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"Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end" - Spock Anecdotally I found that the Less Wrong community tends to be decidedly more full of crap than average.

"Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end" - Spock Anecdotally I found that the Less Wrong community tends to be decidedly more full of crap than average. In the same vein as spiritual materialism[1], many people that engage in a bias witch-hunt seem to be falling prey to "logical materialism", where the whole exercise turns into people deluding themselves into thinking they're somehow "better" than others because they're less full of crap than average. It's good to know thyself, but it's no use if your knowledge isn't tempered by wisdom, and you're not going to get that by reading blog posts about cognitive biases online, no matter how good the posts. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritual_materialism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritual_materialism

Cushman 14y ago
It's nice to know I'm not the only one who thinks this. I think it's really telling that a community which is ostensibly concerned with the science of achieving desires spends so much time focused on the "problem" of akrasia. It's also heartbreaking to see intelligent people getting so excited about ideas like cryonics and personality uploading. I mean, they're interesting things to talk about, but a lot of people on LW seem to actually think they might get to live forever. It's kinda sad.
- ableal 14y ago
  > actually think they might get to live forever And they aren't horrified at the prospect of that being possible? Not much thinking going on there, I suppose.
  - Cushman 14y ago
    Eliezer Yudkowsky's younger brother died in 2004 and it inspired a lengthy email thread about the subject.[0] I expect it is not so much about wishing not to die, which even a transhumanist must admit is at least no worse than living, but wishing not to have loved ones die. Truly tragic. [0] http://yudkowsky.net/other/yehuda http://yudkowsky.net/other/yehuda
  - D_Alex 14y ago
    Why would you be horrified at the prospect of living? I suspect it is you that needs to put a bit more thought into this matter.
    - D_Alex 14y ago
      Oh wow! A downvote! So, the message I'm getting is that a) it is appropriate to be horrified at the prospect of living; and furthermore b) asking why is inappropriate...? This is seriously weirding me out.
      - Jach 14y ago
        The message I've taken from this entire subthread is "try to laugh rather than shake my head." The behavior makes a lot of sense if I frame it in status signaling (which helps make sense of so much that I suspect it of being too broad a framework). My own comment on the topic of living is: so it may be physically impossible to live forever, I think shooting for even a "mere" 200 years is doable and would be fucking awesome. At least we're not dogs, they get less than two decades.
- unimpressive 14y ago
  > It's also heartbreaking to see intelligent people getting so excited about ideas like cryonics and personality uploading. I mean, they're interesting things to talk about, but a lot of people on LW seem to actually think they might get to live forever. I wouldn't totally dismiss sci-fi concepts like brain uploading. But then I'm not totally sold on their viability either. One of the things I always thought was interesting about cryonics was data integrity. It could be a while before you hit the singularity. (Or whatever it is you think will wake you up.) Even with liquid nitrogen I doubt your brain can be 100% preserved. So let's say hypothetically you get yourself some proper Ray Kurzweil recursively improving A.I. And as a common courtesy decide to revive the Alcor people. If you have 99% of someones brain image and use statistical algorithms like Bayes theorem to fill in the rest is it still the same person when you wake them up? How about 99.99% their brain? 99.999999? (Which brings us back to the semantics of labels and reductionism vs. wholism.) People who think they'll live forever have huge logic fails on their hands. Ignoring the heat death of the universe as an obvious one. [0] In fact every time I think of the whole business Issac Asimov's The Last Question comes to mind. [1] [0]: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe) [1]: (http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html)
