[marginalium]
Rationalist community rediscovering psychology
20 Sep 2024
The rationalist community has a very sexy take on approaching the world. It’s the same take as the Effective Altruists (and so no surprise they overlap so heavily). Basically, we make decisions, but our decisions are very emotional. So we should look at the data, and make decisions on the basis of probabilities and deep understanding instead. Something like this, but worded so it sounds like a new idea, and in particular very contiguous with Scientism. They spend a lot of time litigating what this means, because they don’t want to fall into old, bad patterns of thinking. But they are very committed to the problem. It’s just very unfortunate that they suffer from all the same problems any new approach to psychology discipline suffers. They have to rediscover all the shit we’ve been tripping over forever. Here, this person talks about ‘trapped priors’, a statistical idea about how some kind of local minima can be confused for a global one (i.e. we assume something’s x because it has many of the characteristics of x, but actually it’s y, which has similar characteristics but is importantly different). It seems to be a bit of a revelation to this person, and they mention another very prominent rationalist’s similar revelatory discovery of the idea, then they speak of how spirituality might help uncover these kinds of deep psychological truths. But because this movement is a reaction to psychology, they fail to see that actually, probably, psychology might help uncover and in fact already has uncovered this specific deep psychological truth. It’s not a purely rationalist problem. ‘Cognitive science’ has rediscovered and renamed old concepts. Attention literature hasn’t advanced substantively past James’ musings in the early 1900s. It’s just, like, how often are we going to keep doing this, you know? There is this language problem that plagues people—say the same idea with different words and it will fail to get over the net. It’s such a waste of time.
Anthologies: Betterment, Thought Architecture, On Being Fruitful, On Culture, On Thinking and Reasoning, Abstractions as Gods, Everything Is Ideology