I think the "good instincts" amounted to being aware that I was behaving in irrational/suboptimal ways, to my own detriment and there were probably tools out there to improve on this, if only I could find them.
The question that kept recurring in my head was "there's plenty of people who can give me advice on various decisions I'll have to make... but how the fuck can I know which advice is good?" Blindly accepting the advice of people I considered "authority figures" had already failed me badly.
That was the "bootstrap" portion of it. Being able to assess information in a systematic way so as to identify and make use of good information and, generally, discard bad/useless information (and none too soon, given how the ratio of useful to useless information has decreased exponentially).
Or, as the sequences put it, to be more confused by lies/falsehoods than truth.
I lacked any reliable tools for doing this despite having, as stated, the intuitive sense that the tools ought to exist.
Which really speaks ill of my college education, I should add.
The main way this helped in Crypto was the very early realization that nobody on the crypto subreddits knew shit about finance, they were all self-interested, and mostly dishonest (or self-deluded). So I went and learned to understand finance and ignored 99% of what the community had to say.
Only regret I have is not jumping on Dogecoin early on. Had no reason to think it would have this kind of longevity, though I did predict that it's community would fail to keep any of its early ethos intact.
I dunno, I think my life ends up very different if I never read the sequences. I would probably be one of those types who "fucking loves science" but really just uncritically accepts what experts say. And that would have caused me some problems when Covid hit.
Also, being plugged into the rationalist community (and, relatedly, /r/themotte) kept me like 3 months ahead of the curve on understanding the pandemic.
Over the years I've made better life decisions in a hundred little ways that would be hard to sufficiently articulate here, that I think the counterfactual version of me handles more poorly overall.
Also, being plugged into the rationalist community (and, relatedly, /r/themotte) kept me like 3 months ahead of the curve on understanding the pandemic.
Really? This place was overflowing with doomer takes about the pandemic as the "big one" (as opposed to the big scam) that aged terribly, and as far as I can still tell there's still no widespread recognition here that people were overly hasty and insufficiently scrupulous about their vax shilling.
If I had listened to /r/themotte I'd probably have my furniture made of worthless (or at least mostly unnecessary) N95 masks by now.
That's the thing. Themotte was quicker to see that masks might be helpful (whilst the CDC was literally saying "stop buying masks!"), but also shifting away from them as it became clear that this wasn't going to be the civilization-ending event it might have been.
The biggest insight I received from /r/themotte specifically was someone pointing out that viruses tend to mutate towards less lethal versions since that is optimal for long term spread.
Which is exactly. what. happened. Remember Omicron was more contagious and less deadly?
In absolute OCEANS of misinfo on the right and the left, and absolute collapse of expert guidance, themotte was basically the equivalent of a lighthouse in a storm.
Reddit at large was still in favor of mandatory masking FOR CHILDREN long after some posters here had already pointed out that this didn't actually help and might actually HURT young children's development. The latter being a point the CDC (I think) agreed with until it became politically unfavorable and they pulled that info from their site.
I'll go back and pull up the actual comments from the old sub if you don't believe it.
Of course, you do have to be able to sift out useful information from non useful to get the full benefit. But see my whole comment above about rationality teaching exactly that.
Fair, but I still resent the "rationalist" side of the Internet (well it wasn't all rationalists per se, but it was mostly fringey Internet commentators at least at the very beginning, not established media figures, Substacks and Mediums at best) for (and I'll admit contributing myself to some of the first point, to my regret, which is why I think it's worth pointing out):
Essentially greenlighting the whole hysteria. Sure, established authorities weren't taking the threat as seriously as they should have at the beginning and maybe needed a little kick in the pants, and sure many rationalists called BS on the alarmism once the novel virus became less novel and was revealed to be far less dangerous than initial concerns (which happened far before Omicron btw and as early as the first global strain, so anybody only admitting it then was way behind the curve), but if rationalists really were all that rational, they should have perhaps seen two steps ahead instead of just one and realized that it would be very hard to take back the panic they helped drum up once it got rolling, especially since it was known that viruses have a tendency to moderate their own mortality as they spread as you mentioned. Instead I think so many people were desperately excited to finally get to go into "X-risk" mode and prove how Serious™ they are, and then the resulting mindset of paranoid doomer absolutist safetyism was hijacked by established authorities for their totalitarian ends and became the dominant attitude of authority throughout the entirety of the pandemic until it was unceremoniously ended by Putin.
Particularly on /r/themotte (though obviously this particular issue was far worse in the non-terminally online realm in general), again the vax was shilled far beyond available sensible justification (and I haven't seen any retractions), especially for people who had supposedly appropriately absorbed SSC's reflections on metascience/the replication crisis and the flimsiness of so much "research" and so many "studies" because they are too hasty, unexacting, and corrupted by perverse incentives (like how about being conducted by the same people trying to sell the object of study as one of the most profitable pharmaceutical products of all time?). (But I'm pretty sure Siskind got the jab too (or I assume his polyorbit or whatever would have screeched at him until he had) so maybe even he didn't absorb his own reflections. Hopefully he faked getting it.)
