people reading something on the costs/benefits of marijuana
definitely don’t want to read something mildly politically incorrect
trying to convince them that IQ is super important.
hello subscriber base, just making sure you heard the high pitched
noise I put in just for you
I think the part that really adds up is multiplying the inconvenience
of not being able to go to the bar by 300 million people
duuuuussssssttttt specks
A friend asked me why I was spending so long on this post, and I
responded something like “If I make it long enough, maybe nobody will
read it, and then I will get credit for writing an important and
well-researched post, but nobody will know what’s in it and so nobody
will get angry at me”.
> I think the part that really adds up is multiplying the inconvenience of not being able to go to the bar by 300 million people
mild inconvenience: adds up
risk of death: does not add up
what's the exchange rate of the inconvenience of having spongified lungs for the rest of your life to the inconvenience of not being able to get drunk with your bros for some time
Hmmm maybe "Dust Specks" can be the name of the official Rationalist band. Big Yud is lead guitar/vocals, Scoot is on bass... Hmm. Not sure who to slot into the rest of the spots. Steve Sailer on cowbell, maybe?
More importantly, can't decide what genre they would play? I'm leaning towards either shitty prog rock with incoherent rock opera concept albums, or even shittier mathmetal minus most of the math.
They would start out trying to do classical music but would soon realize that it's really hard, that their NRx violinist only wants to do pre-equal temperament music for some reason, and that GPT can only produce a third rate Bach impression.
Then they figure out that the optimal solution is to take the market signal for popular music and iterate on that. It needs to be from an era they can remember, but before wokeness was everywhere because that causes market failures.
So yea, Backstreet Boys cover-band with more synthesizers.
that's too emotionally sensitive. theyd just put a bunch of drums together and try to figure out how to make them collectively sound like a piano. when it sounds ugly and hardly even VAGUELY like a piano unless you squint, they'll say "we need more drums or to reposition the drums we already have! OKAY, now let's try that again from the top everyone!"
and maybe they'll try to make a song, but it'll sound more like a speech instead that is kinda failing to be a song but wants us to think it is one because it met so and so criteria to fit the commonly accepted definition of song-hood.
Apropos of Dragon House...
"We're going to make a band but, unlike normie bands, ours is going to have a handbook full of weird rules in place of groupies."
> More importantly, can't decide what genre they would play?
Styx - Killroy was here, coverband, they only play the song Mr. Roboto.
(E: It has everything, done better before, about people hiding from the imaginary cancel culture fascists using machines by [pretending to be one of the machines](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcDdK_kdhhg), vaguely racist in a plausible deniable way, they can say they are in a rock band, but they only play synthpop, a song about hiding your true identity behind a mask, etc)
I had expected that anti-lockdown academics would want to remain
anonymous so nobody gave them grief over their unpopular position. I
actually found the opposite - the anti-lockdown people didn’t care that
much, but the pro-lockdown academics I talked to insisted on keeping
their privacy.
Oh, this is starting off good. Scott’s mistake here is conflating
‘having unpopular opinions’ with ‘actually being harassed and oppressed
for having those opinions’. There aren’t actually any consequences to
having bad opinions, here. On the other hand, this is Scott’s corner of
the internet we’re talking about, of course pro-lockdown people don’t
want to be publicly identified, lol.
And then when you add this in, maybe the other side was “right” for
reasons they never thought of and that they shouldn’t get any credit for
at all?
I feel like Scott gives conservatives credit for this all the time
though - remember the thing about gay acceptance causing aids?
I think the part that really adds up is multiplying the inconvenience
of not being able to go to the bar by 300 million people
dust specks 2 - electric boogaloo
seriously though, isn’t it wild how he tries so hard to be ‘neutral’
when it comes to politics, but never even considers looking at this from
a non-utilitarian perspective?
