A couple of thoughts on the post rat sentiment of "who cares about truth, I just want to thrive". On its face there's nothing wrong with refusing to have opinions on things and focusing on personal growth and overcoming trauma and all that stuff. BUT...
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First, having opinions about things like COVID, technology, economics, etc opens you up to attack but also gives you credibility. If you have many great insights on personal healing and development, surely you can stick your neck out on something externally verifiable.
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Many post-rats do this, but some refuse on principle. The real world is out there, and a thriving person should be able to face it and understand it instead of talking only about friends and meditation and crying and video games. I love these topics myself, but not exclusively!
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And from the other side: thriving ultimately necessitates acquiring true models of the world. Models of psychology, physiology, community, culture, etc. Models that inevitably become entangled in external things because reality is one and all true things connect.
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The habits of epistemology that help you understand research papers on medicine also help you figure out your own life. The rules of evidence, bias, wishful thinking, authority vs. observation etc are the same, just in a different domain and with fewer p-values.
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There are many things in orthodox Rationality that may not be immediately useful for the goal of thriving, and may even be epistemically counterproductive if you end up in bad valleys. But caring about truth is good and useful no matter the end goal.https://putanumonit.com/2018/04/23/dont-believe-wrong-things/ …
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Replying to @yashkaf
what if believing in one wrong thing permits you to believe in two right things you otherwise wouldn't be able to handle?
I suspect this constraint exists in practice
or put another way, there are limits to how many things one can usefully believe at any given time1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes -
Replying to @eigenrobot
1. Big if true! How would we know if it's true? 2. Two of your last three posts are about biosecurity and Roth IRAs, you're fine. I'm with you 100% that one should not strive to have an opinion about every single thing. That's the failure mode of journalists and philosophers.
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Replying to @yashkaf
I'm not sure we disagree about much :) Re (1), this is practically untestable via traditional methods; pure intuition, make of that what you will, something something indexicality
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Replying to @eigenrobot @yashkaf
I find minimizing commitment to broad opinions makes it easier for me to settle on novel and useful evaluations of new information and situations something like bottom-up rather than top-down evaluation, if I were to write an essay about it and,
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I think foolish commitment to broad opinions is a common failure mode I've noticed here and declaiming commitments helps me avoid that at a low cost something isomorphic to Keep Your Identity Small maybe. Anyway godbless :)
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Replying to @eigenrobot
Why don't you write an essay about that? Twitter must feel like a game on easy difficulty for you now, why not level up just to get a taste of hard mode? If you're not sure what exactly you believe and how it's useful, writing 1,500 words is the way to figure it out.
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