I think that you are responding to the post at too low a level of abstraction.
One of the pleasures of reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation is the scene in which Harry Seldon demonstrates the power of Psychohistory by designing an organisation, a variation of the Womens’s Institute, that grows and grows and grows. (And one of the shocks of re-reading Foundation is that the scene isn’t actually in that book. Where is it?). Ones intuition is that there are laws governing the dynamics of society and the rise and fall of empires. Can we discern enough of those laws to make sure that rationalism flourishes?
calcsam’s post contains much food for thought, and I envy his plain, simple prose style. Hence my praise.
Reading between the lines to detect and reject a suggestion that we turn Less Wrong into a church along the line of Latter-day Saints is a mistake. Food for thought should be digested not puked up.
Some rationalists come unstuck by becoming addicted to alcohol. Do we want a no-drinking rule, like the Latter-day Saints have? I don’t think we should even be asking the question. I don’t think it is helpful to draw parallels so closely. But we don’t have to just drop the issue.
We are aware of over-confidence bias. Perhaps that is related to alcoholism. It is no secret that alcohol is can be dangerously addictive. Any-one who lives in a big city sees the down and outs living on the street. And yet the problem of alcoholism self-limits at a fairly high level, as though people can see the danger and are over-confident of their own ability to avoid it.
It would be cool if rationalists could win in the sense of the rationalist community having a low rate of alcoholism. We are not interested in trying to do that by having a no-drinking rule, but that doesn’t mean we are not interested in trying by other means.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that over-confidence bias (I can handle it, it won’t happen to me) is part of the cause of alcoholism. The means of combating alcoholism that align with our values is to find ways of bridging the gap between an academic understanding (that people in general are over-confident) and a personal understanding (that maybe I need to cut back my drinking because I am over-confident about being able to handle it.) I don’t think any-one feels threatened by a community norm of helping each other to bridge the academic/personal gap.
Another example is the Latter-day Saints rule against coffee. Not for us, obviously. On the other hand we are into self-experimentation. Try it and see. Nullius in verbia. That makes us a bit different. Most people who try giving up coffee to see if it makes their own life better face ribbing from their friends. The rationalist community could be more supportive than that. So we can look at calcsam’s post and be inspired to build a community around our own values and see how others, with different values, go about it.
Thanks Alan. You get my point. But even if rationalists don’t adopt any LDS norms—and I don’t expected them/us to (I’m hovering at the edge of the community at the moment) -- understanding that the framework here should be helpful.
I think that you are responding to the post at too low a level of abstraction.
One of the pleasures of reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation is the scene in which Harry Seldon demonstrates the power of Psychohistory by designing an organisation, a variation of the Womens’s Institute, that grows and grows and grows. (And one of the shocks of re-reading Foundation is that the scene isn’t actually in that book. Where is it?). Ones intuition is that there are laws governing the dynamics of society and the rise and fall of empires. Can we discern enough of those laws to make sure that rationalism flourishes?
calcsam’s post contains much food for thought, and I envy his plain, simple prose style. Hence my praise.
Reading between the lines to detect and reject a suggestion that we turn Less Wrong into a church along the line of Latter-day Saints is a mistake. Food for thought should be digested not puked up.
Some rationalists come unstuck by becoming addicted to alcohol. Do we want a no-drinking rule, like the Latter-day Saints have? I don’t think we should even be asking the question. I don’t think it is helpful to draw parallels so closely. But we don’t have to just drop the issue.
We are aware of over-confidence bias. Perhaps that is related to alcoholism. It is no secret that alcohol is can be dangerously addictive. Any-one who lives in a big city sees the down and outs living on the street. And yet the problem of alcoholism self-limits at a fairly high level, as though people can see the danger and are over-confident of their own ability to avoid it.
It would be cool if rationalists could win in the sense of the rationalist community having a low rate of alcoholism. We are not interested in trying to do that by having a no-drinking rule, but that doesn’t mean we are not interested in trying by other means.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that over-confidence bias (I can handle it, it won’t happen to me) is part of the cause of alcoholism. The means of combating alcoholism that align with our values is to find ways of bridging the gap between an academic understanding (that people in general are over-confident) and a personal understanding (that maybe I need to cut back my drinking because I am over-confident about being able to handle it.) I don’t think any-one feels threatened by a community norm of helping each other to bridge the academic/personal gap.
Another example is the Latter-day Saints rule against coffee. Not for us, obviously. On the other hand we are into self-experimentation. Try it and see. Nullius in verbia. That makes us a bit different. Most people who try giving up coffee to see if it makes their own life better face ribbing from their friends. The rationalist community could be more supportive than that. So we can look at calcsam’s post and be inspired to build a community around our own values and see how others, with different values, go about it.
It’s the short story “Snowball Effect” by Katherine MacLean. Collected in this anthology edited by Asimov.
Thanks Alan. You get my point. But even if rationalists don’t adopt any LDS norms—and I don’t expected them/us to (I’m hovering at the edge of the community at the moment) -- understanding that the framework here should be helpful.