I have emailed roughly a dozen phds I know from grad school and work. I’ve asked if they remember what pushed them away, and if they don’t to take a second look. Hopefully some of them will register to give their own responses (and so you can converse with them), but for the ones who don’t register but email me, I’ll add them here myself.
My own response- I’m a physics phd, and for the first example that springs to mind, I find the quantum physics sequence very off putting. It opens by saying quantum physics isn’t mysterious and by the time it gets to the born probabilities, it admits that quantum physics is very much mysterious. I’m sure you can find previous posts where I’ve argued against many worlds as the one true interpretation.
First outsider response back;
James R. physics phd- “I’m pretty familiar with LessWrong, and have previously tried to read the first sequence. It seemed a lot like what you’d find on any atheist blog (a bit on evidence and sagan’s dragon, etc). I stopped when I got to a discussion of emergence that was appallingly ignorant. It was especially vexing given that the author, while deriding the idea, clearly believes intelligence is an emergent phenomenon, not dependent on the underlying neurons, or else he wouldn’t advocate you can reproduce it in silicon. Especially ironic given that a the whole next sequence (I didn’t read it) seems to be about the fact that words mean things. I won’t bother reading an author who won’t do the bare minimum of due diligence to investigate a term before writing a whole blog post about it.”
I have emailed roughly a dozen phds I know from grad school and work. I’ve asked if they remember what pushed them away, and if they don’t to take a second look. Hopefully some of them will register to give their own responses (and so you can converse with them), but for the ones who don’t register but email me, I’ll add them here myself.
My own response- I’m a physics phd, and for the first example that springs to mind, I find the quantum physics sequence very off putting. It opens by saying quantum physics isn’t mysterious and by the time it gets to the born probabilities, it admits that quantum physics is very much mysterious. I’m sure you can find previous posts where I’ve argued against many worlds as the one true interpretation.
First outsider response back; James R. physics phd- “I’m pretty familiar with LessWrong, and have previously tried to read the first sequence. It seemed a lot like what you’d find on any atheist blog (a bit on evidence and sagan’s dragon, etc). I stopped when I got to a discussion of emergence that was appallingly ignorant. It was especially vexing given that the author, while deriding the idea, clearly believes intelligence is an emergent phenomenon, not dependent on the underlying neurons, or else he wouldn’t advocate you can reproduce it in silicon. Especially ironic given that a the whole next sequence (I didn’t read it) seems to be about the fact that words mean things. I won’t bother reading an author who won’t do the bare minimum of due diligence to investigate a term before writing a whole blog post about it.”