Why is every rationalist blog post way too long?
alexwennerberg.com
alexwennerberg.com
So it does depend on what you mean by rationalist.
I think it is vastly more likely that those who feel like everything they say is incredibly important might just be idiots who self identify as rationalists, and those who are rationalists are doing more thinking than broadcasting.
You could say there is little overlap between people who are good at basketball and those who say they are good at basketball.
That statement does not have any effect on your ability to judge them by watching them play.
Right, one could make that statement. It would be silly, but they could make it. I think most people who consider themselves good at basketball are probably better than average at basketball.
> That statement does not have any effect on your ability to judge them by watching them play.
Is the notion that someone who's not good at basketball can't recognize a good basketball player?
I'm a little confused by your metaphor.
I should note that you changed the statement from say to consider themselves. It is entirely possible (and rather frequent) for people who do not consider themselves good at basketball to say that they are. People who actually are good at basketball quite often do not feel the need to say so, because it is apparent when they play.
I can change "consider themselves to be rationalists" to "say they are good at basketball" because that is just a change of premise. It leaves the structure the same.
Rational thought should help you understand yourself, not disappear.
I agree.
I might be wrong, of course, but I would argue that general intelligence -- meaning intelligence reducible to a single scalar 'g' -- does not exist. All intelligence is a hybrid ensemble and an adaptation to a particular niche or set of niches. I'm a reasonably smart human but I'd make a really dumb tree or dolphin.
To get started, look up the no free lunch theorem.
There's room for debate here though. I think our technological journey with AI is going to help answer some of these questions.
With the Rationalists, I get the sense that 'g' is a faith, a prior they won't examine.
Opinions based on insufficient information help immensely in determining whether we have sufficient information, and also raise awareness of important topics that we need more information on. These blog posts serve a very important role in the information exchange ecosystem and the whole world would be worse off if all these people held off until they're 99% certain. Nobody would be talking about climate change, about economy, about quantum gravity, about ancient civilizations, about prehistoric animal species, etc. etc. and so on.
People in the rationalist community don’t see it, because ironically they’re not rational enough. But they use the language and essay format to make it seem like they are.
I wrote in a sibling post that they like fascism because any dispute can be reduced to and solved by beating the counterpart to death with sticks.
I suspect a reason for the length of rationalist writers is often rather that they value being objectively correct more than others. Length is just an attempt to be less wrong by including many aspects of a topic to paint as complete a picture as possible.
Additionally people often write what they like to read. It may be shocking to many, but some people may enjoy reading long form text that includes a lot of information that allows them to form their own thoughts. Just like some people enjoy noise music others would characterize as a frontal assault on human hearing. Those people would often find 90% of the music regular people enjoy mind-numbingly boring. Human taste is surprisingly diverse.
That doesn't mean that there isn't objectively bad rationalist writing (or objectively bad noise music). E.g. sometimes the train of thought is entirely missing and instead of building an argument it feels more like a lose pile of material that the author stumbled upon by chance in that specific order. If it is declared as that in the start, fine. If it pretends to be a great essay on the nature of $topic and then derails, that means the promise isn't kept.
Don't know if it was intended but there's something to be said about the discussions happening at length on www.lesswrong.com and I felt I had to acknowledge your penmanship.
On the actual topic I for one think some people like reading themselves just as much as hearing themselves thus they're writing for their own audience of one.
Some of my favourite websites are weird 90s website where some weirdo decided to dedicate a website to their extremely obscure niche interest in way more detail than anybody would ever need.
Which is part of the reason why many people find their actual arguments lacking, and the attitude self-absorbed. Because they don’t seem super interested in arriving at a precise argument, but rather in demonstrating the operation of their mind.
Note that within my argument the arrow of causality points in one direction: To explain complex topics adequately a certain amount of length is needed. That obviously doesn't mean long texts are automatically the more adequate explaination of a complex topic in all cases.
It took us thousands upon thousands of years to arrive at this simple idea because it's a blow to our egos and to primate hierarchy and its pretensions of authority. If I am big monkey, I must be right.
My idea is that through first principles and made up probabilities, they can reach any conclusion they want. But there's a veil of authority: "I'm a rationalist, therefore I arrived this conclusion, surely not from rationalization, but from first principles, probabilities and logic! It doesn't matter if it sounds insane, because it uses first principles, probabilities and logic!".
Robinson Crusoe has no use for rationalization. Him rationalizing the berry he ate is not poisonous, or that the shack he built will hold up in the storm is outright dangerous, and definitely useless.
It's just that: wanting to have more accurate beliefs. Believing that this is worthwhile even if it's hard to push against human nature of habitually "choosing" beliefs.
It's like a secular IQ-Calvinist take on infallible religious authority.
An ingredient you're missing though is what I call "intellectual edgelording." All Rationalists don't do this, but it's endemic in the community and has helped give birth to things like neoreaction (monarchy is good actually), extreme "if anyone builds it everyone dies" AI doomerism, and has made them very open to things like "race science" and other "forbidden ideas THEY don't want you to believe!"
They'd never characterize it that way though. They launder it through "giving a fair hearing to ideas that are outside the normal Overton window" or similar framings. But if you look closely, the ideas they give that fair hearing to all have a certain kind of bent: edgy, elitist, or validating to their belief that intelligence can be reduced to a single scalar 'g' and this confers some kind of divine authority.
I think the AI doomerism might stem from this. If intelligence can be summarized by one scalar value than if we build something whose 'g' is on average much higher than ours, it will of course annihilate us. The other unexamined prior there is that intelligence is necessarily supremacy which is necessarily dominating or genocidal. Which leads back to why they fall so easily for fascist-adjacent and racist ideas.
The least charitable take I have on that line of thinking is: they at least secretly believe that lower-IQ people should all die, so they project that belief onto their hypothetical superintelligent AI. It would, of course, come to the same conclusion, right?
It's like this:
I can write an unbreakable cryptographic system by inventing one, going through the motions of making up attacks and showing that those attacks are impossible, and then concluding my system is unbreakable. Anyone can design cryptography they themselves cannot break.
Ask any cryptographer how well that works.
This is pretty normal human behavior, but it's not rational.
What's an example of one?
I feel (but gut feeling, I'm just an internet commenter / shitposter that doesn't have the time or inclination to fully engage with these people) that the bigger rationalist bloggers all stand on a tall soapbox, broadcast something, then disappear into their own head again.
yes, frequently
https://www.lesswrong.com/search?query=i%20was%20wrong
IMO it seems to happen more often than in most other online communities
Their leaning towards fascism is some sort of reductionism for these people I think. In essence political violence make the perpetrators more powerful than if they were nice playing liberals given the same popular support. Thus fuscism. Q.E.D.
Way too little focus on second or third order effects.
Rightwing radicals that 10 to 30 years ago would say they are libertarians are now fascists instead. It is really strange to witness. I think there is a lack of focus on second or third order effects. It is just problem and superficial cause. How hard can it be, just do it, etc.
Whether society eats the people at the bottom or not doesn't matter to them, they just want to be at the top.
If AI is at the top then they will be thrown into the hypothetical meat grinder [0] they thought they were safe from. So AI is the devil to them because it breaks their ideology at its core.
[0] Is it hypothetical if a rationalist is scared of it?
* Augustine, Confessions, Book 10, ch. 23 / sec. 34, https://wist.info/augustine-of-hippo/46880/
Instead they seem to take one premise and just run with it, and tens of thousands of words later, they think they’ve made some profound point.
I’d say that 99% of the rationalist essays I’ve read wouldn’t be given passing grades in an academic philosophy class on the topic.
This may not be the case for historical philosophical arguments. And while these are enormously influential from the standpoint of history of ideas, from the standpoint of a contemporary observer most of them contain trivial logical mistakes.
t. majored in philosophy
That said, I don’t agree at all that authors are incentivized to be obscure. That is a typical criticism from people that don’t have actual experience in the field, but are just repeating culture war tropes.
I also really don’t think you can just hand wave away the entire history of ideas with vague statements like “from the standpoint of a contemporary observer most of them contain trivial logical mistakes.”
This attitude is exactly why rationalism is a goofy internet thing and not an actual intellectual movement.
I also have a degree in philosophy, and IME the idea that papers published in leading analytic journals are obscure on purpose is nonsense. There is no tolerance for the kind of handwavy arrogance you’ll find in “internet thought” on blogs and social media.
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.
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.
People like Jon Elster and Lionel Page much be culture war ideologues, I see.
The LW/rationalist space, and other spheres adjacent to it, have a disdain for traditional philosophy, but have spent very little time engaging with that philosophy and giving sufficient reasons as to why it’s not important, or not even worth engaging with.
The majority of people who hold just about any viewpoint are going to be uninformed, so arguing against the average holder of any idea is going to be pretty trivial as long as you know a bit of the subject matter. The value of an idea is surely roughly proportional instead to the strongest argument for it.
I’m saying that the argument that “academic philosophy is verbose and obscure on purpose” isn’t a good argument, and is most often repeated by people with little knowledge of the field, so often that it’s become something of a culture war trope. At the very least it’s a well-known quality of LW and similar spaces.
As in the comments above, there is often no actual paper, no argument, just vague assertions and a couple random name drops, as if that’s an argument.
This would, however, typically require developing expertise in a field, and then actually reading and understanding the thing being accused of being obtuse and verbose.
If you can demonstrate that you can do that for any arbitrary paper in a field, then sure, you'll convince me that its practitioners are long-winded gasbags.
What do they have to say? What is their argument? Why is a behavioral economist’s opinion relevant in a discussion about academic philosophy? Etc.
“Academic philosophy is obscure on purpose and X two people say so.” is not an argument.
- https://www.optimallyirrational.com/p/how-ai-will-revolution...
- https://philpapers.org/rec/ELSHAS (via Sci-Hub)
You haven’t produced any summary of an argument, or even a real link to one justifying the claim that all academic philosophy is obscure on purpose, in any of your comments.
