perhaps a subtle variation on this story, but one of the things that pushed me to grow the postrationality meme in the early days was that other people were sucked into this vibe and it just seemed like the best way to get people out was to get them to move on.
many things i wrote were because people, including people in the Bay and who attended cfar workshops, just utterly sucked at applying the lessons of the sequences because they gave off a vibe that made everyone get it wrong, such that it didn’t matter what was actually written
i now kind of regret it. not because i think i was wrong, but because i failed to fully appreciate how much the postrationality memeplex would suck in prerationalists. now postrationality things seem like a lot of people not getting they have to be rationalists first.
anyway, I’ve mostly moved on. not because it doesn’t matter at all, but because I’ve come out the other side of the process and know there’s so much work each person has to do for themselves in their own way that it mostly doesn’t matter as much as i thought it did
One thing I didn’t say in that thread that’s probably worth adding:
I think a lot of my most contentious posts over the years come down to me arguing against the vibe of the sequences and people trying desperately to refute me by pointing to the content while actively giving off the vibe and me flailing in desperation to get them to see that they’re failing to actual live the things they’re claiming to believe. I’m not sure it always came off that way, but that’s certainly what it felt like.
The only reason my posts are less contentious now is I’ve given up on trying to directly point out the vibe/content mismatch. I instead come at it with more subtlety and stick to the content. I’m not sure if this is actually better or not, though. I mean sure, don’t have tons of people downvoting me in the comments and long comment threads where people talk past each other, but also maybe some people who need to hear they are living the vibe rather than the content don’t get that message because it isn’t made directly enough.
This framing might at least be a way for me to return to my old ways. I can just say “hey, look, I don’t care what you have to say about the content of the sequences, I’m talking about the rationalist vibe and what’s wrong with it”.
Copying over my replies to this thread on Twitter:
One thing I didn’t say in that thread that’s probably worth adding:
I think a lot of my most contentious posts over the years come down to me arguing against the vibe of the sequences and people trying desperately to refute me by pointing to the content while actively giving off the vibe and me flailing in desperation to get them to see that they’re failing to actual live the things they’re claiming to believe. I’m not sure it always came off that way, but that’s certainly what it felt like.
The only reason my posts are less contentious now is I’ve given up on trying to directly point out the vibe/content mismatch. I instead come at it with more subtlety and stick to the content. I’m not sure if this is actually better or not, though. I mean sure, don’t have tons of people downvoting me in the comments and long comment threads where people talk past each other, but also maybe some people who need to hear they are living the vibe rather than the content don’t get that message because it isn’t made directly enough.
This framing might at least be a way for me to return to my old ways. I can just say “hey, look, I don’t care what you have to say about the content of the sequences, I’m talking about the rationalist vibe and what’s wrong with it”.
Agreed, the biggest problem with post-rationality is people falling into the pre/trans fallacy:
I mostly know this idea as pre-rigor and post-rigor in mathetmatics:
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/theres-more-to-mathematics-than-rigour-and-proofs/