Welcome and a question

[mindstalk]

Welcome to Dreamwidth y'all. I hope you can figure it out. I know different paradigms can be hard; Tumblr's website never kept me for very long, apparently it was meant to be used by app? Whereas DW is pretty much exactly opposite. Apparently there are mobile-friendly themes (Practicality / Neutral Good?) which maybe the community could use? I dunno, I've used LJ/DW for years, but never dived into themes.

Question: what does 'rationalist' mean to you? I joined because it sounded promising when a friend mentioned it, but I haven't been plugged in.

Comments

[s0ph1a]

one of the haha-only-serious definitions of "rationalist" is "someone who disagrees with some of the ideas of Eliezer Yudkowsky"

you may want to go read his main book ( fully available at https://www.readthesequences.com/Contents )

[mindstalk]

Man, I remember when he was a passionate 17 year old joining the extropians list. I was a bit older and starting to get skeptical of some of the wilder ideas. I think he sigquoted me about the accuracy of subjunctive syllogisms.

I've read some of his essays and stories, also some SSC.

[paradigm_adrift]

Here's my standard rationalist community elevator pitch:

Long ago, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote a bunch of blog posts about how to be rational and believe true things and win at life. There arose a big community of fans of his ideas and a big community of critics of his ideas, but the two communities enjoyed arguing with each other so much that they started to hang around the same places and merged into one big subculture.

The result is a group of people who are sorta like an EY fanclub but also the opposite of that at the same time?

Popular ideas/opinions in the community include: you should debate with people rather than punch them (which means a lot of people with horrible ideologies find themselves tolerated here); cryonics is a good idea; artificial intelligence could be dangerous; death is bad; scholarship is good; everyone failing to coordinate in prisoners' dilemmas and similar situations might destroy us all; consequentialist utilitarianism is closer to the right answer than deontology; materialism is basically the correct metaphysics; effective altruism is a neato idea.

Keep in mind that pretty much any one of those is pretty fiercely debated within the community.

Oh, and for whatever reason, demographically the community is basically "computer science majors, except way more queer on average".

[wingedcatgirl]

"Many-worlds is obviously the correct understanding of quantum mechanics" was a popular idea for a while too. I don't recall why, though.

[paradigm_adrift]

Haha, that was totally Eliezer Yudkowsky's pet belief, so it got thrown in with the rest. That's actually one of the more controversial claims within the community I think, less characteristic than some of the others probably? I don't know whether they've ever asked about it in the community surveys.

[metagorgon]

imo it's a fake umbrella term that people of similar neurotypes self-select into.

[kindnesstheorist]

In my opinion, "rationalist" is "person who is emotionally invested in Yudkowsky and/or Yudkowsky's creations and/or other rationalists." Personally, I came for Yudkowsky's HPMOR and stayed for... I was going to say effective altruism, but honestly, it was theunitofcaring.tumblr.com. I think I agree with rationalists more often than not, and I admire their dedication to principle over instinct. I still don't consider myself "a rationalist" but I will admit that "a group of rationalists" could easily include me.

Alicorn's Luminosity was also a sizable landmark on my road to rationalism. (HPMoR is to Harry Potter as Luminosity is to Twilight.) I haven't found Luminosity or HPMOR to have fandoms as such; in my experience, people who meet through them immediately go off on tangents about natural and ethical philosophy without engaging with the fiction as fiction. Which is fine, I mean, I count myself as one of those people, but it was surprising at first to not see people talking about shipping and character arcs and AUs and OCs and playlists and all the other trappings of fandom.

The tumblr app is just... bad. I installed it, briefly. The tumblr mobile site is also bad; I had to set my phone to show me the desktop site in order to get anything to work. Tumblr was always much, much more usable to me on desktop. Anecdotal, yeah, but I never got the impression anyone else liked tumblr mobile; everyone was always saying "I'll change my icon when I get back to desktop" "I'll edit this when I get back to desktop" as if they couldn't wait to escape.

I've set my DW to not show me themes other than Practicality. I like black text on a white background. Tumblr didn't let people do this, which was bad because people could do light pink text on a gray background, and the nature of humanity is such that every now and again someone thinks to do just that.

(Do you have IP logging enabled on purpose?)