Instead you’ve linked to a blog post about AI and academic publishing; and a paper from 15 years ago that says social sciences and humanities are plagued by a problem with obscurity.
This isn’t how actual philosophical debate works. But it’s a perfect example of how LW is not a serious intellectual community.
They can be, and often they are, but not always¹. Sometimes I would be in anger over an author when I discovered that their incredibly verbose, roundabout argument using the rarest of words, with some of them redefined in their meaning, boils down to a very simple statement that could have been made in a single paragraph. As if the author wanted to obscure the obviousness of the point by making the language so complicated that the reader has to suspect there is more to it, while many of the points are just semantics. Much of academic philosophy falls into that category.
But not all of it. In some cases the reconfiguration of language, the introduction of new words etc, genuinely brings you to the edge of what is thinkable within that language with some truly novel angles as a result. This is then often very precise and rigorous thinking and the verbosity is a result of that.
The problem is then of course how to tell the two apart, since you have to follow the thought to decide into which category any given text happens to fall. With rationalist writing the issue however can be that sometimes there is no discernible train of thought to begin with.
I also studied philosophy.
--- ¹: Edmund L. Gettier: „Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?“, in: Analysis 23 (1963), H. 6, S. 121–123. This is just 3 pages long, many more such examples.
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.
That being said, I don't think that a lot of the people who are recently opposed to rationalism are doing honest philosophy either. Ten years ago, the trend online was to become a rationalist; these days, the trend online seems to be to accuse rationalists of being sex cult satanists that are not equipped with the magical power of "common sense". Out of these two options, I much prefer the rationalists. For while they may have a lacking understanding of some of the history of philosophy, their contrahents don't even pretend to have an understanding of the world that is grounded in anything but irrational fear and hatred.
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.
Why? "Bayesian thinking" is really just empirical observation and statistics, which is the foundation of all modern research, security or otherwise.
Your comment does nothing but create a vague sense of unease (a hidden cabal of rationalists! they're even doing research!), without making any clear point. At least, I suppose, it's not 25,000 words long.
My reading is the inability to understand serves only as an educational device for the reader. After all, at the end of the article the only point of contention is whether or not the objective truth exists. Is your point that the postmodern types don't claim that it doesn't? Or that they're an easy target used to later claim victory against a larger group?
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.
Can you share some good books/papers/posts that would be a good introduction to for this?
50 Philosophy Classics by Bowdon.
It’s easy to dismiss the argument with “lol nicotine bad”, but I think it’s good to examine studies on the addictiveness of nicotine when not smoked, and not assume it would be just like smoking. There are plenty of things that seem obvious but are not and it’s always good to be rigorous.
It's like the "alternatives considered" section in a design doc or RFC: it shows you've thought through different approaches, considered trade-offs, etc. It's a little like showing your work combined with taking the reader on a journey.
When I was younger, sometimes I would just get carried away by the splendor and awe of it all and soak in the 25,000 word articles (or whatever they are.)
Today I would say that either he has fallen off a little, or I've just grown a little weary of the form, but I don't really get the same rush out of his writing anymore; and I notice more of the motivated reasoning and cheap tricks.
Still, sometimes I'll come across one of his posts and think 'damn, Scott's still got it.'
> What do you mean with 'how'? What is being? Who am I, truly?
The semantic bollocks that man ties himself into sometimes
Ughh!
I wish he kept to talking more about those subjects and the Bible as I found that much more interesting.
Then there is this infamous quote in 2022.
> "Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement – I would not have cared."
I understand he is being hyperbolic, but honestly it wasn't that obvious though, because the aforementioned crash outs. He also allowed everyone to be quote mine him. It is an unforced error.
Generally I find Sam Harris tbh to be not particularly that interesting anyway. He gets a lot of mileage (like a lot of these personalities) from his elocution. He makes him sound insightful than he really is.
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are both rival elites vying for power to enrich themselves and their circle via the apparatus of the Republican and Democratic parties. They are both reprehensible, for different reasons. Voting for Trump was a middle finger to both establishment parties in the US (the Republicans didn't want him running for the party). There are no good guys here. They were both shit.
The crash out was due to the fact Sam Harris couldn't wrap his head around the fact that people were fed up of public figures that are similar to himself. Quite frankly, it is embarrassing. He appeared to do very little introspection on the matter. His whole brand is him trying to rationally understand what's happening, and he did the exact opposite.
Cory Doctorow, on the other hand, is another left-wing intellectual that did understand the sentiment and has made an effort to understand people he deeply disagrees with. Guess whose ideas are more relevant currently? It isn't Harris; Harris is irrelevant these days.
Bullshit. Trump is the logical outcome of republican party project. Vote for him was vote literally for that.
Republican politicians did not liked hia style, but did liked his project, supported and created project 2025, live the violence and all of that.
The corruption was making Trump cool to these people.
> There are no good guys here. They were both shit
Not nearly in the same way. Not even close. And Trump voters knew that.
I don't understand why people like yourself come up with this stuff. There are loads of clips from 2016 where people were saying this. It's 10 years later, and I am still having conversations where we are denying the reality of what happened; it is bizarre.
> Republican politicians did not liked hia style, but did liked his project, supported and created project 2025, live the violence and all of that.
Project 2025 is a thing from the Heritage Foundation and wasn't a thing back in 2016, because it was published in 2023. You are just repeating stuff you've heard on the TV/YouTube.
The Heritage Foundation has been moving towards Paleo-conservatism since about 2021. The Paleo-cons were ejected/rejected from the Republican Party in the Buckley days.
I was talking about the 2016 campaign. Back in 2016 (not 2024), the Republican establishment didn't want him there. Pretending otherwise is asinine.
> The corruption was making Trump cool to these people.
People liked Trump because he's brash and loud and has an attractive wife who used to be a model. He has a ridiculous hairstyle. He flew in on a massive jet that has his name on the side of it.
He also trolled/manipulated the media constantly, which was pretty funny on the face of it. E.g., I remember he was going to talk about Obama's birth certificate or something like that, and he got CNN to broadcast his entire rally, and he mentioned it for like 5 seconds at the end.
I am English, I live in the UK. My mates and I would get some beers and watch the Hillary Clinton/Donald Trump debates late at night to see the shit show. It was really funny. "What is old Donald going to say this time?!".
I understand that doesn't appeal to everyone, but a lot of people like this stuff. I won't lie, I kind of liked it as well at the time.
Compare that to someone like Jeb Bush or even his opponents, Hillary Clinton; there was no momentum, no hype.
Malcolm McLaren is quoted as saying, "Pro-wrestling is real, and politics is fake." You need to keep that in mind when watching any political coverage.
> Not nearly in the same way. Not even close. And Trump voters knew that.
No, they didn't. What people like is that he was talking about stuff they cared about and they believed he was speaking for them.
It is 10 years later, and people like yourself are still misstating what people were saying and have done no introspection.
Trump voters aren't evil. You really need to do introspection because you still don't seem to understand why there were major political upsets, both in the US, UK and EU.
You are doing exactly what many people were criticising Sam Harris for. I was fed up of it back in 2017, and you and Sam haven't learnt anything.
It is one of the reasons why I don't bother talking to people about stuff like this, because you can't look past the surface, and you make no attempt to understand what happened.
Claim it was rejection of both parties is self serving bullshit. It feel good sound good story and nothing more.
> which was pretty funny on the face of it. E.g., I remember he was going to talk about Obama's birth certificate or something like that, and he got CNN to broadcast his entire rally, and he mentioned it for like 5 seconds at the end.
That one is waaay more about "black man not valid American" thing then about "funny" in an abstract way.
> rump voters aren't evil. You really need to do introspection because you still don't seem to understand why there were major political upsets, both in the US, UK and EU.
Yes they were making bad choices, knowingly. Really, that is their choice. You need to do introspectiom if you still need to defend them and their choices.
There is really no reason to play this "only left of center can be criticised, impossible for far right and Trumpians to do something bad" game.
> I spent quite a lot of time reading and interactimg with conservatives and republicans. I am from that environment.
I don't believe you. I am not conservative; I am not American, and I can tell you haven't.
> Claim it was rejection of both parties is self serving bullshit. It feel good sound good story and nothing more.
Why? Because you say so? I don't even understand how it is "self serving bullshit". People were fed up with run-of-the-mill politics. Even on the left wing you had many people that were radical (that have become less so over time) entering into politics around that time.
I also must have imagined reading all the comments and seeing all those videos that people posted around that time, specifically on the theme that they were voting for Trump because they believe he was something different.
I remember listening to many hours of people just talking in Skype, Google Hangouts and similar places at the time. I get really annoyed when people try to gaslight me about events that I was paying a lot of attention to at the time.
> That one is waaay more about "black man not valid American" thing then about "funny" in an abstract way.
I think it is funny to get CNN to broadcast your rally for you based on deception, because CNN wanted him to something racist and he didn't. He trolled them because they are predictable.
> Yes they were making bad choices, knowingly. Really, that is their choice. You need to do introspectiom if you still need to defend them and their choices.
Apparently you can read minds now. How do you know? I really doubt anyone said, "I know Trump is an evil man, but I am going to vote for him," or something to that effect. If you claim you have. You are lying.
> There is really no reason to play this "only left of center can be criticised, impossible for far right and Trumpians to do something bad" game.
I am not. The fact that you can't recognise that because I have take on Trump that is sympathetic to MAGA / Trump supporters is ridiculous. Most Trumps aren't far-right either. You say you listen to Republicans and Conservatives, but you clearly aren't if you are claiming that.
I think, TBH, you are lying to me. So I don't want to talk any further. Go away.
Sure, JD Vance is a cretin and Trump is vile. Can we please go back to intellectually interesting pursuits?
A smart, very good writer will write something and get to the point quickly. Articles are mostly a page or less.
Writing like that respects people's time.
Many bloggers could do with writing things more briefly.
The author of this piece also makes a very good point that often long pieces go into weird corners of their own argument without thinking about their own assumptions.