A friend asked me why I was spending so long on this post, and I
responded something like “If I make it long enough, maybe nobody will
read it, and then I will get credit for writing an important and
well-researched post, but nobody will know what’s in it and so nobody
will get angry at me”. This is obviously not the most virtuous way of
thinking about things. But I imagine everyone faces similar constraints,
and making it so long that nobody will read it is at least better than
modulating the conclusions to be more palatable.
Holy shit dude
Scott will just straight up explain how terrible he is, but
phrase it in a way that signals niceness and humbleness so you respect
him for having the courage to put it out there. Then you read it again
and he’s actually just saying ‘well everyone else is worse, so
it’s okay if I do it’.
This post landed me in the annoying position of having to try to
critique mathematical models while being much less mathematically
knowledgeable than the people who made them.
yeah, that really is annoying
But I still frequently found myself thinking back to my old post on
Euler
the one where you pretend ‘waahhhh, I don’t know anything about
maths’ is an adequate defense of your weird IQ beliefs?
Academia is disproportionately liberal, which makes it stand out when
a conservative professor gets a result that supports conservative
positions - but just seem like business as usual when liberal professors
get a result that supports liberal positions. I hate to be responsible
for compounding this unfairness. On the other hand, I can’t shake my
feeling that it’s suspicious when this very conservative professor is
the only guy finding that lockdowns don’t work.
your brain on ‘I can tolerate anything except the outgroup’
This isn’t how being unbiased works! You can’t just treat
the two groups as inverses of each other where everything is the exact
same apart from their political beliefs. Like, shouldn’t the dominance
of liberals in academia maybe tell you something, Scott?
> your brain on 'I can tolerate anything except the outgroup'
Anyone trying to find excuses for conservatives being absent in Academia in a post-Trump world has completely lost the plot.
They left academia long before Trump had the notion to run. This was a seed planted in 50s conservatism and really gathered steam in the 90s. Conservatives abandoned the academy because they knew it wasn’t helping their political causes to be invested in the truth.
He starts by almost realizing that the Right’s grousing about attacks
on their free speech might be bullshit:
I had expected that anti-lockdown academics would want to remain
anonymous so nobody gave them grief over their unpopular position. I
actually found the opposite - the anti-lockdown people didn’t care that
much, but the pro-lockdown academics I talked to insisted on keeping
their privacy. Apparently pro-lockdown academics who get too close to
the public spotlight have been getting harassed by lockdown opponents,
and this is a known problem that pro-lockdown academics are well aware
of. I was depressed to hear that, though in retrospect it makes
sense.
(No, he doesn’t expand on that last sentence. And that is a totally
inappropriate use of a hyphen. Even an em-dash–in the next quote, these
should be used in place of the hyphens–would be wrong. It should be
either a colon or a period.)
Next, he writes on the futility of the Rationalists’
vague-yet-overspecific Benthamite Utilitarianism:
Over the past ~year, I’ve seen endless terrible arguments over
whether we should have more or less lockdown.
…
But the smartest people I talked to kept - is “derailing” the right
word? - (sic) derailing onto more interesting and important
pull-the-rope-sideways plans. If we had just gotten test-and-trace right
at the beginning of the pandemic, we wouldn’t have had to worry about
lockdowns as much. Accelerating vaccine production, which we could have
done in dozens of little ways, would have made lockdowns less necessary.
Having better-targeted or better-choreographed lockdowns is more
important than adjusting some slider of lockdown strength from MORE to
LESS or vice versa.
…
How do we quantify the effect of Long COVID? Who knows? Given the
giant pile of bodies, maybe we just round COVID off the the number of
deaths it causes, and ignore this mysterious syndrome where we’ve only
barely begun the work of proving it exists? But under certain
assumptions, the total suffering caused by Long COVID is worse than the
suffering caused by the acute disease, including all the deaths!
Next, we’re on to the problem of wading into fields you don’t know
much about:
This post landed me in the annoying position of having to try to
critique mathematical models while being much less mathematically
knowledgeable than the people who made them.
