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You aren't alone.

• alephnerd 2y ago
  And I got flagged for calling out the reductiveness of LessWrong style arguments. Really touched a nerve apparently.
  • ShamelessC 2y ago
    Yeah they’re fond of flagging in my experience. It’s kind of a cult for the emotionally unintelligent and/or wealthy programmer. Lots of lonely people in need of a belief system and finding one in statistics, longtermism, techno-optimism, techno-doomerism, and Spock/Sherlocke style “Bayesian” reasoning. Much of the research done is very overconfident (and reductive, as you mention). They make very bold assumptions, casually throw out contradictory results as outliers, make massive leaps to hypothesis which sound more like science fiction than science. They personally really creep me out. The personality types it attracts seem really impressionable and lacking in a healthy disrespect for authority. Also seem to be a lot of Wolfram types who simply ignore criticism rather than admitting a mistake. Fond of the sound of their own voice.
    • alephnerd 2y ago
      Agreed. I mean there value in using hard rationalism in the social sciences, but science is inherently built on a model. Models are sometimes wrong (they're abstractions and approximations - there's a reason we use confidence intervals), but that doesn't mean it's all for naught - we learn something new and continue to iterate. (Also, it feels like people in the LessWrong space never really heard about econometrics or the UChicago/Fresh Water School of Social Sciences - ie using quantitative methods in the social sciences space, which is something they've along with CMU pushed since the 30s) The entire movement feels like people who read Asimov's Foundation, but ignore the fact that even the Foundation failed to predict the Mule. It also feels like the ETO in the 3 Body Problem (the Tencent version, never watched the netflix one and imo never will)