If you want to write long form, please use a medium where that is naturally part of that medium. Quarterly magazines, books, full length investigative pieces, etc. An important part of WHY longer form writing works in those media is that the author is understood and expected to have devoted much more time and work into it, and doesn't output content so frequently. In other words, respect the axiom that the medium is also the message.
In a cold autumn in 1967, a barely awake scientist in the now defunct Institute of XYZ thought he'd go through his lab notes as he has done for the past 3 years since leaving the serene setting of the University of...
I immediately close it.
This is reasonable though. Tradition and common sense suggest value perhaps more than rationalists think, but if tradition and common sense have value, there is an underlying reason.
For example, our eyes are wired the wrong way, that is, the optic nerve goes in front of the retina, causing a blind spot and other issues. From a design perspective, it is really stupid and there is no "good" reason why we are like this, it would be like making a monitor with the connectors in front of the display. Octopus eyes are wired the correct way and it works better.
Eyes have evolved like this out of random chance, as an imperfect but functional solution, and we are too advanced for evolution mechanisms to fix the problem now.
And sometimes the “good reason” that something survives for a long time is that the better alternative was difficult to invent/discover/implement. Which is obviously not a “good reason” to oppose the introduction of better alternatives.
Like, maybe Christmas as understood for Americans has no value. But the fact a Christmas exist does result in families getting together and provides a cohesive context for the winter season across pop culture, and that can have downstream value.
This is an underlying reason
Female genital mutilation is traditional in some places. That alone doesn't mean it's valuable.
Not that FGTM is comparable, but Rationalism really doesn't do as good a job as it believes it does of explaining why people end up believing ridiculous, harmful things.
An effective form of rationalism would be very good at preventing and reversing irrational and harmful beliefs.
There is zero evidence that the Rationalists have done that.
There's no harm in critically examining why a tradition is there (especially if harmful in other ways). But a lot of the time, "it's a long story" does actually have a reasonable story.
Suppose I want to post a bunch of recipes. I could just post the recipes with absolutely no further commentary. In that case someone else could copy what I write wholesale and that might be depressing, or stop me getting famous, or reduce my income from advertising. So far, so good.
I could preface each recipe with a short relevant paragraph or two saying a bit about why I like the dish, where I got the recipe from, maybe some things I tried that didn't work out. In that case someone just scraping my site would be guilty of copyright violation, yay. Maybe I could force them to take it down. Or they could just copy the recipes, which doesn't seem like it would be super-difficult technically, and then I'd be in the same state as before.
Or I could preface each recipe with six pages of rambling about how much I love my dog and how sweet my now-deceased grandmother was. And that would get me ... so far as I can tell, exactly the same protection from plundering as a couple of relevant paragraphs would. (And would be exactly as vulnerable to a slightly smarter plagiarist stealing just the recipes.)
It's not clear to me that copying just the recipes is hard enough to make any of this worth while, but even if it is I don't see how you get any extra copy-protection from the long rambling anecdotes, compared with a small amount of actually relevant information.
So I think that the rambling-blog-post phenomenon has to have some other explanation. Maybe you can embed more ads in a longer post, or maybe recipe-bloggers just often tend to enjoy telling anecdotes, or maybe they think the anecdotes are what will actually draw readers in.
In other words - our system of epistemic evaluation is conditioned on our moment in history. What appears as a fact of the universe today may not be tomorrow.
Unless you're a world-class expert and one of the best in the world already, any insight you can come up with has been had by other people and if they're not doing it anymore it's usually for a good reason.
Even when the the "common sense" route is not optimal along whatever metric your measuring, there's probably something else you're not noticing: the classic dinner of potatoes/rice, cooked vegetables, and a piece of meat might not be the best in terms of health or nutrients or taste, but when you take into account things like ease of cooking, low cost, low mental effort, easy to make bigger portions, it very clearly becomes obvious why basically every civilization has traditional grain/potato-vegetable-meat type meals.
Traditions can often encode good things, but they shouldn't be respected solely because they are tradition.
One needs to actually spend the time and effort to understand what value is potentially encoded in traditions before suggesting a replacement.
...though yes, in practice if your invoke or, they're fairly likely to explain in elaborate length why it doesn't apply here.
Many people also use tradition as a cover for bias, bigotry, and bullying. When one has been on the other end of that, one learns to view blind tradition with a healthy dose of skepticism.
And yet, still, there is much of value there. Ironically it takes some wisdom to learn which is worth keeping and which is not.
Thanks for sharing your opinion on what other people really think. Low openness people always see disagreements with high openness people as a moral failing on their part.
It's a neat package of non-sequitur, moral grandstanding, and misdirection.
I'm making valid (if deeply critical) points but you're contributing nothing except your misinformed judgments.
Grandstanding is a meaningless color commentary term I only reused because I was the one accused of it despite not being the one moralizing.
This is why people don't respect "rationalists." Because people claim to have superior reasoning skills but would fail a freshman survey course on it.
"I've seen rationalist adjacent tech twitter accept people who take openly awful ideas" > "People believe bad things, and I don't like that people engage with them."
"It seems as though the tolerance for rejection of norms is a really good cover to let horrible ideas proliferate" > "The people who engage with them must also believe the bad things too."
"If someone is willing to be verbose and pedantic enough to dissuade anyone from trying to argue against them." > A nonsensical argument to make about twitter which has a character limit.
Unfortunately most rationalists aren't as smart as they think and mistake verbosity for reason and judgment.
There is more insidious kind of bad idea, like anti-vax philosophy. With these ideas, the layperson doesn't have direct access to comprehensive evidence, the necessary domain complexity exceeds common understanding, human tendency toward suspicious works against you, simple barometers like artificial=bad are useless or harmful, and evidence that seems to support them exists at the margin.
It should be clear that mass social media is causing these bad ideas to proliferate. On the other hard, trying to shut these ideas down through institutional or communal censorship seems to just give them a shot in the arm. Willingness to engage with their proponents shouldn't be seen as tacit support.
I apologize if this list of counterexamples ran too long.
"The Secret of Our Success" literally starts with how European explorers starved to death in environments that other humans thrived in because they lacked the cultural knowledge local hunter gatherers had, includes many other examples of how pure reason can be counter-productive to survival, and ends with a warning that the idea that now it's finally different may not be true.
What G.K. Chesterton said is that, if you can't make an affirmative case for the tradition's origins and show why the cause no longer applies, you should leave the tradition in place.
In the listed examples, rationalists celebrate this principle with examples such as the bitter cassava preparations of the Tukanoan people, which were very labor- and time-intensive. A much shorter processing would have eliminated the obvious, short-term toxicity of the plant, so someone scientific experiments to determine how much processing was actually necessary would likely end up damaging themselves and their reproductive prospects in ways that wouldn't show up for years or decades.
So there's evidence that the rationalist community actually appreciates tradition more strongly than the average person, and searches harder before discarding it.
The problem with "secret esoteric hacks/techniques" is that other people are not NPCs and are in fact also trying to achieve their goals, and for any goal you can imagine, there are a million people who have put in way more effort into figuring out the optimal path.
If there's a secret method of becoming good at an instrument quickly, why don't music schools teach that? If there's an obscure way to run a 4 hour marathon without much training, why doesn't every training plan include that? The common sense approach is usually right on the inflection point of the 80/20 rule, where you get the easy, simple way to get decent results.
Of course, there are sometimes real constraints (i.e. popular apps like Duolingo are bad for learning a language, because most people who use it are not serious about becoming fluent and not willing to put in time) but even then, the reasonably effective answer is usually 1 layer below the surface (learn the basics through a textbook/course/online material, then just use the language a lot and actively study new vocab/grammar/concepts), not in some obscure rabbit hole.
This is not the point, but I’m very confused by the link that is linked as evidence on that line? It doesn’t match the sentence it’s attached to
Link in question: https://psychotechnology.substack.com/p/a-love-song-to-nicot...
What I take issue with is the original sentence saying it’s “bad for you”, I was expecting new science showing that it’s, well, bad for you rather than “just” addictive
I’ve known many people who used chewing tobacco and were not smokers.
[1]https://www.dailystar.co.uk/showbiz/simpson-addicted-to-nico...
Regarding the varying degree of quality I wanted to note that this is a public forum where anyone is allowed to create an account and post public articles. Anyone is allowed to call themselves a "rationalist" if they want to. I wonder if most who read articles there and post occasionally do label themselves though. I know some who don't.
Personally I think the length is often justified by the attention to detail but I must admit I only read some of the classics and a few recent posts when they caught my interest. I even scroll past certain paragraphs if I'm uninterested but I don't mind then being there.
It's also such a mix of things over there. What OP mentioned in particular looked to me like original investigative journalism and those kind of undertakings often enough result in whole books.
This is a particularly weird example. The median post in the "sequences" is less than 1000 words long. The sequences are mostly a long series of individually very short blogposts.
Besides there are other HP fan fics in this range
Sometimes it is the question. "Yes" is the answer.
The ridiculousness of it all serves as a type of hazing ritual. To enter the cool club you have to grit your way through it and also The Sequenced.
Most people tap out early. Those who persevere get to join the cool kid’s club, where they haze others into reading it all too.
Are you sure “cool” is the correct adjective?
Then author got his diva moment, at least this is how I remember it. He constructed some impossible to solve situation and had tantrum that if readers won’t give answer how one of protagonists will solve it, author will stop writing the book. I think it had even time limit for readers.
After that I dropped the book and never returned to it.
Most fans loved that challenge. We're you worried? Angry? Either way you just had to wait for the next installment.
Strange that you dont remember that the protagonist was the titular Harry Potter.
I tried to remember who was challenged, but I wasn't sure and my main candidate now was Snape.
No. My exposure to HPMOR was a very long time ago from an eccentric coworker and his friends who tried to get me to read it. I curiously read a little bit and couldn’t believe people were taking it seriously.
Then I Googled it and found lively discussions from rationalists bending over backward to defend the part of HPMOR where Draco says he’s going to rape someone, and noped right out of that entire subgenre of the internet for years.
