Fox Mulder and The X-Files of Rationality

> In general it's striking to consider how different LessWrong and its consequences would have been if The Sequences had focused by word count largely on the thing that determines most of whether you are correct.

I have been considering compiling a tome of epistemology in adversarial environments

> You can no longer assume people get their news from a shared, relatively non-partisan source like a newspaper subject to the fairness doctrine, or public broadcast news.

This literally rearranged my internal experience from "going after light in a dark dungeon" to "annoying seizure raveparty"

> I think a greater and greater number of people now do not have the epistemic basics covered. In previous eras, you had implicit information control through the high cost of publishing. Now, the cost is near zero.

> Most aren't even attempting to monitor whether their beliefs predict reality at all. [...] We don't teach people in public school, "Hey, you should make sure your beliefs correspond to things that will happen later. Your beliefs should pay rent in terms of anticipated experiences."

very much so; the sequences provide a different kind of value if you're in an environment when people can't/won't even reliably generate non-deranged hypotheses to begin with

> But what I'm trying to say is that the information environment in 2008 was such that those foundational "29 bits" might have seemed less important. Now they're critically important, and I think part of the reason this is salient to me is because of how I got into Less Wrong in the first place.

> If you train people in a style where the goal is to refute all bad arguments, and that if you can't refute one, you don't have a good reason to disbelieve it, that is an incredibly toxic mindset.

kinda sounds right and maybe there have been some downsides to endorsing memetic immune disorders

there are two wolves inside you

memetic inoculation makes you retarded
vs
i will not sing of walls

> If you do feel compelled to engage deeply every time, it's like being memetically immunocompromised. You have no defense against people acting in bad faith.

This was actually pointed out in Reason As A Memetic Immune Disorder or something

> A lot of people would become less obnoxious and more nuanced if they stopped the common failure mode of feeling obligated to argue with every wrong argument put in front of them.

> I think "warrant" is a completely reasonable name for this. If you take this idea seriously, your approach to epistemology would change dramatically.

I'm here to commit epistemic police brutality

you know, there might be something here.

a) i say i'm disagreeable partly because if i'm perceived as such, don't feel like disputing it. (seems i said so 2 years ago too)
b) intent-wise, i see "you're wrong" as a kindness if it rests on earnest belief. opportunity to mutually update worldmodel

geeks/mops/sociopaths rules everything around me etc etc

thus "finding is less about looking for a signal against a quiet background and more about looking for signal in the noise"