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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
su3su2u1-deactivated20160226
uncrediblehallq

New on Wordpress: Reply to Scott Alexander:

Paul Krugman once wrote:

There is nothing that plays worse in our culture than seeming to be the stodgy defender of old ideas, no matter how true those ideas may be. Luckily, at this point the orthodoxy of the academic economists is very much a minority position among intellectuals in general; one can seem to be a courageous maverick, boldly challenging the powers that be, by reciting the contents of a standard textbook.

I was reminded of this quote when I found Scott Alexander praising me for my alleged contrarianism…
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nostalgebraist

Since you seem to have interacted more with non-tumblr-associated parts of LW than I have, I am curious: do you think that tumblr LW is more reasonable / less “Yudkowskian” than other parts of LW, like main site comment threads?

Over the course of my time on tumblr, I have changed my tune from “LW is wrong about a bunch of stuff” to “Yudkowsky is wrong about a lot of stuff,” because a bunch of tumblr users who identify as LW-rationalists began interacting with me and it turned out that they agreed with me and not Yudkowsky about most of this stuff, and in fact were generally a lot more subtle and thoughtful than EY himself.

My current impression is that LW is a community that has turned out much better than it could have been based on its source material, inheriting improved versions of Yudkowsky’s good qualities and discarding most of his bad ones.  Whenever EY’s positions about MWI or Taubes come up on tumblr, say, it seems to be in the form of people attacking or lamenting them.  (Even the neoreaction stuff, which is probably my biggest complaint, tends to take the form of people endlessly arguing against Moldbug-esque points and tolerating the people who make these points so that they can continue to rebut them again and again; this may be a waste of time, but certainly isn’t a case of too much credulity towards crackpots.)  But I don’t know whether this is a case of tumblr LW being better than the rest of LW, or a case of the two of us actually having different standards.

uncrediblehallq

It’s been quite awhile since I’ve spent a significant amount of time on LessWrong proper. (My last full-length post there was May 2014.) But in the time I knew LessWrong (proper), I’d say it was much more Yudkowskian than Tumblr LessWrong, or at least the parts of TumblrLessWrong I hang out on. I think su3su2u1 has also said that Tumblr LessWrong has been more receptive to his criticisms than other parts of the LW diaspora.

su3su2u1

Yeah, the “feedback” I got via asks when I was linked on reddit was pretty intensely negative. 

And the rationalists I know personally are pretty negative re: my criticisms.  

slatestarscratchpad

The people still on the LW site are not a representative sample of anything. With the exception of a few people like Stuart Armstrong, they’re some kind of pack of unquiet spirits who have moved in to haunt it after it got abandoned by the founding community members. At this point it’s pretty much diaspora all the way down.

Also, I’ve got to ask. You frequently refer to the rationalists you know in real life. Where are you that you are IRL encountering rationalists? I can only find them when I laboriously set up specific rationalist meetups, and even then half the time it’s like me and two other people. The idea of just going around and bumping into rationalists is kind of hard for me to fathom, and I’m curious whether maybe everywhere except Michigan they’re a dime a dozen.

Source: uncrediblehallq

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nuclearspaceheater
nuclearspaceheater: “ shlevy: “ thetransintransgenic: “(via (not original source but) ) ” Help I’m somehow authoritarian left? ” Talks a good game about freedom when out of power, but then as soon as he’s in, bam, everyone is enslaved in the...
thetransintransgenic

(via (not original source but) )

shlevy

Help I’m somehow authoritarian left?

nuclearspaceheater

Talks a good game about freedom when out of power, but then as soon as he’s in, bam, everyone is enslaved in the human-flourishing mines.

slatestarscratchpad

I identify with @nuclearspaceheater’s description so hard.

…actually, permission to use that as a tagline?

Source: thetransintransgenic

I’m staying in a friend’s room right now, while the friend is away..

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My friend says I can open the window on the right. She says the bees don’t care about this one, even though it’s only a meter away from their hive. They just get angry if you open the one that’s directly below it. She’s lived in this room a long time and she swears this is true.