I do think it’s fascinating how the rationalists are so unwilling to accept that people may not resonate with their material that everyone who disagrees is assumed to be part of an ideological outgroup with bad intentions. Sneer Club is a tiny subreddit that appears basically inactive?
Why would you presume that the only way for someone to dislike HPMOR is to be indoctrinated by a tiny subreddit instead of having their own opinion? I suppose it tracks that rationalists would view ideologies as being sourced from groups and communities and look for group membership to assign someone’s opinion to, rather than accepting that someone might be able to form their own independent opinions.
You either dedicated quite a lot of effort to somehow get this statistic (unlikely), or make things up, or acquired the attitude from a place that was quite active at the time.
I felt I could make a single guess about a single person.
Got through the end, not a believer in anything. Not only your statement is wrong (because most absolute statements are) even the weakened statement of most who finished are believers is likely wrong because likely most people who read it are just fanfics enthusiasts like me.
> The ridiculousness of it all serves as a type of hazing ritual.
I have read way worse btw.
Like, you could still have the different members of the forge and lean into a single source of the tech. Warhammer 40K could fit, given Tetra and some of the initial abilities/power. So you could keep most/a lot of the summit meeting events.
Sorry but I don’t believe that HPMOR holds a particular draw to normal Harry Potter fanfic readers.
The parts I read were basically Yudkowsky doing a self-insert into the book and trying to dress rationalist lecturing up with Harry Potter themes.
> I have read way worse btw.
That’s about the level of endorsement I’d expect for that book. “Technically, even worse writing exists”
Believe as you wish but I found about it through r/HPfanfiction.
> That’s about the level of endorsement I’d expect for that book. “Technically, even worse writing exists”
It is a fanfiction, you shouldn't expect a good published book level writing. Sturgeon's law apply very strongly to fanfiction.
It's not just relevant because Yudkowsky wrote it, it's relevant because it essentially serves as Rationalism's "Torah".
Is it perhaps possible one of these is not like the others?
I've seen Rationalists defend it against very fair and accurate criticisms (see this whole thread for some of those), completely failing to recognize the complaints and objections are often legitimate.
I believe I've seen people cite it as the thing that brought them into the Rationalist community.
It's not uncommon to see people quote it in varying capacities - as a reminder of what "good rationality" looks like, as a cultural shibboleth, as a criticism of an idea they disagree with, and more. As an ex-evangelical who's read the Protestant Bible well over five times, this behavioral pattern looks very, very familiar.
I'm not going to spend the hours digging to find actual evidence I'm correct, and it's possible I'm being unfair and misremembering. I'm just a guy on the Internet - don't take this as anything other than "Here's my recollection. Take it for what it's worth."
The label of "Torah" did not strike me as wrong, though.
The rest of it, not so much. Of course I've seen people say positive things about it, and I've seen people say more positive things about it than I think it deserves. But that, too, is very different from treating it as a holy text; surely the same is true of pretty much anything that a lot of people have read and liked.
I just did a search for comments on LessWrong in the last year that contain the string "HPMOR" -- unsurprisingly there are hundreds of them, so I looked at the first few pages of results. I found a fair amount of "X reminded me of Y in HPMOR" but nothing that looked (to me; of course I might have blind spots) as if the thing was being treated like sacred scripture. E.g., no instances of "you say X, but HPMOR says Y, so obviously you're wrong" or the like.
It feels to me less like the way Christians relate to the Bible and more like the way they relate to, say, the works of C S Lewis. A shared bit of culture that can be referred to; something a lot of them like; in some cases the thing that brought them "into the fold".
Maybe I've just failed to notice. Maybe I've noticed in the past but forgotten. (I'm pretty good at forgetting things.) Maybe the search I just did was the wrong one -- e.g., maybe for some reason rationalists treating HPMOR as scripture tend not to call it "HPMOR" while doing so. But so far I remain unconvinced.
I'm not sure that's the case here, because rationalist fanfics tend to instead try to tear down the world as illogical.
Example for Harry Potter and this fanfic. In Harry Potter magical currency is made of precious metals and there are bronze coints, silver coins and gold coins. And they have fixed exchange rate.
"But wait!", notices the rationalist. "Since those coins could theoretically be melted down, and rates for those metals on exchange is different I could make infinite money glitch and crash the economy. Those wizards are so dumb, haha, for thousands of years they never figured out the basic logic."
Congratulations you found an economical inconsistency in a children's book. Your next period is boxing against kindergartners.
In my mind if you were a fan of original work, you would not be doing this. You could find different explanation that does not try to paint the world as stupid. Simplest being https://xkcd.com/1494/
However, I wouldn’t call it “long” in the same way that I wouldn’t call The Count of Monte Cristo or Great Expectations long. Serialized stories are just naturally longer because readers want a sizable chunk every week/month, regardless of that inflating the total size or not.
"There also used to be a practice on LW of telling newbies who weren't producing good content to come back when they'd read the sequences."
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EauwsXht4jrjTTE9m/reading-th...
The Bible is fundamentally a collection of different works. Within those works, I generally agree that the ideas are fairly succinct. But because there are multiple documents in the Bible which cover roughly the same events, it kind of necessarily isn’t succinct as a single cohesive document.
In other words, if you rewrote the Bible as a single document, yeah, it’d be like 10% as long. But that isn’t how it was made.
As for meandering, the narrative follows people who travel around to different places so I don’t know what you mean. The canon of the Bible doesn’t arrange all the books chronologically. You can read them in chronological order if you want.
More of a go away and do this thing that will take a long time because we don't want to deal with you at the moment?
"I would have written a shorter letter, but did not have the time." - Blaise Pascal in “Lettres Provinciales,” 1657.
I don't think historical "sorry for the wall of text"s by famous intellectuals is the dunk on walls of text that people seem to think it is.
It is a bit overused phrase, but I find it to be absolutely correct -- to make something concise without losing meaning and not being overly dry is both a skill and also lots of effort. I don't think it is impossible, it is just that often it is not worth it.
But that’s explicitly not what the quote says - it’s not that they can’t, it’s that it takes work.
Which, TBH, matches the clear majority of AI boosters.
Speaking of long-winded rationalist blog posts, the evidence for that claim is this long, detailed, full-of-receipts accounting of David Gerard's use of RationalWiki (though mostly Wikipedia) to push his personal agenda in subtle ways while scrupulously following the rules to avoid being caught at it:
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...
Personally i think the world would be a better place if more of us added nuance to our arguments.
The trick is to include a lot of nuance, details, and steelmanned arguments about little concessions and downstream, but to leave the key assumptions at the start largely unquestioned.
The reader spends 15 minutes reading what feels like a highly nuanced, deeply researched article. If you’re not paying close attention you don’t notice that some pivotal assumptions were spared from the nuance and steelmanning.
Rationalist bloggers aren’t the only ones who use this technique, but it is oddly common in rationalist blogs. Once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere.
Personally I really wish authors would pack their 'nuance' into well-sectioned areas, maybe even collapsible (we have the technology!). I shouldn't have to skim several paragraphs just to understand the core of the argument.
Arguably, it's not a big problem if you already love the author and hang on to their every word. But as someone who is often just trying to get the gist of the idea, I find the rationalist writing style really tiresome.
That blog post is explicitly targeted at people who are looking for a nice calm evening of reading about a super weird “way out there” subject. It’s not meant to convince you of an argument quickly and effectively.
It’s a bit like complaining that the “1 pound hangover beater” hamburger at your local grease diner has too many calories.
Part of the author's argument is that it doesn't do a good job of arguing at all, let alone quickly and effectively. It just inundates you with so many words and "facts" that people get bowled over by how "smart" it sounds.
This would be a fair complaint if it couldn’t also serve as a valid subtitle to the entire blog itself and not just a post. Admitting it in the title does not undermine the OP’s point about trying to obscure a poorly-framed argument.
My take from the OP was almost immediately, “Oh yeah, they never read Aquinas, et al”. Clearly that too comes from a fixed viewpoint, my particular Western Classics-style education delivered via US Catholic schools in the ‘80s, but I think there is a lot more honesty in any of old Tommy’s Proofs of God. You may agree or disagree with them, but pretty much anyone without any particular background or prior reading can immediately engage with them whereas the rationalists are doing all this navel gazing, or possibly glazing, around their feeling to make it so you cannot disagree because it’s set up to be a game of manners rather (have you read my other source I cited? How can you say that without reading this other link?) than an argument.
> adding layers of detail and nuance rather than interrogating the one or two assumptions they make at the start
This is a fundamentally neurotypical assumption. NDs have a hard time understanding the shared context of their audience, so they splay out all the detail to compensate. Earlier in their lives they tried 'just interrogating the one or two assumptions' but because they are not able to infer context nobody understands them because they are off the mark. They also enjoy diving into a huge amount of detail and exploring every nook and cranny to potentially find something new.
I would say this is fascinatingly true of AI as well, and probably one of the reasons I (and maybe other ND folks?) work with it so well, cringey slop word choice aside.
I was joking a few years ago that if the AI was trained on the internet, the corpus included massive overrepresentation with ND style writing.
Or they understand that this “shared context” is a myth that doesn’t exist in reality. Plenty of situations where everybody just nods “yea, right” and then walks away with a different idea because they’ve been looking at it from a different perspective/set of assumptions.
> huge amount of instinctual social detail behind it and knowing what kind of 'yeah right' and seeing how your audience received it is part of the game.
Most people's instincts on the matter lead them astray. They seem to spend their life hallucinating that other people said or thought things that they didn't. Functional assumptions, but wrong. With a predictable consequence that sociopaths have an easy time ending up in charge if they feel like it, because people relying on their instincts just make too many social mistakes.
It's not an accusation, but a mirror to help them potentially realize something, so they don't suffer so much through life so. When you realize what is happening, it helps release a lot of suffering in a person's life. The sour grapes is not helpful, NT social instincts are not going away and it's better to understand and work with the world than to be upset that rain happens sometimes and it just should never exist!
NT social instincts does not mean the person is super effective socially and everything else, but it's a very useful tool if they decide to develop their social skills.
