LessWrong 2.0

Aug 24, 2017

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by Eliezer_Yudkowsky

Leveling up in rationality means encountering a lot of interesting and powerful new ideas. In many cases, it also means making friends who you can bounce ideas off of and finding communities that encourage you to better yourself. This sequence discusses some important hazards that can afflict groups united around common interests and amazing shiny ideas, which will need to be overcome if we’re to get the full benefits out of rationalist communities.

The Affect Heuristic

The affect heuristic is when subjective impressions of goodness/badness act as a heuristic—a source of fast, perceptual judgments. Pleasant

Evaluability (And Cheap Holiday Shopping)

Followup to: The Affect Heuristic With the expensive part of the Hallowthankmas season now approaching, a question must be looming large

Unbounded Scales, Huge Jury Awards, & Futurism

Followup to: Evaluability "Psychophysics", despite the name, is the respectable field that links physical effects to sensory effects. If

The Halo Effect

The affect heuristic is how an overall feeling of goodness or badness contributes to many other judgments, whether it's logical or not, whet

Superhero Bias

Followup to: The Halo Effect Suppose there's a heavily armed sociopath, a kidnapper with hostages, who has just rejected all requests for

Mere Messiahs

Followup to: Superhero Bias Yesterday I discussed how the halo effect, which causes people to see all positive characteristics as correla

Affective Death Spirals

Followup to: The Affect Heuristic, The Halo Effect Many, many, many are the flaws in human reasoning which lead us to overestimate how we

Resist the Happy Death Spiral

Followup to: Affective Death Spirals Once upon a time, there was a man who was convinced that he possessed a Great Idea. Indeed, as the

Uncritical Supercriticality

Followup to: Resist the Happy Death Spiral Every now and then, you see people arguing over whether atheism is a "religion". As I touched

Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs

Followup to: Uncritical Supercriticality Early studiers of cults were surprised to discover than when cults receive a major shock—a proph

When None Dare Urge Restraint

Followup to: Uncritical Supercriticality One morning, I got out of bed, turned on my computer, and my Netscape email client automatically

The Robbers Cave Experiment

Did you ever wonder, when you were a kid, whether your inane "summer camp" actually had some kind of elaborate hidden purpose—say, it was al

Every Cause Wants To Be A Cult

Followup to: Correspondence Bias, Affective Death Spirals, The Robbers Cave Experiment Cade Metz at The Register recently alleged that a

Guardians of the Truth

Followup to: Tsuyoku Naritai, Reversed Stupidity is not Intelligence The criticism is sometimes leveled against rationalists: "The Inqui

Guardians of the Gene Pool

Followup to: Guardians of the Truth Like any educated denizen of the 21st century, you may have heard of World War II. You may remember

Guardians of Ayn Rand

Followup to: Every Cause Wants To Be A Cult, Guardians of the Truth "For skeptics, the idea that reason can lead to a cult is absurd. T

Two Cult Koans

Followup to: Every Cause Wants To Be A Cult A novice rationalist studying under the master Ougi was rebuked by a friend who said, "Yo

Asch's Conformity Experiment

Solomon Asch, with experiments originally carried out in the 1950s and well-replicated since, highlighted a phenomenon now known as "conform

On Expressing Your Concerns

Followup to: Asch's Conformity Experiment The scary thing about Asch's conformity experiments is that you can get many people to say blac

Lonely Dissent

Followup to: The Modesty Argument, The "Outside the Box" Box, Asch's Conformity Experiment Asch's conformity experiment showed that the p

Cultish Countercultishness

Followup to: Every Cause Wants To Be A Cult, Lonely Dissent In the modern world, joining a cult is probably one of the worse things that

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