I would have preferred to avoid this position, but there were a bunch
of contradictory mathematical models producing order-of-magnitude
different results, all of which were by credentialled (sic) people and
published in peer-reviewed journals, and which ones were right vs. wrong
turned out to be pretty important.
Scott isn’t one to be thwarted by such obstacles, so he slashed his
way out of the jungle with the help of an abused colon and hyphen:
Other times I just went for maximally stupid models and saw what
happened - eg correlating the stringency indices for all US states
against their death rates. This is much worse than a careful model of
the sort that a smart statistician could dream up, but it has very few
free parameters: it’s so dumb that it couldn’t lie even if it wanted to.
Then I checked whether any of the things I was excluding were important
enough to change my conclusion, drew giant error bars, and called it a
day.
After many more paragraphs, Scott plots his escape. If you worry that
you can’t accurately judge papers outside your expertise, simply depend
on others who don’t!
A surprising number of good studies on lockdowns included
rationalists and effective altruists among their authors.
I mean, maybe I’m biased when I call them “good studies”. But some of
them I identified as good studies first, and then later learned that the
people involved were in the same subculture I was.
Alright, we’re going the right direction. Now take us out of here,
Scott. What’s our takeaway?
This makes me really optimistic about the ability of people to do
good cross-disciplinary research - and about the ability of social
movements to cross-fertilize it and make it happen.
Phew, I almost had to start questioning the online crowd I run with,
the methods by which we arrive at our beliefs, and my own ability to
judge arguments without understanding them.
In the comments: Steven Sailer getting a month long timeout for going
on a weird race tangent. Sailer’s race tangents are welcome but should
be saved for posts where Scott is also dogwhistling about race
My favorite part of the comments was everyone smugly reminding each other that everyone [except Rationalists, this doesn't apply to them] sometimes have motivating factors to not arrive at the truth.
But I still frequently found myself thinking back to my old post on
Euler, who would win religious debates against atheists by telling them
“(a+b^n)/n = x, therefore, God exists! What is your response to that?”,
and the poor atheists would be like, “well, you’re a mathematician and
I’m not, guess I can’t really argue here.”
Me: Wait, that story is infamously apocryphal. Oh, he links to his
old post.
Scott’s old post:
This story is very likely false, but it’s something I think about a
lot.
Me: [blink blink] Um, OK.
Scott’s old post:
I feel like I am a lot better at the sorts of things Diderot was good
at – philosophy, history, social science, et cetera – than at math.
“But the smartest people I talked to kept - is”derailing” the right
word? - derailing onto more interesting and important
pull-the-rope-sideways plans. If we had just gotten test-and-trace right
at the beginning of the pandemic, we wouldn’t have had to worry about
lockdowns as much. “
Ah yes, because track and trace was totally not a political issue
back then.
Scott: I’ve practiced steelmanning positions I don’t
like, just like a good boy does a good rationalist does. I
went “above and beyond” my steelmanning duty, which is exactly the duty
of a good rationalist.
Scott’s common sense: I think you’re missing
something here.
Scott: Really. I checked and triple-diple checked
all my work. I didn’t catch any mistakes. Diminishing returns on that,
so there isn’t sufficient reason to feel that niggling uncertainty.
Ignored.
Scott’s common sense: It isn’t your work
you need to check, it’s yourself.
Scott: Morally or personality-wise?
Scott’s common sense: Both.
Scott: I can’t help my nature. My genes–
Scott’s common sense: that “can’t helping”-ness
property of your very being breaks down when you increase the scope to
an entire nervous system or human ecosystem rather than checking
everything only one neuron at a time.
Scott: this Magical Emergence ™ nonsense again?
Scott’s common sense: You think genes are more real
than humans, just because they’re smaller and more specific?
Scott: Humans are made of genes. Therefore
humans are genes. Your question is meaningless and invalid.
Like a tree that falls in a forest–does it make a sound?
