I’m not sure if the rationalists did anything they shouldn’t do re: Ziz. Going forward though, I think epistemic learned helplessness/memetic immune systems should be among the first things to introduce to newcomers to the site/community. Being wary that some ideas are, in a sense, out to get you, is a central part of how I process information.
Not exactly sure how to implement that recommendation though. You also don’t want people to use it as a fully general counterargument to anything they don’t like.
Ranting a bit here, but it just feels like the collection of rationalist thought is so complex and, even with the various attempts at organizing everything. Thinking well is hard, and involves many concepts, and we haven’t figured it all out yet! It’s kind of sad to see journalists trying to understand the rationalist community and TDT.
Another thing that comes to mind is the FAIR site (formerly mormon apologetics), where members of the latter day saints church tries to correct various misconceptions people have about the church.[1] There’s a ton of writing on there, and provides an example of how people have tried to, uh, improve their PR through writing stuff online to clear up misconceptions.
And did it work? I suspect it probably had a small positive effect. I know very little about this, but my hunch would be that the popularity of mormons comes from having lots of them everywhere in society, and people get to meet them and realize that those people are pretty nice.
(See also Scott Alexander’s book review on The Secrets to Our Success)
Why are people so bad at reasoning? For the same reason they’re so bad at letting poisonous spiders walk all over their face without freaking out. Both “skills” are really bad ideas, most of the people who tried them died in the process, so evolution removed those genes from the population, and successful cultures stigmatized them enough to give people an internalized fear of even trying.
They also provide various evidence for their faith. The one I find particularly funny concerns whether Joseph Smith could have written the book of mormon. It states that Smith (1) had limited education (2) was not a writer and that (3) the book of mormon was very long and had 258k words.
This calls to mind a certain other author, with limited formal education, little fiction writing experience, non-mainstream sexual preferences, and also wrote a very long book (660k words!) that reached many people in the world who ended up finding him very convincing…
In companies where I worked, we sometimes had a security training, which included stories about the things that went wrong in the past. Some examples were from the industry in general, but some of them were from that specific company (with specific names removed).
We probably should write a short report on “the things that went wrong in the rationalist community”, written from our perspective, without specific names, and… it could be an interesting topic for the new members.
I’m not sure if the rationalists did anything they shouldn’t do re: Ziz. Going forward though, I think epistemic learned helplessness/memetic immune systems should be among the first things to introduce to newcomers to the site/community. Being wary that some ideas are, in a sense, out to get you, is a central part of how I process information.
Not exactly sure how to implement that recommendation though. You also don’t want people to use it as a fully general counterargument to anything they don’t like.
Ranting a bit here, but it just feels like the collection of rationalist thought is so complex and, even with the various attempts at organizing everything. Thinking well is hard, and involves many concepts, and we haven’t figured it all out yet! It’s kind of sad to see journalists trying to understand the rationalist community and TDT.
Another thing that comes to mind is the FAIR site (formerly mormon apologetics), where members of the latter day saints church tries to correct various misconceptions people have about the church.[1] There’s a ton of writing on there, and provides an example of how people have tried to, uh, improve their PR through writing stuff online to clear up misconceptions.
And did it work? I suspect it probably had a small positive effect. I know very little about this, but my hunch would be that the popularity of mormons comes from having lots of them everywhere in society, and people get to meet them and realize that those people are pretty nice.
(See also Scott Alexander’s book review on The Secrets to Our Success)
They also provide various evidence for their faith. The one I find particularly funny concerns whether Joseph Smith could have written the book of mormon. It states that Smith (1) had limited education (2) was not a writer and that (3) the book of mormon was very long and had 258k words.
This calls to mind a certain other author, with limited formal education, little fiction writing experience, non-mainstream sexual preferences, and also wrote a very long book (660k words!) that reached many people in the world who ended up finding him very convincing…
In companies where I worked, we sometimes had a security training, which included stories about the things that went wrong in the past. Some examples were from the industry in general, but some of them were from that specific company (with specific names removed).
We probably should write a short report on “the things that went wrong in the rationalist community”, written from our perspective, without specific names, and… it could be an interesting topic for the new members.