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TheDag  Per Aspera ad Astra  1yr ago (text post)   3095 thread views

Calling all Lurkers: Share your Dreams of Effortposting

It’s been pointed out recently that the topics discussed in the Culture War thread have gotten a bit repetitive. While I do think the Motte has a good spread on intellectual discussion, I’m always pushing for a wider range (dare I say diversity?) of viewpoints and topics in the CW thread.

I was a lurker for years, and I know that the barrier between having a thought and writing a top level comment in the CW thread can loom large indeed. Luckily I’m fresh out of inspiration, and would love to hear thoughts from folks about effortposts they want to write but haven’t gotten around to.

This of course applies to regulars who post frequently as well - share any and all topics you wish were discussed in the CW thread!

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Many obsolete abandoned drafts for substack based on stuff discussed around these parts.

  • The pessimistic bias in science fiction that makes it to screens. Banks estate refusal to allow adaptations of Culture, failed Chinese attempts to incentivize optimistic productions.

  • Stonetoss' dog breeds comic and its woke edits as a case study in epistemology and chilling effect of the default mode of school education.

  • Procautionary and Precautionary principles and shouting fire in a crowded market: the unreasonable absence of repercussions for incurring an opportunity cost via playing the adult in the room.

  • Why the french AI researchers are unambitious

  • Rationalist reversals: the notion of «Infohazard» is the most salient example of infohazard known, anthropic shadow as an anti-bayesian cognitive bias and reasoning yourself into a cult.

  • Traditional (especially Western Christian) morality as incompatible with effective altruism and privileging pet causes and projects as acts of cultivating a personal relationship with the transcendent.

  • LLM-based methods for discovering words that really express untranslatable concepts and supposedly define culture.

  • Psychedelics as the bane of mesa-optimizer; reflections on a bad AI take, bad psychoterapy take, the hedonic gradient and the fact that greatness is born of evolutionary failure.

  • cringe policing as a way to set the borders of allowable discourse, and its limits.

  • Steelmanning as a corrupt intellectual practice in rationalist discourse that amounts to clever logorrheic strawman; defeating golems made of steel, superficially formidable bosses with known weak points.

  • related, "puzzle assemblers and lego arguers": Scott Alexander and Bryan Kaplan on mental illness as examples of deductive vs. inventive approach to reality

  • On pruning science, or, the razor of Bayes: one of many thoughts of «what if Lesswrong weren't a LARP» the need to have a software framework, now probably LLM-powered, to excise known untruths and misstatements of fact, and in a well-weighed manner all contributions of their authors, from the graph of priors for next-iteration null hypotheses and other assumptions.

  • On atomization and connectivity; with more autonomy and commoditization, some assumptions about human nature become self-fulfilling.

  • in defense of Marx.

  • the empire fetish, nation as a purposeful project (MacIntyre), and what Westerners got wrong about Russian-German business.

  • Poshlost and what anti-AI artists get right. Reflections on watching Master and Commander and Black Adam in the same day

  • Russian societal attitudes and policies around minority crime prior to the war

  • Russian Death and death as conceptualized in Russian culture.

Many others.

As someone fluent in more than one language (grossly different ones to boot), I'm hard pressed to think of even a single word in all of them that I can't with enough time and effort get across to a reader only fluent in one.

I've always found myself leery of the concept, at least in terms of written/spoken words. It would be difficult to convey the qualia of redness vocally!

Steelmanning as a corrupt intellectual practice in rationalist discourse that amounts to clever logorrheic strawman; defeating golems made of steel, superficially formidable bosses with known weak points.

I would like to read this as it is counter to my intuition but that probably means I need to get my head around this perspective.

in defense of Marx.

I was not expecting this.

On pruning science, or, the razor of Bayes: one of many thoughts of «what if Lesswrong weren't a LARP» the need to have a software framework, now probably LLM-powered, to excise known untruths and misstatements of fact, and in a well-weighed manner all contributions of their authors, from the graph of priors for next-iteration null hypotheses and other assumptions.

Also interesting

Rationalist reversals: the notion of «Infohazard» is the most salient example of infohazard known, anthropic shadow as an anti-bayesian cognitive bias and reasoning yourself into a cult.

Curious about this.

Poshlost and what anti-AI artists get right.

Please write this one so I can reply to it.

Traditional (especially Western Christian) morality as incompatible with effective altruism and privileging pet causes and projects as acts of cultivating a personal relationship with the transcendent.

This one is just straightforwardly true (which is why I’m not an effective altruist).

Most of these are quite fascinating - I’d love to see your defense of Marx in particular. Communism is definitely a bugbear around here.

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