But rationality is already considered a serious subject; and so the 12V shows that it’s possible to think about these matters in a different way than usual.
Well… a lot of what is being said on LW takes standard ideas much further than they are usually taken in the literature, as far as I know.
For example, the idea that you should use academic-strength decision theory to actually make decisions about everyday and real-life matters (“rationality is about winning”), that you should apply the same mental model to your day-to-day life as is applied to truthseeking in the sciences—that you should debias, do cost-benefit analyses, etc. These are not, to my knowledge, standard ideas. These are fairly frigging extreme in this perverse world. The idea that a scientist who applies careful experimental and statistical truthseeking techniques in her day job, and then goes home to relax to some comforting new-age or religious nonsense is doing something wrong is not a standard idea.
It’s supposed to be strange. Strange gets attention. Strange sticks in the mind. Strange makes the truth memorable.
Strange will get attention… from the wrong crowd. We want to attract the most sober, most rational crew possible. Transhumanism/Singularitarianism in the hands of the sci-fi fringe is really not the way it should be, in my opinion. It’s the clever normal people who are really worth persuading.
Well… a lot of what is being said on LW takes standard ideas much further than they are usually taken in the literature, as far as I know.
For example, the idea that you should use academic-strength decision theory to actually make decisions about everyday and real-life matters (“rationality is about winning”), that you should apply the same mental model to your day-to-day life as is applied to truthseeking in the sciences—that you should debias, do cost-benefit analyses, etc. These are not, to my knowledge, standard ideas. These are fairly frigging extreme in this perverse world. The idea that a scientist who applies careful experimental and statistical truthseeking techniques in her day job, and then goes home to relax to some comforting new-age or religious nonsense is doing something wrong is not a standard idea.
Strange will get attention… from the wrong crowd. We want to attract the most sober, most rational crew possible. Transhumanism/Singularitarianism in the hands of the sci-fi fringe is really not the way it should be, in my opinion. It’s the clever normal people who are really worth persuading.