A fascinating and provocative post; I hope lots of EAs read it. It nicely captures some of the frustration I’ve experienced in my limited engagement with LessWrong.
If I had to choose between Socrates and Aristotle, I’d choose Aristotle as a better philosophical role model. Socrates basically promoted the idea that you can get closer to the truth through armchair debate, spotting logical fallacies, defining terms, testing edge cases, mocking inconsistencies, etc. Aristotle promoted a more grounded, based, adventurous empiricism, that involves actual travel, observation of nature, and gathering new information.
Insofar as LessWrong has been leaning a little too far in the Socrates direction, it’s probably become a less empirically fruitful platform, and a more emotionally frustrating one.
Another way to think about this (imo) is “do you screen falsehoods immediately, such that none ever enter, or do you prune them later at leisure?”
Sometimes, assembling false things (such as rough approximations or heuristics!) can give you insight as to the general shape of a new Actually True thing, but discovering the new Actually True thing using only absolutely pure definite grounded vetted airtight parts would be way harder and wouldn’t happen in expectation.
And if you’re trying to (e.g.) go “okay, men are stronger than women, and adults are smarter than kids” and somebody interrupts to go “aCtUaLlY this is false” because they have a genuinely correct point about, e.g., the variance present in bell curves, and there being some specific women who are stronger than many men and some specific children who are smarter than many adults … this whole thing just derails the central train of thought that was trying to go somewhere.
(And if the “aCtUaLlY” happens so reliably that you can viscerally feel it coming, as you start to type out your rough premises, you get demoralized before you even begin, close your draft, and go do something else instead.)
A fascinating and provocative post; I hope lots of EAs read it. It nicely captures some of the frustration I’ve experienced in my limited engagement with LessWrong.
If I had to choose between Socrates and Aristotle, I’d choose Aristotle as a better philosophical role model. Socrates basically promoted the idea that you can get closer to the truth through armchair debate, spotting logical fallacies, defining terms, testing edge cases, mocking inconsistencies, etc. Aristotle promoted a more grounded, based, adventurous empiricism, that involves actual travel, observation of nature, and gathering new information.
Insofar as LessWrong has been leaning a little too far in the Socrates direction, it’s probably become a less empirically fruitful platform, and a more emotionally frustrating one.
Another way to think about this (imo) is “do you screen falsehoods immediately, such that none ever enter, or do you prune them later at leisure?”
Sometimes, assembling false things (such as rough approximations or heuristics!) can give you insight as to the general shape of a new Actually True thing, but discovering the new Actually True thing using only absolutely pure definite grounded vetted airtight parts would be way harder and wouldn’t happen in expectation.
And if you’re trying to (e.g.) go “okay, men are stronger than women, and adults are smarter than kids” and somebody interrupts to go “aCtUaLlY this is false” because they have a genuinely correct point about, e.g., the variance present in bell curves, and there being some specific women who are stronger than many men and some specific children who are smarter than many adults … this whole thing just derails the central train of thought that was trying to go somewhere.
(And if the “aCtUaLlY” happens so reliably that you can viscerally feel it coming, as you start to type out your rough premises, you get demoralized before you even begin, close your draft, and go do something else instead.)