uFAI thing is that if you ask a Less Wrong regular “So what is this ‘unFriendly AI’ thing you all talk about? It can’t possibly be as ridiculous as what that article on Slate was saying, can it?”*, then the answer you get will probably sound exactly as silly as the caricature, if not worse, and you’re likely to conclude that LW is some kind of crazy cult or something.
On the other hand, if you ask your LW-regular friend “So what’s the deal with this ‘Moloch’ thing? You guys don’t really believe in baby-easting demons, do you?”, they’ll say something like “What? No, of course not. We just use ‘Moloch’ as a sort of metaphorical shorthand for a certain kind of organizational failure. It comes from this great essay, you should read it...” which is all perfectly reasonable and will do nothing to perpetuate the original ludicrous rumor. Nobody will say “I know somebody who goes on LessWrong, and he says they really do worship the blasphemous gods of ancient Mesopotamia!”, so the rumor will have much less plausibility and will be easily debunked.
* Overall this is of course an outdated example, since MIRI/FHI/etc. have pulled a spectacular public makeover of Friendly AI in the past year or so.
Please note that none of those links points to a LessWrong page. They are two personal blogs. Personal blogs don’t have to follow LW policies.
I consider Moldbug almost completely irrelevant for LW. He has a few fans here, but they are a tiny minority (probably fewer than e.g. religious LW members). We don’t consider him a rationalist blogger, and don’t link to him in a list of rationalist blogs.
Scott is a LW member who has posted a few articles here; that is much more relevant. But anyway, SSC is his personal blog. (Also, his articles seem sufficiently sane to me—I would love to see more political debates be done like this.)
I guess we need a definition of some core principles of LW community, so the newcomers know what is canonical and what is not. May I suggest Sequences?
This seems like a significant understatement given that Scott has the second highest karma of all-time on LW (after only Eliezer). Even if he doesn’t post much here directly anymore, he’s still probably the biggest thought leader the broader rational community has right now.
I agree with ahbwramc. Going From California with An Aching Heart doesn’t seem to be something written by someone only kinda involved with the rationalist community.
First of all, mea culpa.
I should have provided more context to assuage confusion. The Talon is an alternative social justice publication at a local university. Their editorial board overlaps with the skeptic community in Vancouver itself, which is quite insular, which overlaps with the rationality meetup in Vancouver, too.
There has been some ideological bickering, name-calling, and signaling allegiance to a coalition of classic skeptic community v. Less Wrong perspectives on the Internet, and at various meetups, maybe at pubs, in Vancouver. I myself, among others, may not have engaged in discussions, or debates, as judiciously as would have been prudent. This also involved arguments over articles written on Slate Star Codex, which ‘social justice warriors’, as some call them(selves), find upsetting.
However, none of us here on Less Wrong knew there was enough chatter going around that the first time I meet a journalist, he knew who I was, and asked him why my friends held such peculiar beliefs that are out of line with mainstream scientific consensus if we’re ‘rationalists’. He was a friendly guy I actually like, but his misconceptions seemed worrisome, if he wanted to profile people I know personally. I don’t want a schism rising in my neck of the woods where my friends and I are seen as kooky neckbeards as soon as we enter a public space.
Yeah, when someone is very famous on LW, then even if they publish something on their private blog, it feels like an “idea connected with LW”, especially if the readerships overlap. :(
No idea what to do about this. I support Scott’s right to write whatever he wants on his blog; and the rules of LW do not apply for his blog. On the other hand, yes, people will see the connection anyway. It’s like when someone is a celebrity, they lose their private life, because everything they do is a food for gossip.
(Heck, Scott doesn’t even write under the same name on LW and SSC. But everyone knows anyway. What a horrible thing; not only one has to hide their true name, but even keep their individual pseudonyms hidden from each other.)
Uhm, I missed the connection somewhere. As far as I know, social justice warriors are not mainstream scientific consensus. And Scott doesn’t blog about many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics. :)
Okay, now seriously. I think you maybe overestimate the mainstream status of SJWs. What’s upsetting for them, is not necessarily upsetting for an average person. And optimizing for them… pretty much means following their doctrines, or avoiding discussing any social issues.
