No.10270
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No.10271
People who think having taken an actual philosophy class makes them smart having anime fandom tier "your waifu a shit" discussion.
Also if you're reading this in a screencap on /r/badphilosophy, you personally are a faggot and can eat my ass.
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No.10272
People who think studying philosophy history is the same as studying philosophy.
I have someone like that in my close circle of friends.
He thinks I'm a retard for reading as much philosophy shit as him and still not understanding more advanced terms. The problem is I'm just pretending to be retarded so I can see if he understands those concepts in a similar manner to I so we can have a good argument where maybe I can learn something from him. The only arguments he ever won were those in which his opponent wasn't paying attention or wasn't understanding him.
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No.10273
That being said, it's not like lesswrong isn't a cesspool of larping faggots, like that recent dragon army shit.
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No.10274
They link to https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/, so I would not expect any steelmanning going on there.
Speaking of /r/SneerClub, is the LW hatedom now larger and more prominent than LW itself? (I don't want to say "influential," because the sheer number of followers doesn't grant you influence, and vice versa.) It seems like most mentions of LW/"rationality" on the Internet now attract a "careful, they are a cult" type of comment. I am not sure if this is a bad thing.
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No.10275
>>10274
I think people with only a little knowledge are more likely to have negative opinions, because the most sensational/easily interesting things about it are negative, or at least appear negative. If all someone knows about LW is Roko's basilisk then I can't blame them for thinking of it badly.
And like with most things, there are many more people with only a little knowledge than with a deep interest.
That covers the "careful, they are a cult" comments more than it does the organized /r/SneerClub kind of stuff.
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No.10276
>>10275
Good point, anon. It's an important distinction to make.
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No.10277
What's weird is they seem to be made up of actual academic philosophers or at least students. Which is typical of the badX subreddits.
And they aren't just mocking the more controversial stuff like Roso's Bassoon. They seem fundamentally opposed to even the basic stuff. Like Bayesianism and the idea of representing uncertainty about beliefs as probability, utilitarianism/consequentalism, reductionism, atheism, etc.
Is mainstream philosophy really this backwards? I've absorbed these ideas to the point they just seem trivial and obvious. Is it really that controversial?
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No.10278
>>10277
I still don't get LessWrong-style Bayesianism. Bayes' theorem is obviously true, and it's very useful in some mathematical contexts. But I don't see how it really helps you in practice in a more general way, more than just having a basic understanding of probability theory does. Yudkowsky builds a semi-ironic religion around Bayes' theorem. Why?
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No.10280
>>10278
Well Yudkowsky didn't start it, he got it from E. T. Jaynes. Jaynes came to his opinions because during the 20th century there was huge controversy around Bayesian methods vs Frequentists. Jaynes made it into a whole philosophy.
The biggest insight is that you can represent uncertainty about beliefs as probability. And that is a powerful idea with a lot of consequences. It means you can prove theorems about how rational beings should act and reason. It means you should be able to put a number on your beliefs. Compare those numbers, do math on them, make concrete predictions and bets, update on results and calibrate yourself to do better. It makes the scientific method a special case of a more general method of finding truth. And it resolves a lot of old philosophical debates about whether you can ever prove or know anything for certain.
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No.10285
>>10277
>They seem fundamentally opposed to even the basic stuff.
I took a survey of that subreddit's top posts. Most of the submitters are students, including graduate students who teach. The two living people I saw most mentions of were Sam Harris (mentioned negatively) and Zizek (mentioned positively). To me the posters seem opposed not to atheism in principle, but to what they see as scientism and to atheists like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins for holding some views that are unpopular in academia. They definitely have a leftist thing going on. I'd guess they pattern match LessWrong as flagrant scientism, but they aren't focused on LessWrong at all. The EY photo in OP's screenshot isn't there.
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No.10292
>>10285
I see the EY photo on the site, although there's a whole page-length of rules in the sidebar that aren't there in the screencap, you have to scroll down.
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No.10293
>>10278
Even a simple and obvious idea as updating your beliefs on new evidence is completely out of reach for most people. That (plus taking into account base rates) is basically all you need to be a "superforecaster".
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No.10294
>>10292
You are right, it's there in the CSS. I didn't see it for a technical reason.
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No.10323
>>10270
>What is this shit.
Leftist SJW priggish prog shitlib convergence, goy.
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No.10353
>>10323
When you take the time to step back and think of it, it is still amazing how the most common attack on LessWrong (after the accusations of cultishness, but those are a meta level up) has become that it is not progressive enough. It was on the progressive cutting edge when it was founded.
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No.10354
>>10353
It's so weird. I didn't want to mention it because I find the philosophical disagreements more interesting.
But they are completely a social justice cult. There are more posts about sjw shit there than about philosophy. A great deal of their attacks on lesswrong are just political, which as you noted doesn't even make any sense. The most active post right now is them just complaining about a bunch of kids that don't believe there are 60 genders and children should be drag queens. The top post of all time (by like twice as many votes as the runner up) is a big circlejerk about how much they hate human biodiversity.
It's scary to think they might actually be representative of mainstream academia and philosophy.
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No.10355
>>10353
I thought the politics of early LessWrong was "never talk about politics"?
I mean, the pre-Politics Is The Mindkiller stuff was all typical left-leaning pre-elevatorgate atheist stuff, but hardly the cutting edge of anything.
The only cutting-edge politics LessWrong has put out is the guys who said "actually let's talk about politics" and went on to be Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dreaming Of A Silicon Reich.
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No.10357
>>10355
MMDOASR? Never heard of it.
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No.10358
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No.10371
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