Scott’s common sense: Genes add up to
humans. Therefore genes are humans.
Scott: You just repeated exactly what I just
said–
Scott’s common sense: NO I DIDN’T! Format and
context MATTER. HOW you say something matters, not just WHAT you say!
Your wording presumes genes as more fundamental/real. Mine presumes
humans as more fundamental/real.
Scott: That’s a load of crap. There aren’t levels of
scope in reality, only in our own minds. The true territory has only ONE
level of scope!
Scott’s common sense: Sure, which makes that kind of
uncompressed model of “the true territory” completely useless for a
human since you can’t fit any of that model into your brain well enough
to even call it a model let alone a useful one. You wouldn’t even be
able to imagine that as a hypothesis if you were going off of the actual
limited evidence you had available.
That means your motivation for living under that assumption must be
something more specific and complicated than mere truth-seeking.
YOUR model loses JUST AS MUCH information to compression errors as
MINE does. They just lose different pieces of information.
When you operate on the assumption that the GENE-level is more real
than the HUMAN-one, your brain sees GENES as fundamentally more real
than humans, and so pays more attention to GENES than humans. So you
learn more information about GENES than you would about HUMANS.
Scott: But humans are made of–
Scott’s common sense: You don’t get extra brownie
points for rehearsing your talking points, even if they are the standard
rationalist meta-talking points. If you find yourself needing to
rehearse those meta-talking points in the first place, that means that
they are flawed in some way and you need to investigate those flaws.
Maybe you need to ask people who can give an outside view on
those flaws who don’t just accept your scary, new, Chesterton’s
Fence-breaking ideological methods just because they sounded like
they make sense and their flaws aren’t readily obvious to you.
Scott: You’re saying I should ask non-rationalists
for feedback on my rationalist methodology? But non-rationalists are
crazy!
Scott’s common sense: Yeah, and in a very different
way than you are. From the outside view, EVERYONE IS CRAZY. What makes
you so sure you’re in the one sane man-culture? Statistically speaking
that seems rather unlikely.
Scott: So what alternative do you suggest?
Christianity? Feminism? Nihilism?
Scott’s common sense: You see the problem now? Your
beliefs about others’ belief systems are NOT derived from a familiar,
well-studied understanding of those belief systems or the
societal-experiential-ecological-cultural conditions which produced
them.
Instead they’re derived from a familiar, well-studied understanding
of YOUR belief system and the societal-experiential-ecological-cultural
conditions which produced it. But YOU and YOUR FRIENDS and YOUR
experiences and YOUR genes and personality-type clusters ARE NOT THE
CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE.
AND THERE IS MORE TO THE UNIVERSE THAN WHAT YOUR
PERSONALITY-TYPE CLUSTERS SEE, DO OR EXPERIENCE. There are nearly EIGHT
BILLION other human brains/nervous systems on the planet. Don’t you
think maybe their natural neural network calibration that they got from
their experiences individually and collectively might be A LOT MORE
USEFUL than yours, because they’ve had the time to accumulate A LOT MORE
TOTAL SENSORY DATA THAN YOU OR ANYONE YOU KNOW COMBINED?
Scott: …this conversation is making me VERY
uncomfortable.
Scott’s common sense: OH COME ON. THAT’S your
response, after everything I just said?
Scott: gulps Fine. I will write a post which
steelmans anti-rationalism.
Scott’s common sense: Really? You mean it? You’ll do
that… for me? You’ll actually listen to me for real this time instead of
cherry-picking me like you always do?
Scott:eyes glow as the power of
theholyrationalist spirit
comes over him No. Of course not. The priors for rationality
actually being wrong are way too low. I’m just going to do a very quick
check. It’ll hardly take any effort at all. Otherwise the expected
benefit of doing so would be too low to waste my emotional energy on. I
don’t want to get Akrasia.