(Connotationally: I am not saying “upsetting SJWs is okay”, although I am also not saying it isn’t. Just that SJWs are not mainstream. So do we worry about the image in the eyes of mainstream, or in the eyes of SJWs?)
Right, obviously, I should have thought of this. The skeptic movement tends to be alternative, and socially liberal, and Vancouver city is full of skeptics who are also activists. ‘Vancouver Rationalists’ overlaps with the ‘Vancouver Skeptics’, and sometimes we talk to them without always being humble enough. Among these people are a few friends.
Let’s put ourselves in their shoes
We’re a bunch of people who feel (society is) threatened by others’ abuse of social privilege. Not always, and not by most of them, but we notice much of this type of abuse is at the hands of white males. Now we notice a bunch of one type of white male showing up at our safe spaces, often talking about this online community of (mostly) the one same type of white males. This community of (mostly) white males seems to disdain political activism and seem like they might be the same type of male jerks at college who say women can’t do math and science. And this online community believes they’re so good at science they can figure out even what Ph.D’s can, which doesn’t line up with skepticism. And the most popular white male blogger in this community should be allowed a safe space where anyone can say triggering things without using trigger warnings, they think we’re too politically correct, and they think there’s not enough evidence behind our activism.
...and back in our own shoes
Imagining the above, which even if it’s oversimplifying, makes it seems how some poor communication begetting tension seem obvious for Vancouver, if not other places.
*(a better, in a sensitive way, word than ‘warrior’)
An unavoidable consequences of promoting rationality is upsetting the irrational.
I am not quite sure what are you saying here. It does sound like you want LW to change so that it becomes more acceptable to your new friends and that seems to me a strange way to approach things.
For the last few years, my friend Eric and I have been part of the skeptic community in Vancouver. He had been involved with the rationalist community for a couple of years before I was, and then I eventually came around. After having each gone to CFAR workshops, Eric, a couple other CFAR alumni friends, and myself returned to Vancouver inspired and excited to seed a community as vibrant as that in the Bay Area. So, we go to other meetups for skeptics, and the like, and discuss their ideas, and tell them if they want to expand the sort of thinking going on at skeptics meetups to novel topics, to join us at our Less Wrong meetup.
We have also reached out to some local university clubs, the local Bitcoin scene, and the life extension community. This has gone phenomenal. I feel like we’re finally putting all the pieces of the correct contrarian cluster puzzle together. ‘Hanging out with my closest friends’, and ‘learning important things with others’ are synonymous in my social life.
However, with the few skeptics groups, with a misplaced explanation of a technological singularity here, and a heated debate on cryonics my other friend had over there, I’ve meet people at parties asking me why I hold peculiar beliefs that I don’t hold. The freethought community in Vancouver is very insular, as over half the city, by census data, identifies as not belonging to a major religious denomination. We got too enthusiastic in growing the meetup, turned some people off, and gossip started. If an article is written poorly, than not for all of Less Wrong, but for my friends, and I, in particular the pattern could become crystallized that we’re kooks only pretending to be freethinkers. This wouldn’t bode well, but in collaboration, I can help decrease distrust, and strengthen bonds between two communities that seem like they should be allies rather than enemies. This doesn’t affect the whole community, maybe just my corner of it. Suggestions are welcome.
So you got pattern-matched to something you’re not. And? That’s very common and will NOT be fixed by any changes in LW.
That still is not something that can be fixed by LW changing.
Also, LW is a global forum. You should expect that a community local to one city will find many strange things in a global forum.
Well, my original post started out with one thesis that morphed into another by the time I finished writing it. At this point, with what I’ve learned in dialogue with other users, is that, of course I can’t change Less Wrong. I didn’t want to in the first place, anyhow. However, what’s going on is that Less Wrong was my impetus in generating a conundrum I may now mitigate, and I thought I’d return to Less Wrong to ask for its advice on handling the issue. This makes sense all the more because the community can share with me their maybe similar impressions, or experiences, because the community is made of people.
In this regard, this is how I should have thought from the beginning. What others I know personally think of Less Wrong is a feature, but not the source, of my problem.
Well, I have the same opinion of most of the people calling themselves “freethinkers”.
Obviously you should ditch your new friends, if they’re not willing to sign on to our awesome community!