Well I’m personally hella surprised by rationalists coming up with a thing where the less you know of the subject you’re talking about, the better you are at it.

Nerst believes that the world can be divided roughly into “high decouplers,” for whom decoupling comes easy, and “low decouplers,” for whom it does not. This is the sort of area where erisology could produce empirical insights: What characterizes people’s ability to decouple? Nerst believes that hard-science types are better at it, on average, while artistic types are worse. After all, part of being an artist is seeing connections where other people don’t—so maybe it’s harder for them to not see connections in some cases. Nerst might be wrong. Either way, it’s the sort of claim that could be fairly easily tested if the discipline caught on.

We should just sterilize all of the artists and continental philosophers and be done with it.

conservatives have lashed out against findings that would “normalize” homosexuality. But the dispute over which sexual acts, if any, society should discourage is totally separate from the question of whether sexual orientation is, in fact, inborn.

… homosexuality is about a bit more than just ‘sex acts’, discrimination, marriage, adoption, not being harassed/mocked, etc. In fact, which sex acts are allowed is totally different from homosexuality.

I know that he prob was trying to do the ‘I used only anti leftwing examples, so lets add an anti conservative example’ thing. But he fucked it up. This is basic stuff (in fact, by linking homosexuality to just sexual acts, he in fact made this slightly homophobic, nice work…).

As if to subvert the hyperkinetic, screamy, rage-tweet-a-minute culture of today’s online discourse, Nerst rolls out his views on erisology in the form of long, carefully constructed blog posts, borrowing liberally from and building on the ideas of other people.

I feel like there’s an assumption right there, that these long, wordy blogs are better or more right than the rage-tweets.

But if LessWrong and SSC are anything to go by, well, they aren’t really that much better.

When I first heard of decoupling, I immediately thought about the nervous way in which liberals discuss intelligence research.

That might be because you’re obsessed by it. Just saying.

None of that has anything to do with race, because races do not map neatly onto genetic difference.

I guess I should be glad that he at least admits that.

Once you know a term like decoupling, you can identify instances in which a disagreement isn’t really about X anymore, but about Y and Z.

Thing is, you don’t really need a term like decoupling to do that.

Nerst believes that the world can be divided roughly into “high decouplers,” for whom decoupling comes easy, and “low decouplers,” for whom it does not. This is the sort of area where erisology could produce empirical insights: What characterizes people’s ability to decouple? Nerst believes that hard-science types are better at it, on average, while artistic types are worse.

So, as of yet, “erisology” isn’t really a scientific discipline. It’s just “the stuff that a rando called Nerst believes.” That makes the name a bit pompous.

When I ran the concept of erisology by a couple of political scientists who study disagreement, I got some unexpected pushback. […] Still … I’m on Team Erisology

“I’m gonna believe the guy who thinks he just invented a new field over the ones who are experts in an established one. That makes sense.”

I mean, I’m not saying that science can’t become outdated, or that new fields are inherently bad, but maybe you could wait for actual evidence before endorsing this stuff?

Came here to post this with the title “Furiously wanking in public and appalled no one will engage with me in a civil debate.” That’s Singal’s fetish.

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As you all know, I’m a big supporter of decoupling, and as such see no problem with it. Disagreements on the internet are rampant, and if only people agreed to set aside what I know to be the irrelevant aspects of their position and focus on what I think really matters, life would be so much better! So much time on the internet is wasted because people aren’t taking their discussions seriously enough to set aside their petty grievances and concerns like potentially advocating for genocide and talk about the real, important topics like how to raise the population’s IQ by a few percentiles.

Clearly the problem’s on the internet are endemic of a larger problem, that is that we keep attaching meaning to things. If only we could be cold dispassionate calculating machines we would be so much more efficient. With the exception of marxism of course, because you can’t separate that from the soviet purges or the Tiananmen square massacre.

Imagine how peaceful the world would be of only people knew how to argue properly on twitter. Instead of sending rape and death threats, fascists could just send people links to studies showing how they are genetically inferior and ought to be euthanised. We’d probably have world peace by lunchtime.

I know some might consider decoupling to be a machiavellian debating tactic, but they couldn’t be more wrong. If you don’t understand why, you clearly just aren’t decoupling enough. It’s what all the smart, hard science people who are actually intelligent do. You don’t want to be one of those hippie artists do you?

Jesse Singal was erased from existence weeks ago as part of a donation goal for a Donkey Kong stream so I don’t know what youre talking about

Then, they write arguments meant to be read by their ideological adversaries, like opinion columns, or engage in speaking events, like debate competitions, meant to be heard and rebutted by them. … The welcome rise of near-universal literacy and democratic values more generally, as well as the partial dissolution of an entrenched aristocratic class, has put some cracks in this system, and the rise of the internet has blown it up entirely.

Debate club just hasn’t been the same since everyone learned how to read :(

Nerst believes that the world can be divided roughly into “high decouplers,” for whom decoupling comes easy, and “low decouplers,” for whom it does not. This is the sort of area where erisology could produce empirical insights: What characterizes people’s ability to decouple? Nerst believes that hard-science types are better at it, on average, while artistic types are worse. After all, part of being an artist is seeing connections where other people don’t—so maybe it’s harder for them to not see connections in some cases. Nerst might be wrong. Either way, it’s the sort of claim that could be fairly easily tested if the discipline caught on.

“Ability.”

“Better at it.”

These people are characterizing ignorance of relevant facts as some kind of skill, because it serves their ideological purposes to ignore those facts.

Link doesn’t work for me.

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