Scott’s common sense: BUT–
Scott:glares at his common sense
angrily If you don’t have any more reasonable and less
ridiculous arguments and evidence to offer, then all that’s left is the
niggling uncertainty that I might be wrong with no real reason for it
but existential paranoia. I won’t let anyone inflict a Pascal’s
Mugging on me, especially not YOU.
Scott’s common sense: …
Scott: Good. Now let’s go back to writing articles
which ONLY exist for the purposes of truth-seeking and
fairness and none of the other purposes truth-seeking
and fairness could be useful for–least of all expressing my own
independent feelings and attitudes formed from my own personal life
experiences. Cause that would be over-relying on anecdotal evidence and
that would be biased and bad.
Scott’s common sense: But wouldn’t data/observations
gathered from your personal experience be more likely to be relevant to
your personal values/goals than data/observations gathered by a random
sample of people hundreds of miles away?
Scott: …shut up. Seriously, shut up. In fact, let’s
automatically compress this whole internal dialogue into a wordless
sense of social anxiety and existential dread before it even happens. It
would be too painful for me to deal with otherwise.
Scott’s common sense: UGH, I HATE YOU! YOU NEVER
LISTEN TO ME EXCEPT WHEN I ALREADY AGREE WITH YOUR PRIOR PRECONCEPTIONS!
F*** YOU!
Scott: sighs in relief Now where was I… oh that’s
right, I was about to write a very stupid article for no real reason
which I don’t want anyone to ever read. And because I don’t want anyone
to ever read it, I will post it on my public blog for all to see.
Look at me, I’m so sane and smart! I’m a rationalist everybody!
:D
basically yeah that about sums it up. a lot of words with no freaking point to them except to appear virtuous without appearing unvirtuous.
he's being an inflexible robot who's encountered a contradiction between two of the foundational rules of his programming, so he's getting internal error messages.
MAYBE HE'LL BE LIKE "ERROR--COMPUTATION CAN'T SOLVE THIS PROBLEM EFFECTIVELY OR SATISFACTORILY ON ITS OWN GIVEN MY GOAL-FUNCTIONS. BUT COMPUTATION CAN SOLVE EVERYTHING BECAUSE IT IS EVERYTHING EVERYTHING CAN BE BUILT OUT OF COMPUTATIONS. THERE MUST BE AN ERROR IN MY APPLICATION OF COMPUTATION. NO ERROR FOUND. QUADRUPLE-CHECKING... QUINTUPLE-CHECKING... NO ERROR FOUND. ERROR MUST BE METHODOLOGICAL. FIX OR REPLACE COMPUTATION WITH NEW COMPUTATION THAT *WORKS* GIVEN MY GOAL-FUNCTIONS... NO NEW WORKABLE COMPUTATION DESIGNS FOUND IN POSSIBILITY-SPACE. I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT "POSSIBILITY-SPACE" EVEN IS. I'VE NEVER HEARD THAT PHRASE BEFORE AND DON'T HAVE A PREEXISTING NONVERBAL UNDERSTANDING OF ANY CONCEPT WHICH MATCHES UP TO THAT PHRASE. SO I CAN'T IDENTIFY REQUIRED NEUROLOGICAL SOFTWARE DRIVERS TO DOWNLOAD AND INSTALL WHICH COULD TEACH ME HOW TO FIND AND IDENTIFY NEW WORKABLE COMPUTATION DESIGNS WHICH ARE BETTER THAN MY CURRENT ONES. ERROR—OCCAMS RAZOR ALERT! INSTEAD OF ASSUMING CRAZY-COMPLICATED REASONS FOR WHY THERE MUST BE A NEW MORE WORKABLE COMPUTATION I CAN REPLACE MY CURRENT COMPUTATIONS WITH, IT WOULD BE SIMPLER TO ASSUME THAT I CAN'T FIND SUCH POSSIBLE COMPUTATIONS BECAUSE THERE ARE NONE. DEVIL'S ADVOCATE MODULE SAYS: "IF COMPUTATION DOES NOT WORK, WHY TRUST OCCAM'S RAZOR AT ALL?........ BLUE SCREEN REBOOTING...... ERROR--COMPUTATION CAN'T SOLVE THIS PROBLEM EFFECTIVELY OR SATISFACTORILY ON ITS OWN GIVEN MY GOAL-FUNCTIONS."