I’m going to open the window on the right. If I die, tell my friend bees are less silly than she thinks.

K: I think I’m missing some context for your story about the eclipse

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K: Oh, that’s clever. I’ll have to remember to try that.

ME: Try it? Are you planning on going exploring?

K: No, I mean if we have children. When there’s an eclipse coming up, then I’ll tell them they’ve misbehaved so badly that I’m going to blot out the sun, and then I’ll tell them I’ll bring the sun back if they promise to be good, and then they’ll never misbehave again.

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Me: Did you get the new tablecloths? I thought that we agreed to discuss all house purchases before making them. They’re the wrong color and they don’t fit the table at all. I put them on anyway, and if you put both of them together it *sort* of looks okay, but I still think we should have discussed this together.

K: I didn’t get any tablecloths. Maybe you got the tablecloths and forgot about it.

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conversations with k
trickytalks
sci-techuniverse.com

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gray-firearms

YO THAT SHIT BALLER AS FUCK HOLY SHIT

slatestarscratchpad

Since this almost fooled me: the picture above isn’t one of the images. It’s an “artist’s rendition” of what the probe might see later.

Source: fuckyeahspaceship
nostalgebraist

herbertherbertson asked:

"I hardly ever get properly angry." you know you're low-key Buddhist af, right?

nostalgebraist answered:

I don’t really know enough about Buddhism to say.

herbertherbertson

I don’t know all that much about it either (I took one well-taught class on it in college) but I know enough to know that you independently brought yourself to pretty solid restatement of how bad kharma works and how attachment leads to cycles of suffering more generally.  And more than the specifics, the sort of disappointed boredom with “sin” you talk about experiencing is very, very Buddhist.

imo rationalists and their adjacencies should really look into further into Buddhism.  The core premises–rebirth and the possibility of enlightenment–are matters of faith with not a lot of evidence (there is a little, and what’s there is facinating, but it was never enough to come close to convincing me).  Without them it did not make any sense to even consider converting, for me.  But Buddhist thinkers have spent thousands of years exploring fascinations with psychology and ethics, and a lot of what these educated and literate people thought about (most of it, in the case of the the psychology stuff) doesn’t necessarily rely on those core premises.  It’s been too long for me to remember anything specific,* but I recall reading some very old texts that had remarkably sophisticated theories about the mind–and, additionally, getting the strong impression that it was only the tip of the iceberg and that there was far more waiting to be translated or unmasked from jargon.

(* One exception–Buddhadasa’s approach to consciousness/the self was some very interesting shit once I understood all the jargon)

nostalgebraist

Interesting.  I’ve always wanted to learn more about Buddhism, but I’ve never been able to find sources on it that I enjoyed reading.

Something I’d really like – and this goes for various other religions – is a sense of the religion’s cultural “center of gravity,” the kind of sense I have about Christianity and (more weakly) Judaism.  Like, there are a lot of types of Christianity out there, but there’s enough of a common center that we can casually describe things (attitudes, emotions, moral outlooks, aesthetics…) as “Christian” (or “Catholic,” “evangelical” etc.), and I feel comfortable with this way of speaking.  If someone described a post of mine as “low-key Christian AF” I’d probably know what they meant – or one of 3 or 4 things they might have meant.

Even if some of these meanings might be based in stereotypes, they’re stereotypes that are familiar in Christian circles and that Christians may use themselves.  With Buddhism, even my stereotypes are second-hand.  Each might be traceable to real practice, but might also be an invention of some 1960s mystical self-help writer, and I have no way of knowing.

But if you go looking for writing about Buddhism’s “center of gravity,” you run into the same self-help writers and their ilk.  If you go looking for the most reputable stuff you can find, it’s academic and boring and you’re likely to miss the forest for the scrupulously footnoted trees.

Or that’s been my experience, anyway.  (Recs welcome)

slatestarscratchpad

I’ve really been enjoying Mastering The Core Teachings Of The Buddha, which I think is a little different from what you’re talking about here but still worth a look.

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