Alas, I can’t give you a sweeping history of a bunch of movements and factions. The last group really comparable to today’s rationalist movement was the community around Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics. My essay will talk about them.
What is now being mulled over by my beta readers is somewhat more personal and depends on the premise that my experience was representative of a lot of 20th-century proto-rationalists, including in particular Eliezer. Fortunately I don’t have to handwave this; there’s reasonably good evidence that it’s true, some of which is indicated in the essay itself.
I depends on how you define This Sort of Thing , or rationalist/sceptic movements in general. If you use a definition along the lines of:-
• Being science-orientated , but having much more specific claims than “science good”
• Being largely outside of mainstream academia etc
• Being an insular group that mostly talk to each other
• Having difficulty in communicating with outsiders , in any case, because their own theories are expressed in a novel jargon.
• Centering on a charasmatic leader, with a set of mandatory writings
• Having an immodest epistemology..which claims to be able to solve just about any problem..
• ..which is based on a small number of Weird Tricks.
...then you would need to include David Deutsch’s followers as well..the Fabric of Reality was published in the 90s.
And this iteration of rationality borrows Deutsch’s argument for the many world’s interpretation, just as it borrows Korzybski’s map-territory distinction.
I know who Deutsch is, and I’d never even heard that he had a movement around him.
Which is relevant. I’ve had my ear to the ground for interesting rationality training since, oh, 1975 or so, and I definitely run in the right circles to pick up rumors of stuff like this. The fact that your report is my first sign for that crew is from my POV pretty good evidence that its impact was very, very low.
I also question some of your other premises. Speaking as a person who approaches the Yudkowskian reform from a perspective formed by a previous rationality movement, I don’t think it has all that much difficulty communicating with outsiders at all, certainly not compared to the culture around General Semantics. To the extent it does: well, science is hard. There’s not much point in trying to pitch the Sequences to people much below the American mean IQ level, at least not before our tutorial techniques get a lot better than they are now.
Nor, speaking as a person with considerable subject-matter expertise in epistemology, do I think this movement has a particularly “immodest” epistemology. If one doesn’t think one’s theory knowledge can explain the justification of knowledge in very broad generality, there’s not much point in maintaining it at all, is there?
Speaking as a semi-outsider, it’s not clear to me that this community has mandatory writings at all. Yes, a lot of us have read parts of the Sequences, if not all (I’m not-all myself) but I see no sign that one’s in-groupness depends on having done that. It’s very easy for me to imagine someone fitting into this movement although never having read a word of Yudkowsky, simply by being able to adopt the community’s discourse habits and its concerns.
I described myself as a subject-matter expert in epistemology. That means I’m familiar with the branch of philosophy that considers the maintenance and justification of knowledge. and considers different theories of same.
Since you’re using the name ‘metatroll’, I think I’ll leave it at that.
Alas, I can’t give you a sweeping history of a bunch of movements and factions. The last group really comparable to today’s rationalist movement was the community around Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics. My essay will talk about them.
What is now being mulled over by my beta readers is somewhat more personal and depends on the premise that my experience was representative of a lot of 20th-century proto-rationalists, including in particular Eliezer. Fortunately I don’t have to handwave this; there’s reasonably good evidence that it’s true, some of which is indicated in the essay itself.
I depends on how you define This Sort of Thing , or rationalist/sceptic movements in general. If you use a definition along the lines of:-
• Being science-orientated , but having much more specific claims than “science good” • Being largely outside of mainstream academia etc • Being an insular group that mostly talk to each other • Having difficulty in communicating with outsiders , in any case, because their own theories are expressed in a novel jargon. • Centering on a charasmatic leader, with a set of mandatory writings • Having an immodest epistemology..which claims to be able to solve just about any problem.. • ..which is based on a small number of Weird Tricks.
...then you would need to include David Deutsch’s followers as well..the Fabric of Reality was published in the 90s.
And this iteration of rationality borrows Deutsch’s argument for the many world’s interpretation, just as it borrows Korzybski’s map-territory distinction.
I know who Deutsch is, and I’d never even heard that he had a movement around him.
Which is relevant. I’ve had my ear to the ground for interesting rationality training since, oh, 1975 or so, and I definitely run in the right circles to pick up rumors of stuff like this. The fact that your report is my first sign for that crew is from my POV pretty good evidence that its impact was very, very low.
I also question some of your other premises. Speaking as a person who approaches the Yudkowskian reform from a perspective formed by a previous rationality movement, I don’t think it has all that much difficulty communicating with outsiders at all, certainly not compared to the culture around General Semantics. To the extent it does: well, science is hard. There’s not much point in trying to pitch the Sequences to people much below the American mean IQ level, at least not before our tutorial techniques get a lot better than they are now.
Nor, speaking as a person with considerable subject-matter expertise in epistemology, do I think this movement has a particularly “immodest” epistemology. If one doesn’t think one’s theory knowledge can explain the justification of knowledge in very broad generality, there’s not much point in maintaining it at all, is there?
Speaking as a semi-outsider, it’s not clear to me that this community has mandatory writings at all. Yes, a lot of us have read parts of the Sequences, if not all (I’m not-all myself) but I see no sign that one’s in-groupness depends on having done that. It’s very easy for me to imagine someone fitting into this movement although never having read a word of Yudkowsky, simply by being able to adopt the community’s discourse habits and its concerns.
How do you know that you’re good at knowing?
I described myself as a subject-matter expert in epistemology. That means I’m familiar with the branch of philosophy that considers the maintenance and justification of knowledge. and considers different theories of same.
Since you’re using the name ‘metatroll’, I think I’ll leave it at that.