  - Cushman 14y ago
    > ...is it still the same person when you wake them up? This is pretty much where I land on this. Given any empirical theory of consciousness, it's never going to be "I get to live in the computer," just "I die, but a copy of my brain lives in the computer." And it's pretty hard to draw a bright line between that and "I die, my brain slowly decays for thousands of years, then it's surgically reconstructed and awoken." Still feels like death to me. Of course, to your transhumanist theorist, there's probably just as much connection between me and the computer as there is between me in the night and me in the morning; it's all just an illusion created by a persistent brain state. But that doesn't help either, because now you're describing a kind of immortality -- "This exact stream of continuous consciousness is a dead end, but something very like it will continue to be and think of itself as part of me and that gives me and it some comfort about the whole thing" -- which the general public has been achieving quite successfully for some time in the form of procreation. In fact, since every living organism represents a terminal link in a chain of unbroken life dating back to the first self-replicating molecule, it might be quite reasonable to say that we have all been alive for billions of years at least, we just don't remember most of it. But this is changing: I can go on Wikipedia today and recover the memories of our culture dating back for most of its existence. Naturally, they grow vaguer the further they go back in time, as memories do; but for events that take place today, we have a record which far exceeds human memory in accuracy and exactness of fact, and which will very soon be competitive with it in emotional effect. It is quite realistic for me to expect to create a record of my life which has as much effect on my descendants in a hundred years as my own memories of today would have on me were I to live that long. So I think it's possible the transhumanists missed the boat. Or rather, they're on the boat already and just don't realize it. The human macro-organism does, starting from now, seem to stand a decent chance of living to see the heat death of the universe.
planetguy 14y ago
Anecdotally I've seen some pretty good articles on lesswrong, and some not so good ones. But the idea "Hey, want to be more rational? Join our community" gives me the willies. If you want to be more rational, then joining a groupthink-ish community is the last thing you should want to do.
cheatercheater 14y ago
Reminds me of my Mensa membership (hey, at 16 you're young and impressionable). Quit that ghetto a week into reading their mailing lists. Imagine the complete opposite of HN.
- Produce 14y ago
  Given that everyone is wrong some of the time, wisdom suggests that being involved in both communities will lead to being more right than either of them.
D_Alex 14y ago
"... more full of crap than average..." Than average what? I often lurk on LessWrong, and post there very occasionally. I find it to be a very rich source of original ideas, some of which are truly profound. YMMV, of course.
astrofinch 14y ago
As a frequent LW contributor, I agree that Less Wrong users can be arrogant in a way that's counterproductive. I'm actually planning to write a series of posts presenting a sophisticated argument for this at some point. I'm curious if you think there is anything else we could stand to work on. I interpreted your use of the word "wisdom" to mean a lack of arrogance, but if you were using it to mean other stuff as well I'd love to know. (I'm a fan of yours, BTW.)

