bartlebyshop:

slatestarscratchpad:

bartlebyshop:

slatestarscratchpad:

bartlebyshop:

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veronicastraszh:

bowtochris:

bartlebyshop:

slatestarscratchpad:

Okay, we’re having too many collisions here, so here’s the updated Official Rationalist Tumblr Argument Schedule. Please remember to stick to the schedule unless you’ve applied for special dispensation.

January: Is MIRI Effective?

February: Are We Bad People For Tolerating @severnayazemlya ?

March: Intelligence Explosion

April: Torture Vs. Dust Specks

May: Has Social Justice Gone Too Far? Or Possibly Not Far Enough?

June: Is IQ Real?

July: Utilitarianism-Related Grab Bag

August: Conservatives: Terrible People, Or Terrible People But We Shouldn’t Say So Explicitly And Should Pretend To Like Them?

September: Quantum Physics

October: Is Less Wrong A Cult?

November: N  E  O  T  E  N  Y

December: IDK, Probably Moldbug Or Something

I swore I’d restrain myself but I guess I can’t. The fact that this joke post exists, and that everybody gets the joke, is probably the biggest indictment of LW I’ve ever seen. Shit or get off the pot. In some cases these fights are nearly old enough to chat on Neopets without parental approval and they’re still going on in much the same form. Someone, I think @bgaesop, said that LW meetups were just people quoting the same “Friendly AI theory 101″ material round and round at each other. I’ve never been so I can’t comment. Is it that there’s no there there? Is it that LWers are insanely vulnerable to the actions of “trolls”? At least in my dumb as fuck physics subfield we do eventually settle things. I couldn’t compile a calendar like this for “do SSRIs work and are they worth it?” or, to take another topic deeply relevant to trolling, “is CICO true?” Isn’t this exhausting for everyone? Wouldn’t we all rather argue about something else? I could write posts about bad QM but what’s the point? You’ve all seen that shit already and in addition to not mattering it’s also boring. This joke post is just deeply depressing to me on multiple levels. Can’t we all find something new to have stupid, dramatic, under-informed arguments about? If you’re all going to doxx me at least do it over my opinions on Rational metrics for graduate fellowship allocation or something, not fucking first year quantum mechanics.

LW is bad, and you should all stop it.

Oof!

That was really not a good example. Psychiatry, fields vaguely related to it and trolls pretending to be related to it have been having stupid and unproductive arguments about whether SSRIs work and whether they’re worth it for thirty years now.

This reads like someone blissfully unaware of of philosophy, political science, art criticism, or any other field outside the hardest of hard sciences.

really? people in psychiatry do eventually produce new studies about this rather than endlessly quoting the same five things back at each other. in contrast to tumblr LW the vast majority of these people don’t give a shit about this argument - they keep prescribing (or doing CBT) anyway. most psychiatrists apparently can resist the temptation to go online and spout off about it considering people keep posting in your comments that your SSRI post was “the first time” they’d ever seen a nuanced discussion of this issue. afaict the ssris debate community online is like 10-15 doctors vs Mad in America and that’s about it. new things happen.

don’t really see why you felt the need to be so rude, but ok. i think i’ll refer to @philsandifer (LET ME TAG TUMBLR)’s thing about sociology. even in a field notorious for foundational recursive arguments things eventually get settled.

actually in physics we have a field known for this style of bullshit endless argumentation about boring crap: high Tc. and even there, the character of Discourse is totally different. No one could make a calendar like that about pair density waves.

Please read your post back to yourself before accusing anyone else of rudeness.

The SSRI thing has become so annoying that Coyne calls it “the antidepressant wars”. Yes, it’s a small community of doctors arguing against a small community of Internet trolls, with most researchers happy to prescribe SSRIs regardless. I would argue that AI risk issues are a small community of LWers arguing against a small community of Internet trolls, with MIRI and FHI happy to keep doing their work regardless. As long as there are people on the Internet saying “U GUYS ARE ALL IDIOTS FOR THINKING ROBOTS CAN THINK”, there will be people who can’t leave well enough alone and keep on saying “NO WE’RE NOT YOU TAKE THAT BACK”.

