(Stem fluidity bridge is fun because Chapman is finally complaining about an outgroup that apparently he and I both dislike, which is… most postmodernist academics except for the very first ones. He claims the first postmodernists were correctly noticing something incomplete about “systematic rationality” [which I think still means something other than LW style rationality, or at least only a subset of LW style rationality], and then they didn’t quite articulate it, and then they accidentally trained successors who eventually lost systematic rationality, which you actually need to understand before you can transcend it)
I’d argue the thing about LW-style rationality doesn’t matter as much as most people think it does due to over indexing on the vibe of the sequences. No matter how much I hear folks say “that’s not LW-style rationality” I just look at what LW-style rationalists actually do and it’s much closer to Chapman’s notion of rationality than actual meta-rationality. Maybe at best I’d say something like playing at meta-rationality without actually giving up the key stuff about rationality that holds people back?
Anyway, that’s not an actual argument, just claiming I think there’s something important going on here that means saying he’s not talking about LW-style rationality (as written about or aspired to) misses the point.
Update: I didn’t get anything out of this piece, but I did get value from reading:
https://metarationality.com/bongard-meta-rationality
and
https://metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-bridge
(Stem fluidity bridge is fun because Chapman is finally complaining about an outgroup that apparently he and I both dislike, which is… most postmodernist academics except for the very first ones. He claims the first postmodernists were correctly noticing something incomplete about “systematic rationality” [which I think still means something other than LW style rationality, or at least only a subset of LW style rationality], and then they didn’t quite articulate it, and then they accidentally trained successors who eventually lost systematic rationality, which you actually need to understand before you can transcend it)
I’d argue the thing about LW-style rationality doesn’t matter as much as most people think it does due to over indexing on the vibe of the sequences. No matter how much I hear folks say “that’s not LW-style rationality” I just look at what LW-style rationalists actually do and it’s much closer to Chapman’s notion of rationality than actual meta-rationality. Maybe at best I’d say something like playing at meta-rationality without actually giving up the key stuff about rationality that holds people back?
Anyway, that’s not an actual argument, just claiming I think there’s something important going on here that means saying he’s not talking about LW-style rationality (as written about or aspired to) misses the point.