The existence of LessWrong does make me want to steer the Earth into the Sun. All that effort supposedly reinventing human dialogue in terms of what is maximally rational and instead you get insights not far above the level of your below average NYT op-ed column.
From a certain distance LessWrong looks like the kind of place that would appeal to someone like me, so in spite of some of the negative characterizations I heard I tried browsing it through the strongest steelman goggles I could find.
The experience mainly left me with a sober respect for Groucho Marx's about not joining clubs that would have me as a member.
I think that place was at the forefront maybe 10-15 years ago and by now it's more a new generation of imitators/cargo-culters of that original vibe, which is not so appropriate to where the discourse has gone today.
Where's the equivalent place of today? The answer is necessarily murky and elusive. When a club gets famous for being the place where all the cool people hang out, it quickly ceases to be that kind of place. Cool places have to filter for the ability/connections to find them.
I would never call LW cool, but I get what you're saying. I think the problem is that its moment has passed. There was only a single moment in human history where people thought that Harry Potter fan fiction could change the world, and however snide that sounds, I don't mean it as an insult. I knew many people who were profoundly impacted by their time in that fandom (and yes, even as it moved away from its roots in fan fiction it was still fundamentally a fandom).
What happened is that the internet changed and fandom changed, and also trends in philosophy for young lonely nerds shifted away from that particular brand of rationality, to places both sunnier and darker. I think if you want to find spaces like that you now have to look either in closed Discord server or more likely offline. Substack certainly does not provide the same kind of community.
> That's one hell of a statement for a place like LessWrong.
Not that I hang out a lot at LessWrong, but it seems like a place for philosophy (and more), from an outsider perspective at least. And nihilism certainly is a perspective some hold within philosophy, so it seems like exactly the right place for a statement like that?
Nihilism is a terminology debate. Running the planet into the sun because the pianos are out of tune is a physics-based policy proposal. You want your civilization to gracefully degrade as it loses value, rationally shedding components that become untenable.
It's likely that at least one person's going to have value up to the very end as your civilization loses resources but still remains rational, something that can't be said if it went into the sun hundreds of years ago.
I doubt that this is what the author intended, but it could be interpreted to refer to human's cultural ability to pay attention to small, seemingly unimportant (if not unseen) details.
Take climate change: most informed people think this is a job for science, this is where we should exert our effort and invest our funds. But this overlooks that individual human opinion and volition plays an absolutely massive role in the problem, at many levels. From where I'm sitting, this problem is not even on science's radar, beyond general complaints about those stupid people who ruin everything (overlooking that it was science that invented the technologies that went on to enable climate change in the first place...but you see, that doesn't count, it is(!) not a part of "the" chain of causality). Metaphysical causality is something else that is basically not on science's radar, or in their Theory of "Everything".
But of course, all of this this is pedantic, and can be safely ignored, or better yet, suppressed.
Huh, maybe I was a little hasty. Looking again, it does seem like a joke.
I still think it’s kinda off. It doesn’t quite land. Like I’m not sure what takeaway they are trying to give. That ambiguity makes it much less funny.
It would have worked better if they connected it to the point about not automating away these skills / expertise with shittier versions, which is a great point and would be nice to end on.
That's one hell of a statement for a place like LessWrong.