For my experience, kinds of “yeah right” are just nonverbal signals. People who primarily communicate by text may miss those (it’s literally a different language), and so may folks who tend to get hyper focused on their thoughts so they lose track of their peer (so they stop seeing those details). What confuses me here is that it’s not something with a ton of detail - just a bunch of signals and their meanings that people are expected to know and recognize. There sure are groups with insanely deliberate rules and complex signaling, but that’s for extra geeky folks, not any norm.
Even if I’m just missing the complexity… I don’t see: why not being able to do so would tend to steer someone into hyper-verbosity? Especially when plain old conformance is more than enough to explain it all no less plausibly?
To be honest, I dunno about neurodivergent experience, I’m just a plain old ret^Wdumbass. I think that ND people know there’s - generally speaking - no secret and unspoken NT context game they’re not privy to. There could be something I’m not seeing or even knowing. And that’s exactly why - I think - nuances and details are sometimes important, not because brains can be wired different ways. My impression is that if someone writes any long (for the type of communication) form on some stuff they care about, they’re supposed to get into details and nuances, irrespective of author’s tendency for cognitive or processing quirks.
So, sorry - not to invalidate if this is a personal experience, but… while I won’t dispute ND correlation, how do you know that explanation?
The game I'm speaking about is the social game we all play day to day.
Which I find is the lesswrong-style to a T: here are all the details, literally all of them, and then we'll find our way to the point together, eventually.
I have ADHD and I tend to be the total opposite
I skip over details because my short term memory is bad and I work in extremely abstract abstractions all the time
I have a hard time fleshing out work presentations past like 10 minutes. I figure things get boring. to be honest... maybe that's accurate and nobody's listening past 10 minutes.
I haven't heard the term "rationalist blogger" before, but surely, not assuming tradition is correct is sort of key to the "rationalist" part?
If it's so rational, why does it need to be over-explained?
It's gish gallop
Imho narrative and metaphor and feeling hits more like the breadth-first mode. Lots of compression in pursuit of demarking a reality, whether or not everyone likes where a story does its compression. It takes visiting a lot places (and listening to how lot of signals bounce back) to drop a good metaphor, or craft a good story, that reaches and affects a large quorum of minds.
I suppose letting students turn in 3 sentence essays may not be a better option, but it at least it doesn't encourage students who engage with the assignment in good faith to turn a high-quality six paragraphs into six pages.
None of the people grading my writing ever even attempted to do that. The grade existed separately from my writing and served no purpose of education.
I once turned in a five sentence essay that covered about a single page. The person next to me in class turned in five pages, but ultimately got the same grade as me. That's when I realized how stupid it all was.
- 99+ percentile scores on the multiple choice sections
- winning multiple essay contests in middle school and high school
I have the worst handwriting of anyone I know and sometimes wonder if that influenced the scores.
First, it has a canon, every rationalist ends up referencing Yudowsky, arguments frequently refer back to earlier ones, and to make matters worse, by shorthand ("Molochs", "The Litany of Tarski", "conflict vs mistake theory")
Like the Talmud, rationalists like to use extreme hypotheticals to test principles. The contrivance of the situations is the point, as if stress-testing a rule by applying it to extreme situations to distil it to a single variable problem.
Both writing traditions keep opposing arguments in full. The Talmud records minority options and the full log of disputes that went for centuries. Rationalist's steelmanning is basically the same.
It is not surprising that Yudkowsky is Jewish and grew up Orthodox. A lot of other very important figures are also Jewish like Scott Alexander, so, it is plausible that they brought a lot of the disputation-as-study and commentary-on-commentary traditions with them and set the tone for the community.
Of course, I am not directly comparing the Talmud to Rationalist writing. The Talmud is ultimatelly a legal document, its hypotheticals feed a system that tells people how to act, compressing centuries of legal precedent, this is by nature dense, and this density makes it hard to read more than simply verbose. Rationalist blogs are often long due to a lack of professional editing.
See Hobbes, Calvin https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/1300k80/ac...
I think that when references to the prior work are only implicit, pieces tend to be nearly unreadable for casual readers.
However, when interesting counter arguments are stated explicitly, the long articles can still be kind of fun, and personally think this is something Scott Alexander does pretty well, for instance. He is not the main offender of unreadable long rationalist blog posts, of which there are many.
I have a theory the best philosophy can be stated simply and briefly. Like with consciousness Nagel asking what it's like to be a bat is an interesting idea but you don't need hundreds of pages to explain it.
By the way, there's a big divide between continental (European) and analytic (Anglosphere) philosophy. The Calvin and Hobbes joke is poking fun at postmodern continental philosophy (or literary criticism or gender studies) but most analytic philosophy is not like that.
(ie "honest caveats" wording comes from a reward for being honest about drawbacks instead of covering them up)
Note Opus 5.5 is much less likely to do it.
* Writing to think -- writing about a subject to understand it better -- is a common technique in online rationalist circles
* I often just throw long (esp rationalist) essays at my LLM text summarizer script to see if they would be something I'd like to read. It works well for me
* Rationalism the subculture, rationalism the skill, rationalism the subject, rationalism the mindset, etc, all seem pretty distinct. This comment is more for the comments here (mftch)
* Inducing a trait from a few examples to a whole group (esp a long tailed (ie diverse) group) is usually a bad idea. Exposure is often a good remedy for that. (mftch)
* It might just be me, but it seems that both the online rationalist community and hacker news comments cultures have evolved a lot in the last few years (mftch)
"Back in my day", HN felt more signal than noise. Oh there was flaming and name calling, but there was a lot less of what you point out: simple outgroup dunking.
Also most people on lesswrong are likely on the spectrum and are used to needing to overexplain themselves because neurotypical people rarely give them the benefit of the doubt.
I personally find this kind of overly verbose blog post enjoyable to read (even when, as in the case of Scott Alexander and the internet rationalists, I disagree with a lot of the substance).
Same reason I like A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry, Admiral Cloudberg, Perun (Youtube), and various other long form content blogs and channels. These could all get to the point much faster, but that's not what they're trying to do.
For me - the nerdy deep dive + relatively low information density + analytical style makes for a pleasurable reading / watching experience.
Clarity - grace - style ... is not taught. Passable text is good enough.
No editor - plus a peer group who create bloated text.
Here is my favorite text on how to write clearly: https://www.amazon.com/Style-Ten-Lessons-Clarity-Grace/dp/03...
I really hope good writing makes a comeback. I really appreciate everyone who takes the time and effort to write well.
However, I don't think this article is really complaining about style. Scott Alexander has great style, the clarity/grace people would find much to love about him.
The complaint is about the length of his writing, and the content, ie focusing on endless arguments as opposed to honoring prior traditions.
Consider when blogger Gwern explained that nicotine, actually, is not addictive, and is good for you, as long as you don't smoke it, over the course of 9,000 words, with over 100 references. It turns out, actually, nicotine is addictive, and is bad for you even if you don't smoke it, as you probably already obviously knew.
The second sentence is a link to a Substack essay, which has two screenshots of two individuals self-reporting “nicotine bad” on Twitter, one of whom smoked it.
By the content and construction of these sentences, the author makes it abundantly clear that he finds the second overwhelmingly more convincing than the first, and that the second essentially refutes the first.
Given that the only evidentiary standard this author appears to be able to apply is “how much does this agree what what I already believe”, I find that I agree with his claim that extra words don’t make his articles better, and I would extend this to say that fewer words would make them better still, with perfection achieved when the number of words reaches zero.
All the people who think nicotine is not that bad have clearly not used it long enough, and aren’t addicted enough. There does come a point where it will feel like your bones are trying to escape your body when you dare relinquish from nicotine. Then, it will be clear it is bad.
If there are any doubts nicotine is bad, simply ask nicotine users. And by that I mean, not the people who used Zyn once or twice to study for an exam.
> Given that the only evidentiary standard this author appears to be able to apply is “how much does this agree what what I already believe”
Mainstream medical science along with common sense point to nicotine being addictive and bad for you. I don't really feel the need to interrogate that view, especially when "interrogating" in this context would mean spending dozens of hours of my life going line-by-line through each reference and trying to understand the context of a field which, frankly speaking, neither me nor the author of the article have any business trying to evaluate. The only winning move is not to play.
Gwern's article cites many, many peer reviewed journal articles (aka mainstream medical science) about how nicotine's addictiveness is overblown, and you're citing three tweets.
Common sense points to you being clueless in all of your writing, even though I haven't read it, and I don't really feel the need to interrogate that view.
In general, I don’t think there is a reasonable standard that can be applied to both the essay and the putatively refuting tweets that will privilege the latter. Juxtaposing the two was an own goal.
To bring things full circle, I’ve heard that in the rationality community, it’s actually high status to publicly change your mind and disavow your argument when you realise it’s flawed. I think that’s a neat piece of social technology.
The author of the second essay here! It's a pro-nicotine one — the OP just linked to the very end of it. Moreover Gwern himself reviewed my essay during Inkhaven (https://www.inkhaven.blog/), a 30-posts-in-30-days program.
I asked Gwern explicitly if he ever feels responsible for getting some people addicted to nicotine. His answer was something along of the lines of: “No, I explicitly warned people that (1) vaping/smoking is addictive and (2) if you ever was addicted to nicotine, even sublingual nicotine is enough to get people addicted”.
I do think it's important to warn people that they should be careful with the substance and watch their usage, so I included the screenshots in my essay!
He should have reasonably foreseen that that would be the exact effect.
Most normal people reading his piece would come away with the opposite conclusion.
The title alone: "On the benefits and lack of demerits of nicotine (research up to 2015)"
Is enough to make people go 'oh, that's ok then' without investing in trying to understand the subtlety of the argument made. You can add 500 references and spend 30K words but you've already lost by the first line of the article.
It would have taken 10 seconds to put a bit right at the top that says 'do not see this article as an excuse to go smoke or vape' or maybe even something harsher than that. With great power etc ...
