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Morality suffices to navigate well-defined ethical domains. It fails, and may be worse than useless, when facing “wicked problems”—nebulous ones, in my terminology. “Being a good person” is the essence of the culture war. Y’all should stop that. It’s profoundly destructive.
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I appear “weirdly confused, weak-willed, morally compromised, and inconsistent” and maybe it seems my politics are incoherent or ignorant or bland middle-of-the-road normie. I have, actually, strong political views, but they are not mappable if you seek moral “dry ground.”
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. and I are often cited as “postrationalists.” True inasmuch as we were rationalists at one time (PhDs in control theory & AI respectively) and no longer are. I don’t use the word, because “postrationalism” often means “emotions, yay!” Not my thing.
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Replying to @LisaIRMcNulty and @St_Rev
Yes, I think that's right! I do somewhat feel some vague responsibility for explaining how "meta-rationalism" differs from (some) understandings of "postrationalism." But I feel responsible for explaining way more different things than I ever can, so I probably won't!
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I don't know if that's actually the same sense of the word... postrationalist seems to point specifically to pointing to being post-lesswrong-rationalism. The generic sort of rationality assumed/demonstrated by earning a STEM PhD is at once tighter and looser.
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I'd say academic-STEM rationality is actually closer to the reasonable nebulous normie standard than LW-style. Parts of my PhD thesis are technical and formal (much more so than typical LW-rationalist discourses), but other parts are basically hand-waving narrative shitposting
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Yes, one of the many annoying things about the LW rationalists is that mostly they don’t actually know anything, and don’t recognize that they don’t know anything, and think that their modal undergrad-level of understanding of STEM is adequate to have meaningful opinions.
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There seems to be a lot of confusion on “postrat twitter” about this exact thing - there’s the “kegan 5” tribe and the “after-LW” tribe and they overlap enough to seem like they’re talking about the same things
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