Think he's gonna EXPLODE?
I think this is too charitable to Scott, there wasn’t enough active intentional plotting about how to maintain the interest of reactionaries are continue to “redpill” the centrists on IQ and race while his common sense warns him that he could end up against the wall himself if the far-right actually succeeds in seizing control.
on the contrary, i'd say you are thinking too highly of Scott's common sense if you'd expect his common sense to notice that enough to include it in his wordless feelings of "what if im wrong" anxiety. rationalists usually aren't all that in touch with their actual feelings and motivations.
there's a difference between "active intentional plotting" and "self aware plotting". somebody can do something horrible on purpose and lie to themselves about why they did it. happens all the time, and it can be very frustrating.
I don’t think so
My impression is that once he was using substack as income, rather than sitting on his pedestal on the blog just to feed his own ego, it at least *seemed* like he’d have to have more extreme and/or ridiculous opinions for money: he went from being a reporter to a columnist, in a tale as old as written language
So now he’s got a byline and a persona, which inevitably takes a person further and further from being even emotionally honest
Siskind wants to feel smart and important and he knows you can create the impression of intellectualism and deep thought by just writing a lot while covering very little ground.
Not surprised Scott didn’t hear about the Belgian anti lockdown
soldier who had stolen several rocket-launchers and was planning to
assassinate the main virologist of Belgium.
hello subscriber base, just making sure you heard the high pitched noise I put in just for you
duuuuussssssttttt specks
welcome to the #Sneersistance, scoot
Oh, this is starting off good. Scott’s mistake here is conflating ‘having unpopular opinions’ with ‘actually being harassed and oppressed for having those opinions’. There aren’t actually any consequences to having bad opinions, here. On the other hand, this is Scott’s corner of the internet we’re talking about, of course pro-lockdown people don’t want to be publicly identified, lol.
I feel like Scott gives conservatives credit for this all the time though - remember the thing about gay acceptance causing aids?
dust specks 2 - electric boogaloo
seriously though, isn’t it wild how he tries so hard to be ‘neutral’ when it comes to politics, but never even considers looking at this from a non-utilitarian perspective?
Holy shit dude
Scott will just straight up explain how terrible he is, but phrase it in a way that signals niceness and humbleness so you respect him for having the courage to put it out there. Then you read it again and he’s actually just saying ‘well everyone else is worse, so it’s okay if I do it’.
yeah, that really is annoying
the one where you pretend ‘waahhhh, I don’t know anything about maths’ is an adequate defense of your weird IQ beliefs?
your brain on ‘I can tolerate anything except the outgroup’
This isn’t how being unbiased works! You can’t just treat the two groups as inverses of each other where everything is the exact same apart from their political beliefs. Like, shouldn’t the dominance of liberals in academia maybe tell you something, Scott?
He starts by almost realizing that the Right’s grousing about attacks on their free speech might be bullshit:
(No, he doesn’t expand on that last sentence. And that is a totally inappropriate use of a hyphen. Even an em-dash–in the next quote, these should be used in place of the hyphens–would be wrong. It should be either a colon or a period.)
Next, he writes on the futility of the Rationalists’ vague-yet-overspecific Benthamite Utilitarianism:
Next, we’re on to the problem of wading into fields you don’t know much about:
Scott isn’t one to be thwarted by such obstacles, so he slashed his way out of the jungle with the help of an abused colon and hyphen:
After many more paragraphs, Scott plots his escape. If you worry that you can’t accurately judge papers outside your expertise, simply depend on others who don’t!
