LessWrong House Style (2023)
LessWrong House Style (2023)
https://nonesense.substack.com/p/lesswrong-house-style
Given that they are imbeciles given, occasionally, to dangerous ideas, I think it’s worth taking a moment now and then to beat them up. This is another such moment.
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They do seem to worship Bayes
Edit: I want to qualify that I'm a big fan of Bayes Theorem — in my field, there's some awesome stuff being done with Bayesian models that would be impossible to do with frequentist statistics. Any scorn in my comment is directed at the religious fervour that LW directs at Bayesian statistics, not at the stats themselves.
I say this to emphasise that LWers aren't cringe for being super enthusiastic about maths. It's the everything else that makes them cringe
The particular way they invoke Bayes' theorem is fascinating. They don't seem to ever actually use it in any sort of rigorous way, it's merely used as a way to codify their own biases. It's an alibi for putting a precise percentage point on your vibes. It's kind of beautiful in a really stupid sort of way.
They take a theory that is supposed to be about updating one's beliefs in the face of new evidence, and they use it as an excuse to never change what they think.
It's the Bayesian version of Zeno's paradox. Before one can update their beliefs, one must have evidence of an alternative proposition. But no one piece of evidence is worth meaningfully changing your worldview and actions. In order to be so it would need to be supported. But then that supporting evidence would itself need to be supported. And so on ad infinitum.
They seem to believe that stereotypes often have a grain of truth to them, and it's thus ok to believe stereotypes.
"which stereotypes?"
"oh, you know the ones"I would say it goes further and that they have a (pseudo?)magical trust in their own intuitions, as if they are crystal clear revalations from the platonic realms.
I will always remember Sam Bankman Fried saying it's obvious that Shakespeare can't be the greatest author ever because it's unlikely. Just because something's unlikely doesn't mean it's impossible! You need to independently evaluate the evidence!
Also I feel like the logic he based that on was just dumb. Like, some writer out of the last several centuries is going to be the best for whatever given metric. We shouldn't be surprised that any particular individual is the best any more than another. If anything the fact that people still talk about him after the centuries is probably the strongest argument in favor of his writing that you could make.
But of course Sam's real goal was to justify the weird rationalist talking point that reading is overrated because podcasts exist or something.