So, the thing I want to emphasize is that the community is not about the community. Other communities are about nothing more than themselves, and that’s fine, but this community has purpose. We can’t define a rationalist as being a member of the community, or that purpose gets lost.
So we have to be able to ask whether someone is a rationalist without talking about the community. We might decide later that yes, they’re a rationalist, but all the same we don’t think they’re a good person and we don’t want them in the community; but those have to be separate questions.
(Other communities use the word “rationalist” differently to us, and that’s fine too. I don’t claim there’s an objective definition of the word. Just that we need to use a definition that doesn’t talk about us.)
Similarly, rationality can’t be about rationality. If the goal of rationality is merely to spread rationality, then rationality might as well be herpes. If the goal is “to win, and also to spread rationality”, you have to ask what if those two goals conflict? Maybe you go for something like “the goal of rationality is to win, conditional that part of winning means spreading rationality”, but that seems like an unnatural carving of concept-space. And I question what the point is; if the point is simply that there are certain types of people who win but who we don’t like very much, then we’re going about it wrong. Instead of excluding them from the definition of “rationalists”, we can just exclude them from the community.
All that said, I personally wouldn’t exclude Cummings from the community, not based on this post. I don’t think you’re likely to meet many people like him at LW meetups, but as far as I’m concerned he’d be welcome at the London group.
And I question what the point is; if the point is simply that there are certain types of people who win but who we don’t like very much, then we’re going about it wrong. Instead of excluding them from the definition of “rationalists”, we can just exclude them from the community.
But the community is defined as a rationalist community right? Not a specific type of rationalist just plain simple rationalist. If we can’t explain why some people would be excluded from it, then the community seems ill defined and likely to drift and fall apart. Why do we even have one?
We could define rationalists as any of the following
people who want to use their brain meats to make humanity win (i.e. not lose and go extinct)
people who want to have correct and useful beliefs about the world and spread those beliefs and the methods of generating those beliefs aka epistemic rationalists.
Either of those would fit a large part of the people on lesswrong and capture bits of the the spirit of CFAR.
A community that is truly only about “people that use their brain to win” has very little useful to say to each other. Under many goal/belief systems I should hide my goal and beliefs so that people can’t interfere with them. I should actively mess up other peoples goal and belief systems so that they are ineffectual agents.
You could for example use user research and marketing to generate highly persuasive materials to convince people to join an evangelical church and get lots of money from those people. If your goal was simply to get lots of money would you count as a rationalist?
I think communities are always ill-defined, and just because we’re a rationalist community doesn’t mean we have to include every rationalist. We don’t need a formal account of who is and isn’t welcome.
We already have some definition, “rationalist”. I think that definition isn’t very good at letting people know in advance who they will be interacting with and helping. We could improve that definition without making it too formal.
So, the thing I want to emphasize is that the community is not about the community. Other communities are about nothing more than themselves, and that’s fine, but this community has purpose. We can’t define a rationalist as being a member of the community, or that purpose gets lost.
So we have to be able to ask whether someone is a rationalist without talking about the community. We might decide later that yes, they’re a rationalist, but all the same we don’t think they’re a good person and we don’t want them in the community; but those have to be separate questions.
(Other communities use the word “rationalist” differently to us, and that’s fine too. I don’t claim there’s an objective definition of the word. Just that we need to use a definition that doesn’t talk about us.)
Similarly, rationality can’t be about rationality. If the goal of rationality is merely to spread rationality, then rationality might as well be herpes. If the goal is “to win, and also to spread rationality”, you have to ask what if those two goals conflict? Maybe you go for something like “the goal of rationality is to win, conditional that part of winning means spreading rationality”, but that seems like an unnatural carving of concept-space. And I question what the point is; if the point is simply that there are certain types of people who win but who we don’t like very much, then we’re going about it wrong. Instead of excluding them from the definition of “rationalists”, we can just exclude them from the community.
All that said, I personally wouldn’t exclude Cummings from the community, not based on this post. I don’t think you’re likely to meet many people like him at LW meetups, but as far as I’m concerned he’d be welcome at the London group.
But the community is defined as a rationalist community right? Not a specific type of rationalist just plain simple rationalist. If we can’t explain why some people would be excluded from it, then the community seems ill defined and likely to drift and fall apart. Why do we even have one?
We could define rationalists as any of the following
people who want to use their brain meats to make humanity win (i.e. not lose and go extinct)
people who want to have correct and useful beliefs about the world and spread those beliefs and the methods of generating those beliefs aka epistemic rationalists.
Either of those would fit a large part of the people on lesswrong and capture bits of the the spirit of CFAR.
A community that is truly only about “people that use their brain to win” has very little useful to say to each other. Under many goal/belief systems I should hide my goal and beliefs so that people can’t interfere with them. I should actively mess up other peoples goal and belief systems so that they are ineffectual agents.
You could for example use user research and marketing to generate highly persuasive materials to convince people to join an evangelical church and get lots of money from those people. If your goal was simply to get lots of money would you count as a rationalist?
I think communities are always ill-defined, and just because we’re a rationalist community doesn’t mean we have to include every rationalist. We don’t need a formal account of who is and isn’t welcome.
We already have some definition, “rationalist”. I think that definition isn’t very good at letting people know in advance who they will be interacting with and helping. We could improve that definition without making it too formal.