> Pascal’s Mugging and Why I Gave an Escort My Son’s College Fund
That was the funniest thing I have read in a long time. I laughed so much.
Thank you for sharing.
That has some serious n-gate vibes (http://n-gate.com/)
"Earning to Give and the Case for My Drinking Problem" or "Gay Son or Thot Daughter: A Decision-Theoretic Treatment"
it is about love of the game
> verbosity is a substitute for thoroughness
Clearly OP author is far too wordy as well!
If you read what gwern says on nicotine its far more nuanced than "nicotine is fine, use nicotine." He does acknowledge that frequent use leads to tolerance. But tolerance is not the same as addiction. I think also if you're going to try argue against his post (which is thoroughly researched) then you ought to do better than just set up a strawman and say he's wrong....
following the link:
> My take away is that there is addiction
At least thanks for writing a short blog post!
Can someone explain to me what "rationalist blogs" and the "rationalists" behind them are? (Of course, I could use Google but I'd like to tap into HN's crowd intelligence in this case.)
The idiot rambles on and the coward hides behind a wall of text that would be exhausting to refute.
We are all one or the other occasionally.
Basically it's a defense mechanism against adversarial HN commenter type behavior that's been cargo culted a couple times over and doesn't actually service it's original purpose anymore and is just a group signaling mechanism.
Second off, I didn't call the whole audience "sneering POS's". I only implied it. Regardless of whether they're 5% or 50% those types are sufficiently plentiful in the comments, here and elsewhere, such that anyone posting stuff that's against the grain will be quickly predated upon by them unless their take is hedged in a nearly airtight manner.
Writing in defensive style is a tactical choice.
links to a substack post confirming the benefits Gwern wrote about, and acknowledging the risks Gwern acknowledged
Some arguments about future predictions seem like a sci-fi fan base nerding about their favorite stories, but without any self awareness.
You get a nerds wet dream: nerdy stuff and ego boost. But very detached from reality.
And maybe they are "too long" in the same way that Lean proofs are "too long"? I have no idea - I don't read either very often.
However, often I don't care how verbose a piece is if it can hold my interest. For example, the late Umberto Eco wrote some of my favourite pieces. He was a philosopher (among other things), and many of them - notably of the "post-modern" - are known to be particularly verbose.
Here's a particularly relevant one: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/
Similarly movements who use catchphrases for this, like when Kier Starmers centrist version of Labour started calling themselves "the adults in the room" - it gave away their entitlement to lead.
"Rationalists" can't be wrong - it's in the name, any one disagreeing is just irrational.
To be contrarian isn't to be a "free thinker", it's to be led around like a dog on a leash. You're just a reactionary saying the opposite of an actual opinion.
If I had to wager, I'd say both of those points stem from being bullied in school more often than not.
Not only in that community. I see it a lot at my job too, waffling and loudness as a substitute for knowledge, skill and diligence. I think maybe plato wrote something about this in the gorgias
Logorrhea is a symptom of ADHD, schizophrenia and traumatic brain injuries.
Whatever the faults of internet rationalists, suggesting that they have a mental health disorder is incredibly anti-social behaviour.
Also if I wasn't incredibly anti-social, I wouldn't be on this site in the first place.
Therefore they use a kickstarter or aliexpress style torrent of argument and features to try to cudgel you into agreement.
They just keep going on and on. I wondered why. I think it's because at every point, the person either stopped and bought, or... they're still reading so... you may as well hit them with MOAR and MOAR!
Sounds unachievable? Doesn't mean we shouldn't go there!
The sequences are really books made up of chapters (blog posts). Most of those posts are relatively short.
In my opinion, verbosity is often used to swamp an argument, so brute forcing correctness. Just so I can swipe the ~~insult~~ critique more broadly, you often find the same on philosophy forums. You won't get engagement if you try to distil their arguments down to more concise points that are easier to debate or refute. You need to use the in-group signalling of lengthy posts, complicated language and appeal to authority.
(Just so you're aware, I'm aware, this is going to really annoy some people, nevertheless, I believe it is true).
There's also a culture of not knowing when to stop posting and touch grass - when all your friends are way too online and probably also rationalists and much of your identity and status is tied to online posting, you invest a lot in cultivating that social identity and signaling to your community, even to a degree that would look unhealthy to normies.
It’s to do the practice of rationalist blogging
--
If person rationalist they
> prioritizes explicit reasoning, logic, and evidence over intuition, tradition, or emotion.
By sticking to this principle one has to describe every cause-effect, every idea from their speech. Reality is way more complex and detailed than any of it's representations. So rationalist can keep detailing and grounding everything they touch in their speech, and then ground grounds and so on. Sticking to rationalist values you have to write more and ground more.
By cutting corners of explanation and reason rationalist's claims they becoming less rationalist and less acceptable by the group, thus less popular. So the more you're rationalist, more popular you are more you have to write. It's natural way of things.
--
Irinically the complete rationalism isn't achievable because Gödel's incompleteness teorem.
> There will always be true statements about symbols that the system can write down, but cannot prove or disprove using its own rules.
They, we all have to draw a logical/grounding line somewhere, either by choice either by incapacity.
Also I think the name "Rationalist" is kinda funny. Reminds me of that Antifa meme, "we're the anti bad guy squad, and our opponents are the bad guys! Everything we do is justified because we fight bad guys obviously!" Except these guys are the Rationalists. Everything they do is rational, and if you don't agree with them, then you're irrational obviously.
I’ve seen this tactic in politics and media, to sway public opinion (into something against public’s interest and against basic common sense). I’ve seen with charismatic leaders and followers of religious cults. They talk a lot, write thick books but say little of value. I’ve seen this with people selling Ponzi schemes.
I think the common theme is they have to go against the common sense and have to weaken defense mechanisms of the target. But they have no real arguments that can be summarized clearly in a few sentences. Such arguments would be easy to understand and refute.
There's also rhetorical advantage in spewing so much stuff that you snow your reader under a blizzard; what's worse, some of that tends to be true.
“Do not be rash with your mouth, And let not your heart utter anything hastily before God. For God is in heaven, and you on earth; Therefore let your words be few. For a dream comes through much activity, And a fool’s voice is known by his many words.” -Ecclesiastes 5:2
I think part of what's happening is that the bad ideas and bad reasoning get diluted among 9000 words and 100 references. It's hard to put your finger on one sentence and say "here's where you're wrong", because the conclusion does not (obviously) rest on any one sentence. It rests more on the volume of words.
But "proof by volume" is not actually a thing. (I mean, it's a technique that can be effective in practice, but logically, it's not valid whatsoever.)
How do you answer something like that? If you try a point-by-point rebuttal, you're going to be into it 9000 words yourself (at least), and it is rarely worth it. I think that's "don't answer a fool according to his folly".
"Answer him as his folly deserves" is less clear to me. Is that to just flat out say that his ideas are foolish? Is it to give a concise one-paragraph statement of why his conclusion is folly? I think the latter is preferable (if you can). I mean, the rationalist is just going to claim that you haven't engaged with his arguments, though you can reply "no I didn't; your conclusion is so wrong that I don't need to engage with how you got there". And the concise rebuttal may be helpful to bystanders.
this should be a rule for everyone but the finest wielders of language.
Aristotelian physics is simpler than Newtonian physics, which is simpler than either relativity or quantum mechanics, both of which will probably turn out to be simpler than whatever theory we come up with that somehow encompasses both.
Chapter 1 of the Book of Genesis is shorter than On the origin of species, which in turn is shorter than the shelf-full of books you would need to cover all the details Darwin didn't know about.
The truth does generally turn out to be simpler than its alternatives, when you fill in all their details and add the epicycles you need to make them consistent with what we actually observe. In some sense that's how we recognize the truth: it's what you don't need to keep making increasingly implausible excuses for.
But it's not reliably "very simple" if that means "short blogpost length at most", and things that purport to be that simple often turn out to be simple only in appearance. (Like saying "a witch did it", which in some sense can explain anything, and for the exact same reason explains nothing until you've filled in lots of details about what witches can do and how, at which point it stops looking like a good explanation for anything.)
Cocaine is bad. So is nicotine. Because on balance they are bad, even if they have good properties. You can spend 30K words on 'the good sides' but on balance they are still bad.
But apparently spending 30k words trying to explore the tradeoff is a bad thing? Because it should just be obvious that Nicotine Is Bad on balance, without weighing up the benefits and the harms?
I dunno, maybe gwern's article about nicotine is in fact terrible. I've only looked at it very briefly, and superficially it looks reasonable to me.
"But it turns out that actually nicotine[1] is addictive and bad for you -- Alex's post had a link supporting that." Eh. Alex's post had a link to something that ... actually could be fairly summarized as "I haven't found nicotine[1] addictive and it seems to be good for me overall". What Alex presumably has in mind is the three tweets at the end of the article, under the heading "PS: Be careful". One claims, not giving any evidence, that a bunch of people read gwern's article and ended up addicted to tobacco. One claims, not giving any details, that gwern's article "almost ruined my life". One sketches a way someone could end up in trouble after reading the article, though it isn't clear to me whether its author is saying "this is what happened to me" or "I can imagine this happening" and it looks much more like the latter.
[1] Throughout this paragraph "nicotine" means "nicotine not taken by smoking or vaping"; it isn't surprising that there might be a difference and gwern's article very strongly advises not doing those things.
If you weren't predisposed to think ill of gwern and his writing, would you actually be impressed by this? On the one hand we have what looks like a careful weighing of harms and benefits, with references to the literature; on the other hand we have at most three anecdotes with no details at all. It could still be that they're right and gwern's wrong, of course, but "look at this loser, he posted all those words and here are three tweets that point the other way" doesn't seem like much of an argument to me.
This one in particular looks like a lot of handwaving and justification for self medication.
People aren't perfect. Gwern has a good reputation but he's still human and most likely has flaws, this one article in particular looks pretty flawed to me.
That said I consider the rationalists a little bit higher brow since they're at least DIYing (or were before AI) the words and the arguments and responsible for all that verbosity whereas any idiot can cherry pick links.