Cushman 14y ago

It's nice to know I'm not the only one who thinks this. I think it's really telling that a community which is ostensibly concerned with the science of achieving desires spends so much time focused on the "problem" of akrasia. It's also heartbreaking to see intelligent people getting so excited about ideas like cryonics and personality uploading. I mean, they're interesting things to talk about, but a lot of people on LW seem to actually think they might get to live forever. It's kinda sad.

ableal 14y ago
> actually think they might get to live forever And they aren't horrified at the prospect of that being possible? Not much thinking going on there, I suppose.
- Cushman 14y ago
  Eliezer Yudkowsky's younger brother died in 2004 and it inspired a lengthy email thread about the subject.[0] I expect it is not so much about wishing not to die, which even a transhumanist must admit is at least no worse than living, but wishing not to have loved ones die. Truly tragic. [0] http://yudkowsky.net/other/yehuda http://yudkowsky.net/other/yehuda
- D_Alex 14y ago
  Why would you be horrified at the prospect of living? I suspect it is you that needs to put a bit more thought into this matter.
  - D_Alex 14y ago
    Oh wow! A downvote! So, the message I'm getting is that a) it is appropriate to be horrified at the prospect of living; and furthermore b) asking why is inappropriate...? This is seriously weirding me out.
    - Jach 14y ago
      The message I've taken from this entire subthread is "try to laugh rather than shake my head." The behavior makes a lot of sense if I frame it in status signaling (which helps make sense of so much that I suspect it of being too broad a framework). My own comment on the topic of living is: so it may be physically impossible to live forever, I think shooting for even a "mere" 200 years is doable and would be fucking awesome. At least we're not dogs, they get less than two decades.
unimpressive 14y ago
> It's also heartbreaking to see intelligent people getting so excited about ideas like cryonics and personality uploading. I mean, they're interesting things to talk about, but a lot of people on LW seem to actually think they might get to live forever. I wouldn't totally dismiss sci-fi concepts like brain uploading. But then I'm not totally sold on their viability either. One of the things I always thought was interesting about cryonics was data integrity. It could be a while before you hit the singularity. (Or whatever it is you think will wake you up.) Even with liquid nitrogen I doubt your brain can be 100% preserved. So let's say hypothetically you get yourself some proper Ray Kurzweil recursively improving A.I. And as a common courtesy decide to revive the Alcor people. If you have 99% of someones brain image and use statistical algorithms like Bayes theorem to fill in the rest is it still the same person when you wake them up? How about 99.99% their brain? 99.999999? (Which brings us back to the semantics of labels and reductionism vs. wholism.) People who think they'll live forever have huge logic fails on their hands. Ignoring the heat death of the universe as an obvious one. [0] In fact every time I think of the whole business Issac Asimov's The Last Question comes to mind. [1] [0]: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe) [1]: (http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html)
- Cushman 14y ago
  > ...is it still the same person when you wake them up? This is pretty much where I land on this. Given any empirical theory of consciousness, it's never going to be "I get to live in the computer," just "I die, but a copy of my brain lives in the computer." And it's pretty hard to draw a bright line between that and "I die, my brain slowly decays for thousands of years, then it's surgically reconstructed and awoken." Still feels like death to me. Of course, to your transhumanist theorist, there's probably just as much connection between me and the computer as there is between me in the night and me in the morning; it's all just an illusion created by a persistent brain state. But that doesn't help either, because now you're describing a kind of immortality -- "This exact stream of continuous consciousness is a dead end, but something very like it will continue to be and think of itself as part of me and that gives me and it some comfort about the whole thing" -- which the general public has been achieving quite successfully for some time in the form of procreation. In fact, since every living organism represents a terminal link in a chain of unbroken life dating back to the first self-replicating molecule, it might be quite reasonable to say that we have all been alive for billions of years at least, we just don't remember most of it. But this is changing: I can go on Wikipedia today and recover the memories of our culture dating back for most of its existence. Naturally, they grow vaguer the further they go back in time, as memories do; but for events that take place today, we have a record which far exceeds human memory in accuracy and exactness of fact, and which will very soon be competitive with it in emotional effect. It is quite realistic for me to expect to create a record of my life which has as much effect on my descendants in a hundred years as my own memories of today would have on me were I to live that long. So I think it's possible the transhumanists missed the boat. Or rather, they're on the boat already and just don't realize it. The human macro-organism does, starting from now, seem to stand a decent chance of living to see the heat death of the universe.

planetguy 14y ago

Anecdotally I've seen some pretty good articles on lesswrong, and some not so good ones. But the idea "Hey, want to be more rational? Join our community" gives me the willies. If you want to be more rational, then joining a groupthink-ish community is the last thing you should want to do.

cheatercheater 14y ago

Reminds me of my Mensa membership (hey, at 16 you're young and impressionable). Quit that ghetto a week into reading their mailing lists. Imagine the complete opposite of HN.

Produce 14y ago
Given that everyone is wrong some of the time, wisdom suggests that being involved in both communities will lead to being more right than either of them.

D_Alex 14y ago

"... more full of crap than average..." Than average what? I often lurk on LessWrong, and post there very occasionally. I find it to be a very rich source of original ideas, some of which are truly profound. YMMV, of course.

astrofinch 14y ago

As a frequent LW contributor, I agree that Less Wrong users can be arrogant in a way that's counterproductive. I'm actually planning to write a series of posts presenting a sophisticated argument for this at some point. I'm curious if you think there is anything else we could stand to work on. I interpreted your use of the word "wisdom" to mean a lack of arrogance, but if you were using it to mean other stuff as well I'd love to know. (I'm a fan of yours, BTW.)