I certainly won't say there was no insight on the subject to ever be found on /r/themotte. Its early campaign in favor of variolation was a good idea and probably would have been far superior to the vaccination we got.
The reason that you had many rationalists skeptical of the hysteria but still supporting vaccines is that rationalists tend to be scientifically trained, so even if they don't listen to the scientists who are signal-boosted by the media, they can understand what vaccines do based solely on their own knowledge.
komm-nach-unteralterbach
transhumanist libertAryan monarcho-pedo(anti-agecuck)fascist/natsoc + androsupremacist (unironic)
Jiro 2yr ago
they can understand what vaccines do based solely on their own knowledge.
If that were true then they would have been far more skeptical of taking them, especially for the younger demographics of their own community.
But no, I don't believe your average /r/themotte poster was in any way particularly "scientifically trained" in mRNA vaccine platforms before the debut of the most recent ones.
It wasn't only vaccines. Paxlovid was effective for high-risk unvaccinated elderly to reduce chances of death and severe disease. This community were begging it to be given to young, healthy, fully vaccinated adults with zero evidence that it improves any outcomes for them.
Medicine is extremely complex and generalizations work poorly. Any drug, any vaccine should be judged only on the basis of actual evidence (double-bline RCTs if possible) and not by induction – something like if it worked for flu, it is reasonable to assume it will work for covid.
Even Scott failed in this regard when he wrote his first post about mask effectiveness. The actual evidence showed that masks practically have no effect and the health authorities were right to not recommend them to people before obtaining sufficient evidence.
All these things 1) lockdowns, 2) mandatory masks, 3) vaccine mandates, 4) travel restrictions after covid was already spread locally had no evidence and not only did considerable harm but also unnecessary restricted essential freedoms.
It didn't help that serious people who expressed worries were silenced, even banned from social media. And then only extremist were protesting and that made any objection to masks, lockdowns or vaccine mandates to sound like an extremist (or communist or whatever).
Rationalists really dropped the ball on this one. They didn't win, they lost hard.
komm-nach-unteralterbach
transhumanist libertAryan monarcho-pedo(anti-agecuck)fascist/natsoc + androsupremacist (unironic)
nopie 2yr ago
Let's also not forget that (and this is not my attempt to declare a ruling on the debate overall) Alexandros Marinos has basically written nearly an entire novel at this point owning Siskind on the ivermectin subject, revealing how shoddy his reasoning about it was (with basically zero response).
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Notes -
I think the "good instincts" amounted to being aware that I was behaving in irrational/suboptimal ways, to my own detriment and there were probably tools out there to improve on this, if only I could find them.
The question that kept recurring in my head was "there's plenty of people who can give me advice on various decisions I'll have to make... but how the fuck can I know which advice is good?" Blindly accepting the advice of people I considered "authority figures" had already failed me badly.
That was the "bootstrap" portion of it. Being able to assess information in a systematic way so as to identify and make use of good information and, generally, discard bad/useless information (and none too soon, given how the ratio of useful to useless information has decreased exponentially).
Or, as the sequences put it, to be more confused by lies/falsehoods than truth.
I lacked any reliable tools for doing this despite having, as stated, the intuitive sense that the tools ought to exist.
Which really speaks ill of my college education, I should add.
The main way this helped in Crypto was the very early realization that nobody on the crypto subreddits knew shit about finance, they were all self-interested, and mostly dishonest (or self-deluded). So I went and learned to understand finance and ignored 99% of what the community had to say.
Only regret I have is not jumping on Dogecoin early on. Had no reason to think it would have this kind of longevity, though I did predict that it's community would fail to keep any of its early ethos intact.
I dunno, I think my life ends up very different if I never read the sequences. I would probably be one of those types who "fucking loves science" but really just uncritically accepts what experts say. And that would have caused me some problems when Covid hit.
Also, being plugged into the rationalist community (and, relatedly, /r/themotte) kept me like 3 months ahead of the curve on understanding the pandemic.
Over the years I've made better life decisions in a hundred little ways that would be hard to sufficiently articulate here, that I think the counterfactual version of me handles more poorly overall.
Really? This place was overflowing with doomer takes about the pandemic as the "big one" (as opposed to the big scam) that aged terribly, and as far as I can still tell there's still no widespread recognition here that people were overly hasty and insufficiently scrupulous about their vax shilling.
If I had listened to /r/themotte I'd probably have my furniture made of worthless (or at least mostly unnecessary) N95 masks by now.
That's the thing. Themotte was quicker to see that masks might be helpful (whilst the CDC was literally saying "stop buying masks!"), but also shifting away from them as it became clear that this wasn't going to be the civilization-ending event it might have been.
