NOTE: This is disorganized and not done. Goal is to get something out there I can link to. Many examples are still needed.

As I’m finding it hard to write this post in a constructive, systematic, defensible style, enjoy this angry rant instead.

Some Good Things

Starting with some good things to remain balanced:

Rationalists take epistemology seriously. One of the main times I feel LW made me stronger is when I’m

Epistemic rationality saves you time not in units of wasted hours or days, but in units of wasted years or careers.

(More needed…)

Living in System 2

Copied from elsewhere:

My gut feeling now when I imagine people engaging in text/verbal debate now is “oh dear why are you projecting thought into this terrible medium this process is likely to converge to whoever is better at the weird contortions required to argue in English, or whoever’s beliefs are closer to the English subspace in the vast latent space of thoughts”

Also, because of LW’s bias towards system 2 thinking people who write long mathy posts about magic acausal trade are given more credence than the intuitives who (often rightly) immediately bounce off LW from the vibes (armchair philosophical, culty, imbalanced)

So almost everyone who realizes the rat community is screwed up doesn’t tell the rats about it, or they don’t use rat language (a painfully long LessWrong post).

A rationalist friend of mine:

I used to think “but where are the good counterarguments” and later, when I actually had my own bones to pick, realized how much effort it takes to make the disagreements legible to rats

Pseudo-Intellectualism

Lack of external feedback plus the kind of personality types attracted can lead to intellectual games disconnected from reality. (Expansion needed)

Over Reductionism

Reductionism doesn’t work well on complex systems, especially chaotic ones.

(Much expansion needed. I can state the principle in the abstract, but nobody will get it. It took me around an hour of talking to David Yu and I still don’t really get it, just know it’s important.)

How to fix all of this?

The higher road begins after the Art seems to fail you; though the reality will be that it was you who failed your Art.

Don’t know yet, not at the point where I expect my advice to be useful.