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Tim's avatar

As an inexperienced rationalist blogger, I'll defend our rationalist language norms (which RH correctly notes is a nonsequitor).

Rationalists believe that people are systematically biased in how they create and evaluate beliefs about the world. To a less-wrong-style rationalist the problem is that the way people arrive at beliefs is flawed, and those flaws are more important than the wrong beliefs themselves. Therefore we have developed a bunch of language which helps people identify their biases and think with less of them.

For example, talking about piors and (bayesian) evidence helps the speaker avoid selective demands for evidence. It helps prevent people from saying "the probability of your belief is zero until I see a randomized control trial of p value 20".

Most political ideologies are sets of beliefs, they are not techniques for arriving at beliefs (or they are inefficient techniques). As rationalists we try hard not to force belief sets on people, we try to teach belief-making techniques. Both teaching beliefs and belief-making involves promoting some language and discouraging other language, but we hope the effects will be different.

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Pepper's avatar

I don't think the invention of new vocab is a key sign of righttalkism

"systems which claim that one of if not the most important way to make the world better is to push most everyone to more oft and loudly express good and deny bad beliefs"

How is this supposed to describe the rationalist community? What are concrete examples of rationalists pushing people to express good or deny bad beliefs? The rationalist project is about how one goes about forming beliefs, not the beliefs you end up with

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