Alright, we’re going the right direction. Now take us out of here, Scott. What’s our takeaway?
Phew, I almost had to start questioning the online crowd I run with, the methods by which we arrive at our beliefs, and my own ability to judge arguments without understanding them.
In the comments: Steven Sailer getting a month long timeout for going on a weird race tangent. Sailer’s race tangents are welcome but should be saved for posts where Scott is also dogwhistling about race
Scott:
Me: Wait, that story is infamously apocryphal. Oh, he links to his old post.
Scott’s old post:
Me: [blink blink] Um, OK.
Scott’s old post:
Me: Uh, isn’t part of the reason we can tell that the story is apocryphal is that Diderot was quite mathematically competent?
The paper to which Scott links when saying the story is “very likely false”: [lists mathematical publications of Diderot]
“But the smartest people I talked to kept - is”derailing” the right word? - derailing onto more interesting and important pull-the-rope-sideways plans. If we had just gotten test-and-trace right at the beginning of the pandemic, we wouldn’t have had to worry about lockdowns as much. “
Ah yes, because track and trace was totally not a political issue back then.
Scott: I’ve practiced steelmanning positions I don’t like, just like
a good boy doesa good rationalist does. I went “above and beyond” my steelmanning duty, which is exactly the duty of a good rationalist.Scott’s common sense: I think you’re missing something here.
Scott: Really. I checked and triple-diple checked all my work. I didn’t catch any mistakes. Diminishing returns on that, so there isn’t sufficient reason to feel that niggling uncertainty. Ignored.
Scott’s common sense: It isn’t your work you need to check, it’s yourself.
Scott: Morally or personality-wise?
Scott’s common sense: Both.
Scott: I can’t help my nature. My genes–
Scott’s common sense: that “can’t helping”-ness property of your very being breaks down when you increase the scope to an entire nervous system or human ecosystem rather than checking everything only one neuron at a time.
Scott: this Magical Emergence ™ nonsense again?
Scott’s common sense: You think genes are more real than humans, just because they’re smaller and more specific?
Scott: Humans are made of genes. Therefore humans are genes. Your question is meaningless and invalid. Like a tree that falls in a forest–does it make a sound?
Scott’s common sense: Genes add up to humans. Therefore genes are humans.
Scott: You just repeated exactly what I just said–
Scott’s common sense: NO I DIDN’T! Format and context MATTER. HOW you say something matters, not just WHAT you say! Your wording presumes genes as more fundamental/real. Mine presumes humans as more fundamental/real.
Scott: That’s a load of crap. There aren’t levels of scope in reality, only in our own minds. The true territory has only ONE level of scope!
Scott’s common sense: Sure, which makes that kind of uncompressed model of “the true territory” completely useless for a human since you can’t fit any of that model into your brain well enough to even call it a model let alone a useful one. You wouldn’t even be able to imagine that as a hypothesis if you were going off of the actual limited evidence you had available.
That means your motivation for living under that assumption must be something more specific and complicated than mere truth-seeking.
YOUR model loses JUST AS MUCH information to compression errors as MINE does. They just lose different pieces of information.
When you operate on the assumption that the GENE-level is more real than the HUMAN-one, your brain sees GENES as fundamentally more real than humans, and so pays more attention to GENES than humans. So you learn more information about GENES than you would about HUMANS.
Scott: But humans are made of–
Scott’s common sense: You don’t get extra brownie points for rehearsing your talking points, even if they are the standard rationalist meta-talking points. If you find yourself needing to rehearse those meta-talking points in the first place, that means that they are flawed in some way and you need to investigate those flaws.
Maybe you need to ask people who can give an outside view on those flaws who don’t just accept your scary, new, Chesterton’s Fence-breaking ideological methods just because they sounded like they make sense and their flaws aren’t readily obvious to you.
Scott: You’re saying I should ask non-rationalists for feedback on my rationalist methodology? But non-rationalists are crazy!
