A thread through the archive
Essays tagged “Eliezer Yudkowsky”. Follow an idea across the archive.
Scott shares and comments on various interesting links covering topics like international relations, medical research, technology, and social issues, mixing academic discussion with curious anecdotes.
Scott Alexander refutes a blog post criticizing rationalism, arguing it misunderstands the movement and its core values of empiricism, scholarship, and humility.
Scott Alexander promotes a charity event, encouraging donations to MIRI or Sankara Eye Foundation to help them win valuable services.
Scott Alexander discusses the concept of one-sided tradeoffs, using examples from college admissions to life hacks, and suggests ways to find opportunities for 'free' gains in various decisions.
Scott Alexander argues for a legitimate 'spirit of the First Amendment' that protects the marketplace of ideas, criticizing tactics that silence rather than address arguments.
Scott Alexander explores the ethical implications of publicly debating medical confidentiality breaches, introducing the concept of the 'Virtue of Silence' as a potential solution.
Scott Alexander bids farewell to California's Bay Area, praising its culture and the rationalist community while offering heartfelt tributes to friends who influenced him.
Scott argues against Eliezer's position that reversed stupidity is never intelligence, showing that observing many people believe something for bad reasons can help identify 'popular claims' that people assert regardless of truth, which lets you properly discount future assertions of those claims.
Scott explores how people's moral intuitions often conflict and can be reconciled through reflective equilibrium, using the example of inconsistent punishment judgments for theft by people of different socioeconomic classes.
Scott argues against negotiating with unconscious desires, distinguishing between behavior-executors (which have context-dependent urges) and utility-maximizers (which have stable preferences), and suggests we mistakenly model ourselves as the latter when we're actually the former.
Scott distinguishes between an argument's internal confidence level and our external confidence in that argument, showing that extremely high probability claims should be moderated by the baseline probability that the argument itself is flawed.
Scott introduces the concept of "meta-contrarianism" - where highly intelligent people signal their status by rejecting contrarian positions and returning to simpler views, similar to how hipsters adopt uncool styles to seem cooler.
Scott analyzes results from a 166-person Less Wrong survey covering demographics, probability estimates on various topics, and philosophical positions, finding a highly educated, mostly male, atheist, politically libertarian/liberal community with surprisingly accurate collective knowledge but notable gaps between stated beliefs and actions.
Scott explores how small inconveniences can powerfully shape behavior, from China's Great Firewall to rebate forms to credit card spending, and discusses policy implications including opt-out government programs.
Scott discovers and shares links to the Bayesian Cabaret, a real biennial event where statisticians perform songs and skits about Bayesian probability theory.
Scott argues that "extreme rationality" (x-rationality) - the formal study of rationality beyond normal intelligent thinking - provides much less practical benefit than the rationalist community believes, estimating a correlation of only 0.1 with success.
Scott presents Aleister Crowley's rationalist approach to mysticism and religious experience, arguing that Crowley's empirically-focused system for achieving enlightenment offers valuable insights that both religious and rationalist perspectives typically miss.
Scott defends a 'soft positivism' in which meaningful statements can be reduced to testable claims, and argues that statements that resist such reduction, like 'Islam is a religion of peace', often smuggle in emotion and prejudice.
Scott argues that to persuade people rather than just demolish them, you should leave them a social line of retreat by being genuinely nice and not treating the discussion as a status contest.
Scott argues that good skeptics should try to explain strange claims, as Marinatos did with Atlantis and Santorini, rather than worship them or reflexively ignore them.
Scott uses self-handicapping studies to argue that people can hold a biased belief on the surface and an accurate one underneath, much like belief in belief.