The rhetorical structure of this post seems to imply a substantially different model of who your audience is, and what sort of appeals will work, than the model explicitly described. Since the question of which arguments will work on your intended audience is actually the whole point of your post, I think you should do an internal double crux on this issue, the results of which I expect will change your entire strategic sense of what’s going on in the Rationalist community the value of schisms, etc. I’m happy to spend plenty of time in live conversation on this if you’re interested and think seeking that sort of mutual understanding might be worth your time.
Explicitly, it seems like you’re saying that the way in which woo ideas are being brought into the community discourse is objectionable, because people are simply adopting new fragmentary beliefs that on the surface blatantly contradict much of the other things they believe, without doing the careful work of translation, synthesis, and rigorous grounding of concepts. You’re arguing that we should be alarmed by this trend, and engage in substantial retrenching. This is fundamentally an appeal to rational monism.
But rhetorically, you begin by offering a simple list of the names of things admitted into the conversation, and implicitly ask the reader to agree that this is objectionable before talking about method at all (and you don’t go into enough detail on the type of skepticism and rigor you’re suggesting for me to have a sense of whether I even agree.) The implied model here is that for most of your readers appeals to reason are futile, and you can at best get them to reject some ideas as foreign.
I think that the second model—the one you used to decide how to write the post—is a better representation of the current state of the Rationalist community than the first one. I don’t see much value in preserving or restoring the “integrity” of such a community (constituting in practice the cluster of people vaguely attracted to the Sequences, HPMoR, EA, the related in-person Bay Area community, CFAR, and the MIRI narrative). I see a lot of value in a version of this post clearly targeted to the remnant better-described by the first model. It would be nice if we could communicate about this in a way that didn’t hurt the feelings of the MOPs too badly, since they never wanted to hurt anyone.
There’s an important part missing in my current draft that has to do with the fact that much of the “esoteric” content is in fact not being openly pushed, but rather smuggled into the community via other methods; I think it’s very difficult to translate/synthesize/ground concepts if you aren’t being told about them until they’ve already taken over relevant parts of the community.
This is also why much of the post has a “sound the alarm” feeling. I think that if the community’s institutions were operating more properly, it would be much more resilient to things being “smuggled in”, which in turn would mean that people trying to spread these ideas would have to make a stronger/more reasoned case for them in order to get traction here.
As for the “list” format—this post is somewhat based on a talk I gave at the CFAR alumni reunion last year which was much better-received than I’d anticipated. Several people told me they had similar concerns but wasn’t sure if it was just them or what, and if we’re trying to “get the shields back online” just warning people that this is going on may be sufficient to prompt at least somewhat more careful thinking.
I’d put you in a cluster with Lahwran and Said Achmiz on this, if that helps clarify the gestalt I’m trying to identify. By contrast, I’d say that the cluster Benito’s pointing to—which I’d say mainly publicly includes me, Jessicata, Zvi Mowshowitz, and Romeo, though obviously also Michael Vassar—is organized around the idea that if you honestly apply loose gestalt thinking, it can very efficiently and accurately identify structures in the world—all of which can ultimately be reconciled—but that this kind of honesty necessarily involves reprogramming ourselves to not be such huge tools, and most people, well, haven’t done that, so they end up having to pick sides between perception and logic.
The rhetorical structure of this post seems to imply a substantially different model of who your audience is, and what sort of appeals will work, than the model explicitly described. Since the question of which arguments will work on your intended audience is actually the whole point of your post, I think you should do an internal double crux on this issue, the results of which I expect will change your entire strategic sense of what’s going on in the Rationalist community the value of schisms, etc. I’m happy to spend plenty of time in live conversation on this if you’re interested and think seeking that sort of mutual understanding might be worth your time.
Explicitly, it seems like you’re saying that the way in which woo ideas are being brought into the community discourse is objectionable, because people are simply adopting new fragmentary beliefs that on the surface blatantly contradict much of the other things they believe, without doing the careful work of translation, synthesis, and rigorous grounding of concepts. You’re arguing that we should be alarmed by this trend, and engage in substantial retrenching. This is fundamentally an appeal to rational monism.
But rhetorically, you begin by offering a simple list of the names of things admitted into the conversation, and implicitly ask the reader to agree that this is objectionable before talking about method at all (and you don’t go into enough detail on the type of skepticism and rigor you’re suggesting for me to have a sense of whether I even agree.) The implied model here is that for most of your readers appeals to reason are futile, and you can at best get them to reject some ideas as foreign.
I think that the second model—the one you used to decide how to write the post—is a better representation of the current state of the Rationalist community than the first one. I don’t see much value in preserving or restoring the “integrity” of such a community (constituting in practice the cluster of people vaguely attracted to the Sequences, HPMoR, EA, the related in-person Bay Area community, CFAR, and the MIRI narrative). I see a lot of value in a version of this post clearly targeted to the remnant better-described by the first model. It would be nice if we could communicate about this in a way that didn’t hurt the feelings of the MOPs too badly, since they never wanted to hurt anyone.
There’s an important part missing in my current draft that has to do with the fact that much of the “esoteric” content is in fact not being openly pushed, but rather smuggled into the community via other methods; I think it’s very difficult to translate/synthesize/ground concepts if you aren’t being told about them until they’ve already taken over relevant parts of the community.
This is also why much of the post has a “sound the alarm” feeling. I think that if the community’s institutions were operating more properly, it would be much more resilient to things being “smuggled in”, which in turn would mean that people trying to spread these ideas would have to make a stronger/more reasoned case for them in order to get traction here.
As for the “list” format—this post is somewhat based on a talk I gave at the CFAR alumni reunion last year which was much better-received than I’d anticipated. Several people told me they had similar concerns but wasn’t sure if it was just them or what, and if we’re trying to “get the shields back online” just warning people that this is going on may be sufficient to prompt at least somewhat more careful thinking.
I’d put you in a cluster with Lahwran and Said Achmiz on this, if that helps clarify the gestalt I’m trying to identify. By contrast, I’d say that the cluster Benito’s pointing to—which I’d say mainly publicly includes me, Jessicata, Zvi Mowshowitz, and Romeo, though obviously also Michael Vassar—is organized around the idea that if you honestly apply loose gestalt thinking, it can very efficiently and accurately identify structures in the world—all of which can ultimately be reconciled—but that this kind of honesty necessarily involves reprogramming ourselves to not be such huge tools, and most people, well, haven’t done that, so they end up having to pick sides between perception and logic.