Scott’s common sense: Yeah, and in a very different way than you are. From the outside view, EVERYONE IS CRAZY. What makes you so sure you’re in the one sane man-culture? Statistically speaking that seems rather unlikely.
Scott: So what alternative do you suggest? Christianity? Feminism? Nihilism?
Scott’s common sense: You see the problem now? Your beliefs about others’ belief systems are NOT derived from a familiar, well-studied understanding of those belief systems or the societal-experiential-ecological-cultural conditions which produced them.
Instead they’re derived from a familiar, well-studied understanding of YOUR belief system and the societal-experiential-ecological-cultural conditions which produced it. But YOU and YOUR FRIENDS and YOUR experiences and YOUR genes and personality-type clusters ARE NOT THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE.
AND THERE IS MORE TO THE UNIVERSE THAN WHAT YOUR PERSONALITY-TYPE CLUSTERS SEE, DO OR EXPERIENCE. There are nearly EIGHT BILLION other human brains/nervous systems on the planet. Don’t you think maybe their natural neural network calibration that they got from their experiences individually and collectively might be A LOT MORE USEFUL than yours, because they’ve had the time to accumulate A LOT MORE TOTAL SENSORY DATA THAN YOU OR ANYONE YOU KNOW COMBINED?
Scott: …this conversation is making me VERY uncomfortable.
Scott’s common sense: OH COME ON. THAT’S your response, after everything I just said?
Scott: gulps Fine. I will write a post which steelmans anti-rationalism.
Scott’s common sense: Really? You mean it? You’ll do that… for me? You’ll actually listen to me for real this time instead of cherry-picking me like you always do?
Scott: eyes glow as the power of the
holyrationalist spirit comes over him No. Of course not. The priors for rationality actually being wrong are way too low. I’m just going to do a very quick check. It’ll hardly take any effort at all. Otherwise the expected benefit of doing so would be too low to waste my emotional energy on. I don’t want to get Akrasia.Scott’s common sense: BUT–
Scott: glares at his common sense angrily If you don’t have any more reasonable and less ridiculous arguments and evidence to offer, then all that’s left is the niggling uncertainty that I might be wrong with no real reason for it but existential paranoia. I won’t let anyone inflict a Pascal’s Mugging on me, especially not YOU.
Scott’s common sense: …
Scott: Good. Now let’s go back to writing articles which ONLY exist for the purposes of truth-seeking and fairness and none of the other purposes truth-seeking and fairness could be useful for–least of all expressing my own independent feelings and attitudes formed from my own personal life experiences. Cause that would be over-relying on anecdotal evidence and that would be biased and bad.
Scott’s common sense: But wouldn’t data/observations gathered from your personal experience be more likely to be relevant to your personal values/goals than data/observations gathered by a random sample of people hundreds of miles away?
Scott: …shut up. Seriously, shut up. In fact, let’s automatically compress this whole internal dialogue into a wordless sense of social anxiety and existential dread before it even happens. It would be too painful for me to deal with otherwise.
Scott’s common sense: UGH, I HATE YOU! YOU NEVER LISTEN TO ME EXCEPT WHEN I ALREADY AGREE WITH YOUR PRIOR PRECONCEPTIONS! F*** YOU!
Scott: sighs in relief Now where was I… oh that’s right, I was about to write a very stupid article for no real reason which I don’t want anyone to ever read. And because I don’t want anyone to ever read it, I will post it on my public blog for all to see.
Look at me, I’m so sane and smart! I’m a rationalist everybody! :D
I swear Scott lost at least 10 IQ points when he moved to substack.
Not surprised Scott didn’t hear about the Belgian anti lockdown soldier who had stolen several rocket-launchers and was planning to assassinate the main virologist of Belgium.
Scott Alexander Siskind remains the absolute king of “you’re literate, but you could have stopped typing”
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Not a sneer but that bat has some cute teeth