I'm not the only one who's noticed it:
"Why do tech CEOs sound like doomsday cult leaders?"
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/social-trends/article-w...
(Short version: those parallels aren't terribly close and one can find plenty similar parallels in things that no one thinks are religion-like. Long version: read on.)
"Roko's Basilisk is just rewarmed Pascal's Wager". I don't think it really is, but in any case it's something that so far as I can make out rationalists generally don't agree with and don't give any thought to except when it gets trotted out yet again as an illustration of how crazy rationalists are.
"The singularity is just the apocalypse / rapture". Both are hypothetical future events that would change the world a lot. Beyond that the match doesn't seem very close. The Christian apocalypse narrative is, above all else, about Good Versus Evil. A battle between God and his enemies! A grand judgement in which the living and the dead are all consigned to eternal bliss or eternal destruction! Us against Them! And there's none of that in what people say about technological singularities. (Well, except for Roko's basilisk, I guess. But, again, that isn't actually a thing anyone believes in or gives any thought to.)
"High priests (tech CEOs)". I don't think I've ever seen anything written by rationalists that treats tech CEOs as high priests. Here are a few quotations from recent highly-upvoted Less Wrong comments from high-karma LW users; each was the first thing I found in a search that seemed like it was expressing any sort of opinion on the CEO in question: "Sam Altman has systematically dismantled all of OpenAI's oversight, and betrayed the promises OpenAI made to humanity." "I would add that Elon Musk is not trustworthy and has been strongly suspected of manipulating the recommendation of X ..." "The best executives are very strong generalists, and the best managers are chosen to be strong performers in the task that they are managing other people to do. Elon is widely known to be a strong engineer, as well as a strong designer, and spends much of his time arguing details of that kind of work with his reports. Mark Zuckerberg is known to do similarly." First two are very strongly negative. Third is positive but a long way from setting either of the people involved up as high priests. I didn't find anything very specifically pro or con Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, or Jeff Bezos.
(A lot of internet-rationalists were pretty keen on Elon Musk back in the day, but so were a lot of other people. And there was an infamous post in which Yudkowsky wrote about how major-company CEOs and hedge fund managers and eminent professors seemed really impressive when he met them, which is cringey but not obviously wrong and in any case falls well short of calling anyone high priests -- and the comments below it are full of people saying things like "have you considered that maybe one way you get to be a CEO is by being good at looking impressive?".)
"theologians (Yud, SA)": if "theologian" just means "person who thinks about things and whose writings are respected" then, sure, Yudkowsky and Alexander are "theologians", but then literally every field will have its "theologians". Donald Knuth wrote some big books that everyone respects, and sometimes the word "bible" is attached to them! Clearly he's a theologian and computer science is just another religion! (Actually, Knuth is a theologian, a little bit; see https://archive.org/details/316bibletextsill0000knut.)
"sacred texts": see above.
"heresies (logical fallacies)": heresies are doctrines that arise within a particular religion and are officially rejected by it; to anyone outside the religion they're an irrelevance. Logical fallacies are definitely not that. If someone mixes up "A implies B" and "B implies A" or something, you don't need to be an internet-rationalist to think they're wrong or to criticize their argument.
You might be able to make an argument that Roko's basilisk is an example of a heresy within rationalism? But I don't think the existence of inside-baseball debates where some positions are officially deprecated is terribly specifically religious. The idea that goto statements are a great way of structuring a piece of computer software would be a heresy, for instance. Belief in "cold fusion" would be another. But computing and physics aren't religion-like in any useful sense on that account.
Your evidence isn't very convincing. I think the singularity is actually framed as a battle between good and evil. How else could Sam Altman be accused of betraying humanity if what his company does isn't framed as that? Moreover, that quote pretty much proves what I'm saying about tech CEOs, how the rationalists view them. There's no "betrayal" here, Sam is and always has been a craven capitalist. One would only feel betrayed by him if they believe in him as someone who violated an implicitly shared dogma.
And that's the big reason for the fallout you're identifying. Early on people like Sam Altman and Elon Musk pretended to be saving humanity through their investments and corporations. It was a marketing ploy and rationalists bought into it hook line and sinker. Of course it was always a ruse, of course these guys were never going to deliver, because at the end of the day their goals were to become rich. Which they achieved. So now the world-saving facade is dropped, and the rationalists who bought into it are none too pleased. Even this line:
"Elon is widely known to be a strong engineer, as well as a strong designer, and spends much of his time arguing details of that kind of work with his reports. Mark Zuckerberg is known to do similarly."
Is very flattering of Musk's and Zuckerberg's supposed engineering prowess. One only need look at the Cyber Truck to understand what kind of designer and engineer Musk is.
> Clearly he's a theologian and computer science is just another religion!
I mean you could take it in that direction. Various cults like the cult of Apple that flourished around Steve Jobs, who himself was a bit of a cult leader. There's a cult around Elon Musk. The thing that's missing is the deity of AI, which is unique to the rationalist community. You might even be able to say that academia is a religion that's formed around to worship science, and there's a lot of parallels between religion there too, down to the dresses and funny hats.
> every field will have its "theologians"
They're theologians when they talk of theology rather than theory. Knuth is a practician. People talking about the singularity are like the guy on the street saying the end is nigh, and people writing blogs about it are essentially priests saying the same thing from a pulpit, the equivalent of theologians are the ones writing scientific papers about it.
> If someone mixes up "A implies B" and "B implies A" or something, you don't need to be an internet-rationalist to think they're wrong or to criticize their argument.
That's not exactly what I'm talking about, logical fallacies are fine and you should point them out when it's relevent. What I mean is for example if you're talking to a rationalist, and you make an appeal to emotion, that's regarded as an invalid argument. Or an even better example is when you make an appeal to authority when it matters, and you get into an argument about whether it's valid or invalid ad hominem. In normal discourse, people make emotional and authoritative arguments and those are valid to consider. In rationalist communities, that's considered a logical fallacy, and the discussion is over. So more often than not when you're talking to a rationalist, the conversation devolves into a debate about which fallacies are being applied and whether they're valid or invalid, because the only thing they'll consider is logos. The doctrine here is that pathos and ethos are invalid forms of persuasion. This is why they're so comfortable rejecting expertise, and why it was so easy to be fooled by people like Musk who used good arguments but lacked actual expertise.
If you think it's likely that there will be a singularity and it will be bad, then you'll regard someone working toward it as bad. That doesn't mean that there's any good-versus-evil-ness about the singularity itself. Whereas Armageddon is specifically a battle of good against evil, the Last Judgement is specifically a separation of people into (something like) good versus evil, etc.
The "betrayal" line is saying that OpenAI was founded as, supposedly, an ethical company trying to make sure that AI worked out for the good of humanity, and Altman is failing to live up to that. It doesn't have anything to do with any high view of Altman personally.
I agree that that line is more positive about both Musk and Zuckerberg than either deserves. But the claim wasn't "some rationalists think too highly of tech CEOs", it was "rationalists think about tech CEOs like religious people think about their high priests", and the point is that nothing I've found suggests that that's so. Sometimes people say nice things about (say) Mark Zuckerberg, sometimes not so nice (there was one comment where someone suggested that a different approach to AI safety might have resulted in "Mark Zuckerberg stamping on a face for ever") but no more of it than in the world at large is looking reverently to them as authorities.
If you're happy also saying that computer science and academia in general are religions, then fair enough, but at this point I think saying "X is a religion" is no longer really saying anything.
I don't know whether you're right or wrong in saying that rationalists are too unwilling to accept arguments that are logically invalid but persuasive in other ways, but this seems a long way from saying that logical fallacies are to rationalists as heresies are to (say) Christians.
Logical fallacies do nothing to show an argument is wrong.
All they do is demonstrate that a chain of reasoning cannot be a logical proof that the conclusion must be true, given its premises.
Dismissing arguments because "they're fallacious" is actually not so far removed from dismissing ideas because they're heretical.
In each case, what matters is whether the ideas are true, not whether your interlocutor proved rigorously it is true.
And: where are the rationalists', or the singularitarians', or the atheists', sacred places? what are their regular religious rituals? what organization corresponds for them to churches and the like? what things are they obliged to believe, as opposed to believing by definition as a member of whatever group? what ancient traditions do they preserve or claim to preserve? Of course you can have a religion without any single one of those things, but the more common features of religion a thing doesn't have the less plausible it is to call it a religion.
I've never seen an argument like this that if applied consistently wouldn't equally assert that many academic disciplines, large companies, political movements, etc., are "religions".
If i had to guess its because he argues for slowing down AI development and everyone here is a massive AI booster.
I'm more than happy to be badged a secular humanist and I am led to beleive they overlap but I see differences.
What really shits me is how many rationalists are basically mansplaining tiresome pedants. And, hyper argumentative.
meh, this is legitimately disputed today, for example as there are less smokers today lung cancer has gone down but Parkinson's disease has gone up, suggesting nicotine does have some cognitive benefits
And I certainly have known cigarette smokers who explained "yes, I know they cause cancer and other bad stuff - but they also help with other serious (physical and mental) problems that I have, and I'm choosing quality of life over quantity".
https://psychotechnology.substack.com/p/a-love-song-to-nicot...
It says the exact opposite to me?
Weird that this is how OP chose to support their argument.
It is also readily apparent to me that nicotine is bad for us, generally and broadly.
The combination leaves wiggle room for nicotine to be a net-good lever on certain mechanisms. I do think it's best to avoid it; It's a challenging double-edged sword.
The molecular biology of how it's maybe-good and maybe-bad is probably the most useful aspect of it. It's a strange sort of bronchodilator and has weird and ambiguous antiinflammatory properties. (Which seem to tie in to how it is addictive: Short-term bronchodilation and oddly-shaped short-term antiinflammatory properties turn into bronchoconstriction and proinflammatory effects as time passes from taking nicotine, which feels like it would be rather inductive to generating a craving for more nicotine.)
