epestr
Joined 1 year ago
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Member since
Dec 9
https://epestr.com/
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Comment · 1 day ago
I was quite inspired by the content bar of this site: https://zachlandes.com/trolley-problem and gwern. Though I do think my blog isn't particularly all that minimal I try to add a lot of colors to make it look less dull.
Comment · 2 days ago
Is there a trend in increase of minimalistic website which are LLM generated and explicitly made minimal to not seem sloppy?
Comment · 5 days ago
Anti ichthys?
Comment · 12 days ago
I find it interesting how a mathematician enjoying theory-building or playing with ideas gets recast here as rent-seeking. It sounds much like certain right-wingers complaining that kids these days don't want to work, just stay in university studying useless things at the taxpayer's expense.
Comment · 15 days ago
Closer to the latter. The narrative gets the reader to empathise with the shepherd and see Mark as representative of people who won't change their beliefs. I understand the educational purpose, but the author decides how reasonable the opposition gets to be. A reader could later cast themselves as the shepherd and their opponent as Mark, taking the resemblance as justification. Also a corpus so broad of such writing can become almost theological.
On the first point, questioning an account of truth isn't the same as claiming the lack of objective truth. Actual coherentists do try to account for observational input, and making Mark unable to understand an elementary explanation doesn't address those attempts. People like reductive accounts of complicated positions. The supposed nuance then comes from covering more positions, rather than engaging deeply with any of them.
Comment · 15 days ago
You've misunderstood the scare quotes. I meant the community's perception of "Bayesian thinking", rather than Bayesian inference itself. Calling your reasoning Bayesian doesn't establish that it is, much as {{person of particular religion}} calling themselves moral doesn't establish their morality.
Comment · 16 days ago
I'm not a specialist in either, though I know of Plantinga and don't dismiss him as a preacher. From what I was able to find, there's engagement on this topic with back and forth, so I'm not sure it's settled. I'm not sure how much LW posts are discussed by an out-group.
https://fitelson.org/plant.pdf
On knowability, the SEP says: "There is no consensus about whether and where the proof goes wrong", so I'm not sure this is a good example of a trivial issue either.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fitch-paradox/
And I wasn't claiming philosophy contains no flawed arguments, but dismissing the entire corpus rather than peacemeal attack seems reactionary rather than reformative.
Comment · 16 days ago
The sheep bit is the whole rationalist glorification of "Bayesian thinking". Stones being beliefs and sheep the reality you observe and the process Bayesian thinking.
Scott Alexanders's blog description for example: P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary.
That seems like a false dichotomy. I don't think either describes the median online opinion. Loud reactionary voices tend to be confident and extreme and bad times promote reactionary views.
The divination sticks passage is quite ironic here. Markos' belief is explained through punishment for out-think, but rationalist communities aren't exempt from social conditioning either. Repeated exposure makes certain reasoning feel natural, while people who dislike it may leave. That's part of what I'm criticising, rather than choosing an opposing internet camp. It could be concerning that the same rationalist thinking might carry into safety research (https://www.lesswrong.com/users/beth-barnes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METR)
Every group has people susceptible to the same social pressures and of varying intelligence, and to claim yours is better at being less wrong, is a bit dangerous.
Comment · 16 days ago
This is pretty much what I meant above in the other comment. No particular paper, no concrete argument with the supposed logical mistake identified (and here you'd need a sample too), just an explanation of why the whole field is like this.
I wouldn't say it's a stretch that LW will largely accept a similiar comment because it fits what the in-group believes about philosophy.
Comment · 16 days ago
Yes! There's often no clear thesis or argumentative structure, instead it reads like notes after a rabbit hole session, with little convincing involved.
I see comments defending them for considering "all viewpoints", but these are still a subset of perspectives they've constructed themselves. Good philosophy engages with a work in a way its readers would recognise, rather than arguing against a simplified set of beliefs and closing the book claiming victory.
Even in my brief stint with philosophy of biology, I saw concrete examples and actual positions discussed in the texts, while a lot of rationalist constructions seem to reduce what people believe to almost comical reductive strawmen. I'd say the verbosity often compensates for the lack of historical depth or understanding on the topic.
An example: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X3HpE8tMXz4m4w6Rz/the-simple.... Its fictional opponent's inability to understand elementary explanations does much of the argumentative work.
Though sadly what I'm doing here is pretty much the same. Maybe the quantity the internet allows us to produce simply makes this form of argumentation more natural.
Comment · 16 days ago
The verbosity and ability to rationalize let's you come up with reasons which makes sense to your in-group quickly, even if it isn't often grounded in reality. They're quicker to rationalize than understand.
Comment · 16 days ago
Tweets aren't great for citing sources, two links and you hit the word limit.