The biggest insight I received from /r/themotte specifically was someone pointing out that viruses tend to mutate towards less lethal versions since that is optimal for long term spread.
Which is exactly. what. happened. Remember Omicron was more contagious and less deadly?
In absolute OCEANS of misinfo on the right and the left, and absolute collapse of expert guidance, themotte was basically the equivalent of a lighthouse in a storm.
Reddit at large was still in favor of mandatory masking FOR CHILDREN long after some posters here had already pointed out that this didn't actually help and might actually HURT young children's development. The latter being a point the CDC (I think) agreed with until it became politically unfavorable and they pulled that info from their site.
I'll go back and pull up the actual comments from the old sub if you don't believe it.
Of course, you do have to be able to sift out useful information from non useful to get the full benefit. But see my whole comment above about rationality teaching exactly that.
Fair, but I still resent the "rationalist" side of the Internet (well it wasn't all rationalists per se, but it was mostly fringey Internet commentators at least at the very beginning, not established media figures, Substacks and Mediums at best) for (and I'll admit contributing myself to some of the first point, to my regret, which is why I think it's worth pointing out):
Essentially greenlighting the whole hysteria. Sure, established authorities weren't taking the threat as seriously as they should have at the beginning and maybe needed a little kick in the pants, and sure many rationalists called BS on the alarmism once the novel virus became less novel and was revealed to be far less dangerous than initial concerns (which happened far before Omicron btw and as early as the first global strain, so anybody only admitting it then was way behind the curve), but if rationalists really were all that rational, they should have perhaps seen two steps ahead instead of just one and realized that it would be very hard to take back the panic they helped drum up once it got rolling, especially since it was known that viruses have a tendency to moderate their own mortality as they spread as you mentioned. Instead I think so many people were desperately excited to finally get to go into "X-risk" mode and prove how Serious™ they are, and then the resulting mindset of paranoid doomer absolutist safetyism was hijacked by established authorities for their totalitarian ends and became the dominant attitude of authority throughout the entirety of the pandemic until it was unceremoniously ended by Putin.
Particularly on /r/themotte (though obviously this particular issue was far worse in the non-terminally online realm in general), again the vax was shilled far beyond available sensible justification (and I haven't seen any retractions), especially for people who had supposedly appropriately absorbed SSC's reflections on metascience/the replication crisis and the flimsiness of so much "research" and so many "studies" because they are too hasty, unexacting, and corrupted by perverse incentives (like how about being conducted by the same people trying to sell the object of study as one of the most profitable pharmaceutical products of all time?). (But I'm pretty sure Siskind got the jab too (or I assume his polyorbit or whatever would have screeched at him until he had) so maybe even he didn't absorb his own reflections. Hopefully he faked getting it.)
I certainly won't say there was no insight on the subject to ever be found on /r/themotte. Its early campaign in favor of variolation was a good idea and probably would have been far superior to the vaccination we got.
The reason that you had many rationalists skeptical of the hysteria but still supporting vaccines is that rationalists tend to be scientifically trained, so even if they don't listen to the scientists who are signal-boosted by the media, they can understand what vaccines do based solely on their own knowledge.
If that were true then they would have been far more skeptical of taking them, especially for the younger demographics of their own community.
But no, I don't believe your average /r/themotte poster was in any way particularly "scientifically trained" in mRNA vaccine platforms before the debut of the most recent ones.
It wasn't only vaccines. Paxlovid was effective for high-risk unvaccinated elderly to reduce chances of death and severe disease. This community were begging it to be given to young, healthy, fully vaccinated adults with zero evidence that it improves any outcomes for them.
Medicine is extremely complex and generalizations work poorly. Any drug, any vaccine should be judged only on the basis of actual evidence (double-bline RCTs if possible) and not by induction – something like if it worked for flu, it is reasonable to assume it will work for covid.
Even Scott failed in this regard when he wrote his first post about mask effectiveness. The actual evidence showed that masks practically have no effect and the health authorities were right to not recommend them to people before obtaining sufficient evidence.
All these things 1) lockdowns, 2) mandatory masks, 3) vaccine mandates, 4) travel restrictions after covid was already spread locally had no evidence and not only did considerable harm but also unnecessary restricted essential freedoms.
It didn't help that serious people who expressed worries were silenced, even banned from social media. And then only extremist were protesting and that made any objection to masks, lockdowns or vaccine mandates to sound like an extremist (or communist or whatever).
Rationalists really dropped the ball on this one. They didn't win, they lost hard.
Let's also not forget that (and this is not my attempt to declare a ruling on the debate overall) Alexandros Marinos has basically written nearly an entire novel at this point owning Siskind on the ivermectin subject, revealing how shoddy his reasoning about it was (with basically zero response).
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