Re. Parkinson's: Wild guess, addled brain hunching on nebulous perspectives, but I do think that nicotine's protective effects against Parkinson's are indeed related to the bronchodilation and antiinflammatory aspects, and more specifically it seems to me that Parkinson's has pulmonary basis. I think we're nuking our lungs in many subtle ways that in some of us cause the dam of cell death in the substantia nigra to break. How might we be nuking our lungs? Say… Air pollution, incl. microplastics and plasticizers, various disruptors of fine pulmonary epithelium and metabolic function and neuroendocrine autonomic control. And I'd think that once we start to lose fine autonomic control by way of loss of dopamine cells in the substantia nigra, we'd be poised to enter a vicious cycle of further loss of pulmonary foundations.
but idk, just sayin lol
Actual evidence in the real world points to pesticides causing the rise in Parkinson’s:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/opinion/parkinsons-pestic...
Hence the disclaimer that it's super guessy what I wrote.
So I come to this perspective having had reason to look into synucleopathic disorders like Parkinson's and Lewy body dementia. Read a ton of literature as best I could. (Regular people can read academic literature. To actionable insight. It just takes some care regarding certainty, and one must work with doctors with anything significant. It's a… help the doctor help you thing.)
And indeed: Pesticides. That New York times article mentions paraquat.
It's interesting to look at how pesticides might bring about Parkinson's. Cell death in the substantia nigra.
It's interesting with paraquat that it's especially and specifically destructive to the lung. As well as generally-yet-specifically inducing oxidative stress, which seems as far as I can tell to kind of be… the cause of death so to speak?, for the crucial substantia nigra cells. The Wikipedia page on paraquat underpins this pulmonary impact reasonably well I think, well enough for the sake of discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraquat
Then there's stuff like this: "Elevated PM2.5 concentrations were significantly correlated with an increased risk of PD among patients with COPD. Furthermore, exposure to high PM2.5 levels can further increase the risk of PD." – Association between PM2.5 exposure and risk of Parkinson’s disease in individuals with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in Taiwan: a nested case-control study, https://www.e-epih.org/journal/view.php?doi=10.4178/epih.e20...
And this: "This nationwide retrospective cohort study demonstrates that [Parkinson's disease] risk is significantly increased in patients with [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease] compared with those of the general population." — The association between chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and Parkinson's disease: a nationwide population-based retrospective cohort study, https://academic.oup.com/qjmed/article-abstract/108/1/39/158...
Then I've been surprised and sort of amazed to read studies of the OTC compound ambroxol in Parkinson's. These seem to show that ambroxol has protective effects against Parkinson's, even seemingly curbing the progression of the full clinical manifestation of the disease. Ambroxol is an over-the-counter mucolytic and "cough syrup" thing. It also happens to have specific antioxidant properties – redox-adjusting properties? – and in general very complex and very interesting effects on neuronal signaling; "Ambroxol is a potent inhibitor of the neuronal Na+ channels, explaining its anaesthetic effect", as per Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambroxol
Ambroxol has extensive effects on fine pulmonary function "through several mechanisms, including breaking up phlegm, stimulating mucus production, and stimulating synthesis and release of surfactant by type II pneumocytes."
And! Get this: "Ambroxol is also anti-inflammatory, reducing redness in a sore throat. It reduces the release of inflammatory cytokines and histamines in cell cultures. It also acts as an antioxidant, scavenging free radicals and hypochloric acid generated by neutrophils.[14] These two effects explain its effect in treating acute lung injury caused by paraquat.[7]"
At that point I was like whoa.
Here's a bunch of research stuff on ambroxol and Parkinson's:
Ambroxol-induced rescue of defective glucocerebrosidase is associated with increased LIMP-2 and saposin C levels in GBA1 mutant Parkinson's disease cells – https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26094596/
Ambroxol as a Treatment for Parkinson Disease Dementia – https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2...
Protocol of ASPro-PD: a phase 3 trial of ambroxol to slow progression in genetically stratified Parkinson’s disease – https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00415-026-13683-7
Ambroxol as a disease-modifying treatment to reduce the risk of cognitive impairment in GBA-associated Parkinson’s disease: a multicentre, randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled, phase II trial. The AMBITIOUS study protocol – https://neurologyopen.bmj.com/content/5/2/e000535
Ambroxol for the Treatment of Patients With Parkinson Disease With and Without Glucocerebrosidase Gene Mutations – https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2...
It's wildly interesting. I'm super curious.
So a thing with these studies is that it's looks like ambroxol doses for Parkinson's need to be substantially higher than the cough-syrup/OTC-mucolytic doses. Seemingly to get enough to cross the blood-brain barrier. So this doesn't pin down any pulmonary foundation for Parkinson's.
But it is very, very interesting that... practically all of the stuff that impacts Parkinson's for better or worse always has a pulmonary element. All of it, as far as I can tell. But I don't know! I'm just seeing a structure of evidence as leaning a certain way. Could just be my imagination. And I don't trust it. But I'ma keep reading for sure.
it's very funny to have written SO MUCH WORDS under the link "Why is every rationalist blog post way too long?", aaahahah
Especially in a context where most scientists blame pesticides?
Every contrarian idea has to dismantle layer upon layer of existing beliefs to even be considered plausible. Many people will discard it outright because of how much it goes against their worldview.
The worst part is that people have also been conditioned to believe that long, detailed explanations are the result of delusions built up in social media 'echo chambers' or 'conspiracy theories' based upon fake news. LLMs will typically act as though they are concerned for your mental health if you provide a valid rebuttal to all of their points in such a discussion; they will say "Note what you did, you've made your argument unfalsifiable..." And I have to point out that its own mainstream version is also merely a narrative and also unfalsifiable and backed by even less evidence. The discussion has to be evaluated from first principles, taking into account empirical evidence, trends and incentives.
Incentives are much more important than simplicity of arguments to estimate accuracy. People will go to great lengths to obtain rewards and avoid punishment. Often, reality is complicated, not simple. Occam's razor generally isn't correct these days. Perhaps it was at one point in the past; those were simpler times.
From my own life experience and behavior, there are no simple explanations for anything I did or what happened to me; so I don't see why simple explanations are valid for anyone else. Occam's razor is essentially part of Hollywood's conditioning; conditioning people to people map their lived experiences into simple movie-like narratives.
Nearly every blog post I have read in this ecosystem, even the rare one that contains some good ideas, is painfully long and extremely tedious.You can take the truthest truth ever like "god does not exist". This statement is rationalist and true and short so the author is supposed to cry with a tears of happiness. But making a wisard to behave like this requires something more thorough to be sent. Maybe the author's post also has a chance to become a rationalist if it would be a little bit... longer?
What makes you think the author has poor reading skill?
I'll cite an example: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qDmnyEMtJkE9Wrpau/simulacra-.... I can make the case that one might feel smarter simply having read through the grating writing.
The assumption that “stupids” are going to be more receptive to long-form/from-first-principles arguments is wrong, I think. So is the assumption that that’s why rationalists write that way (it’s more likely because of bubble culture and/or because people like hearing themselves talk).
It’s hard to write a rigorous analysis of something without length. The challenge is keeping it interesting.
I am a fan of falsely attributed quotes...
> Usually that false quote is attributed to Blaise Pascal, but I have also seen it being attributed to Albert Einstein.
Not false: Balzac published first, Pascal second:
Its not about short-form content, its about the unneeded over verbosity being a sign of a failure of communication.
Following Grice's maxims of communication, you can infer that they are either poor communicators or worse trying to hide something.
Defending rambling texts on the basis of "ideas take more words to defend them" is defending the incorrect idea that quantity is a quality in itself. Some ideas are self evident, some ideas can be defended in short well laid out arguments.
Even if a idea is complicated and requires a relatively long explanation. If that is the smallest possible defense, it would still be succinct even if the text is long.
I may as well ask why so many replies, and responses to rationalist posts are empty posturing, sneering, ad-hom attacks, and writing so much while being so insubstanial. That post could be replaced by Bart Simpson bashing a saucepan shouting "I AM SO GREAT" and it would be no less informative.
> "even the rare one that contains some good ideas"
"Tee hee lols, cutting insight from superior mind, zing, burn, am I so great, or am I so great? I hope you feel wiser for reading my wisdom. Imagine how much worse this would be if I committed that sin of 'adding detail and nuance'. Also I'm not going to do the one thing I said they should do - interrogate the assumptions I made at the start."
It's actually quite interesting to me that even relatively mild jabs get dismissed by rationalists as "sneering." "Sneering" is what they are most averse to: as if the worst crime is simply to choose not to engage with something or be dismissive of it on its face. Something that is extremely normal to do.
- "It's because you read too slowly."
- "Most of them are too smart to have brief thoughts, but not smart enough to have succinct ones"
- "they confuse their ideological preference with rationality"
- "When one is “full of shit” as they say, the shit needs to spill out somewhere."
- "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit."
- "a culture of not knowing when to stop posting and touch grass"
- "Rationalism is for people who have the reading skill. If someone prefers short videos, it means that the doors of rationalism is closed for him."
Extremely normal to do, and boring to read. At least Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary is witty with its scathing putdowns. None of these is a good contribution by the HN guidelines (thoughtful, effortful, edit out snark and sneering). Why is it "actually quite interesting" that people who want to focus on evidence and logic are averse to sneering as if that's surprising - who isn't averse to it? (NB. 'simply choosing not to engage' and 'ad-hom the author' are different, btw).
- why are you surprised that anyone doesn't like being sneered at?
- do you think those 'sneering' comments I quoted are good and interesting, would you like it if there were more of them?
- why were your words ""Sneering" is what they are most averse to: as if the worst crime is simply to choose not to engage with something" when sneering and not engaging are different things?
- why are you surprised that a group which is trying to avoid the normal vibes, personal attacks, gut feelings, and instead focus on evidence, logic and reasoning, is particularly against the things they are trying to avoid?
This one is thoughtful correcr observation: "they confuse their ideological preference with rationality"
It is not snearing, it is factual description.