I don’t know Philsandifer’s specific argument against sociology, but I doubt there is any field so pure and perfect that people don’t have stupid arguments about it on the Tumblr. There are stupid evolution vs. creationist arguments all the time; does that mean evolution is a joke because they’re still at the neopets level? No, it means they haven’t yet convinced everybody, through no fault of their own.

i didn’t mean to be rude but i am very very tired. sorry.

at least in other fields when people have dumb tumblr arguments something new sometimes happens. even in the ssri wars this occurs (people produce new studies and new drugs all the time, right? or they do the 1boringoldman thing and produce new arguments from old work).

to me it’s a question of ratios. when was the last time we had a new train of thought or a new argument in these fights? it’s always the same thing over and over. i htink this is what @rageofthedogstar meant about Eternal September which would be fine if new things happened on tumblr (do they happen elsewhere?) but they don’t seem to. maybe my dash is just bad.

evolution isn’t a joke at Neopets level but evolution vs creation arguments are. that’s a good example - when was the last time something different happened there? it’s the same 20 people howling into the abyss as it was when i was in middle school reading PZ Myers’ blog. nothing changes.

no one has an obligation to entertain me but surely you can find some “U GUYS ARE ALL IDIOTS FOR THINKING ROBOTS CAN THINK” level idiots for other aspects of FAI?

I felt like we made a lot of progress in our discussion the past few days about MIRI effectiveness.

I agree that the friendly AI arguments rarely involve anything new. The problem seems to be either that there’s an information asymmetry (eg you and I know X amount about Friendly AI, but Joe Newbie doesn’t, and he insults the entire field for a stupid reason, and I feel like I have to correct him, and then we get in an argument until he knows as much as the rest of us) or a perceived information asymmetry, where all of us think that we know more than our opponents but in fact we know the same amount and just disagree for other mysterious reasons. If the population was stable we could just eventually figure out how much each of us know and forget about it, but since new people keep coming in we keep having to go through this ritual.

I would love to have a “No Friendly AI Argument Unless You’ve Considered X, Y, and Z Points Already” norm, but again when I propose this it gets twisted to “AI supporters aren’t willing to defend their ideas because they know they’re a faith-based cult!” or it just means people keep saying things I think are really wrong uncorrected until I snap.

“but since new people keep coming in we keep having to go through this ritual.”

but you said this is a social problem and i agree. i’m interested in knowing why people don’t just say “ok cool bud i’ll reblog your post when you’ve read XYZ” and then let New And Excited Tumblr LW member deal with the guy. for a bunch of you this seems like it would be a great self-care intervention (in the same way that i self-care by not reading r/physics or r/askscience)?

“it just means people keep saying things I think are really wrong uncorrected until I snap”

ok… but physicists have this problem too and we usually just say “the refutation is linked here, i’m not willing to talk to you unless you agree with it, cheers and have a nice life”. there must be some reason this isn’t working…?

to me the population does seem stable. on my dash it’s the same folks having these fights with each other about neoteny or EA or whatever. i’m honestly confused by it? is it like when married couples “argue” about stuff but not really because they just wanna have something to talk about? i’m not trying to be snarky or dismissive here I seriously do not get this.

Personally I just have these arguments (when I do) because they’re fun for me, even when they’re repetitive.  I’m not sure “fun” is the right word, it’s more like what I talked about in the personal post I made yesterday where I tend to always have a subject I’m into and I like having the terms of that subject and the famous debates around it etc. as part of my daily life.

I don’t claim that this is productive in any sense, it’s just what I do.  I did it about Homestuck for a year and a half and that clearly wasn’t producing new and valuable ideas of any kind (not even about Homestuck, but even if it had, who cares about New Trends in Homestuck Studies)

I think there is a tendency for the same old giant arguments to become giant again, while actually new ideas get ignored, but I’ve seen this elsewhere to about the same extent?  On the Homestuck forum people kept having Vriska arguments that took over every thread they appeared in, until they made a “Vriska Quarantine Thread,” and I happily subscribed to it and kept talking about Vriska.  (I imagine similar “quarantining” could be done on tumblr in principle but it’s always hard to do these things on tumblr)

I’m sure I’ve basically made the same post twice or 3+ times about a lot of things, but this isn’t a waste to me, because running over those familiar mental grooves is a pleasant way to waste time.  (If I wasn’t posting I’d be reciting familiar ideas/arguments in my head because I do that constantly anyway.)

I do think it would be good to separate the “pleasant repetition” side of my tumblr from the side where I try to say new things.  Maybe I should make another sideblog

(via bartlebyshop)