I like this post for reinforcing a point that I consider important about intellectual progress, and for pushing against a failure mode of the Sequences-style rationalists.
As far as I can tell, intellectual progress is made bit by bit with later building on earlier Sequences. Francis Bacon gets credit for landmark evolution of the scientific method, but it didn’t spring from nowhere, he was building on ideas that had built on ideas, etc.
This says the same is true for our flavor of rationality. It’s built on many things, and not just probability theory.
The failure mode I think this helps with is not thinking that “we are the only sane people”. There is much insanity and we are saner than most, but we are descended from people who are not us, and we probably have relatives we don’t know. And I think that’s worth remembering, thanks to this post for the reminder.
I like this post for reinforcing a point that I consider important about intellectual progress, and for pushing against a failure mode of the Sequences-style rationalists.
As far as I can tell, intellectual progress is made bit by bit with later building on earlier Sequences. Francis Bacon gets credit for landmark evolution of the scientific method, but it didn’t spring from nowhere, he was building on ideas that had built on ideas, etc.
This says the same is true for our flavor of rationality. It’s built on many things, and not just probability theory.
The failure mode I think this helps with is not thinking that “we are the only sane people”. There is much insanity and we are saner than most, but we are descended from people who are not us, and we probably have relatives we don’t know. And I think that’s worth remembering, thanks to this post for the reminder.