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4:51am January 2, 2013

➸ Little Condo on the Faultline: How long would I have to spend in the South Bay before every local...

feliscorvus:

dendriforming:

How long would I have to spend in the South Bay before every local acolyte of Eliezer Yudkowsky tried to lure me to a meeting?

Now that my social anxiety has improved and I actually go places, probably not very long.

I’m fond of rationality. I think recognizing cognitive biases is by and large a…

Yeah, you are right to be leery of that particular “rationalist” subculture. I live in the South Bay and from past experience with those folks…even the well-meaning ones come off as annoyingly cultish and there’s an unmistakable circle-jerk whiff to the whole endeavor.

Agreed. And what they do isn’t rational or getting rid of biases. It just pretends to be. I once asked them how someone with my receptive language difficulties could ever get through that huge amount of impenetrable reading they require before they see you as worth talking to. And how they saw cognitively disabled people in general if we couldn’t participate the ways other people can. And they told me, unironically, to do the reading.

I don’t recommend approaching them if you want to learn about rationality or cognitive biases. Because they know less about either one than your average person on the street. And there are other dangers too – many of them strike me as unpredictably violent. Not physically violent. But cognitively violent. You don’t want to hang around with people who have that potential, you can get hurt in ways you didn’t know existed, and won’t know how to repair the damage even if you can locate it.