Table of contents from the part of the Eggplant book explaining why rationalism can’t work. As you can see, I was only able to complete it by including a lot of whimsical examples to amuse myself.pic.twitter.com/4Wq20swOJK
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Table of contents from the part of the Eggplant book explaining why rationalism can’t work. As you can see, I was only able to complete it by including a lot of whimsical examples to amuse myself.pic.twitter.com/4Wq20swOJK
I suspect that that orange/green/yellow thing hints at an answer: deconversion narratives talk about how you discovered that X is totally false. But moving on to yellow doesn't feel like totally renouncing orange; it feels like building a more sophisticated version of it.
Going from a child to an adult doesn't feel like renouncing the understanding of the world that you had as a child, even if much of your old understanding was wrong. It just feels like your understanding gradually getting better.
(this is why I also dislike the whole rationality vs. meta-rationality terminology: it's creating an artificial distinction and a tribal narrative, when IMO there's just a continuous refinement and increasing sophistication of the art of rationality)
Could you say more about "tribal narrative"? I'm puzzled. I know of only about five people who call themselves meta-rationalists (and I've had only brief internet interactions with most of them). There's no tribe that I know of, or tribalism?
There's maybe a few dozen people who identify as "postrationalists"? Some congregate in the community @ribbonfarm has created (which is great), but that doesn't seem like a "tribe" to me (and I don't feel a part of it, exactly, although I'm friendly to it).
There have been some fights about it on LW and in other places, e.g. the thread starting from nshepperd's comment at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5LP6Jc8ztwcyb296X/outline-of-metarationality-or-much-less-than-you-wanted-to … . I assumed that you were aware of it, since your writings occasionally get cited in those arguments, but I guess I was mistaken.
Whoa, that looks like an exhausting and frustrating conversation! I’ve only scrolled through it rapidly, and even THAT was exhausting and frustrating! Kudos to you for persisting.
From the superficial impression I got, this was pretty much the standard argument-with-stubborn-rationalist that I’ve been having since 1987.
I didn’t see in it the tribalism discussion. (But I only scrolled through it rapidly.)
@ribbonfarm
I totally believe the tribalist discussion exists, and I think I have seen one brief example of it on LW somewhere. It’s true that postrats/metarats (including me) can be irritable and dismissive of rationalists when they get into the sort of argument you had there.
That seems rather different from tribalism, though; there isn’t a postrat or metarat tribe. LW-style rationalists do identify as a tribe, and I suspect accusations of tribalism stem from projection? “We’re a tribe, they disagree with us, so they must be a tribe too”?
We might understand tribalism differently. I was thinking of the way that any group label can potentially become divisive by creating an us vs. them - especially if one of the sides is implied to be superior, regardless of whether that was *meant* to be implied.
A natural reading of some of your stuff is that it's saying that rationalists are stupid and limited, postrationalism is better, and here are all these snide comments about rationalists, and if you disagree it's just because you're not sophisticated enough yet, but maybe someday.
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