The amount of knowledge outside your bubble outweighs the knowledge within it by a truly gargantuan margin. If you entering a field that you are not already an expert in, it is foolish to not consult with the existing experts in that field. This includes paying them for consulting time, if necessary. This doesn’t mean every expert is automatically right, but if you are disagreeing with the expert about their field, you should be able to come up with a very good explanation as to why.
Within Rationalism, the obvious filter is the reverence for “the sequences”, an extremely large series of pop science blogposts. In it’s initial form, Lesswrong.com was basically a fanforum for these blogs. So obviously people that like the sequences are far more likely to be in the community than those that don’t. As a result, there is a consensus within rationalism that the core ideas of sequences are largely true.
I think it’s mostly just cognitive science which is daniel kanehman and others(which is well known), good bunch of linguistics (which I have heard are well known), and anti-philosophy (because we dislike philosophy as it is done), rest is just ethics and objective bayesianism, with a quinean twist.
Rationalism loves jargon, including jargon that is just completely unnecessary. For example, the phrase “epistemic status” is a fun technique where you say how confident you are in a post you make. But it could be entirely replaced with the phrase “confidence level”
I think there is a difference between epistemic status and confidence level, I could be overtly confident and still buy the lottery ticket while knowing it won’t work. I think there is a difference between social and epistemic confidence, so it’s better to specify.
@Lukeprog posted this few decades ago “neglected rationalist virtue of scholarship”
I think it’s mostly just cognitive science which is daniel kanehman and others(which is well known), good bunch of linguistics (which I have heard are well known), and anti-philosophy (because we dislike philosophy as it is done), rest is just ethics and objective bayesianism, with a quinean twist.
I think there is a difference between epistemic status and confidence level, I could be overtly confident and still buy the lottery ticket while knowing it won’t work. I think there is a difference between social and epistemic confidence, so it’s better to specify.