Not sure about the verbosity but that's probably where the useless and annoying claudisms come from, they are rewarded by (rationalist adjacent) users because they feel good about understanding the jargon and it reinforces the feeling of communicating with a superior alien intelligence (and that oneself is also somewhat superior for being able to understand it).
I'm speculating but there must be someone who writes a style guide for how Claude is supposed to speak then they design a way to reward for that style? So the problem could be they employ rationalist adjacent people who think this is peak A.I. design.
Because a defining feature of those people is confusing the appearance of seriousness with seriousness itself, just like they confuse their ideological preference with rationality.
If the ideas are not complex enough to warrant a long explanation, it is a failure of the writer to be unable to produce the same information more succinctly.
Its not about short-form content, its about the unneeded over verbosity being a sign of a failure of communication.
Following Grice's maxims of communication, you can infer that they are either poor communicators or worse trying to hide something.
I'm a really slow reader. Had some hilarious conversations with fast readers. They really enjoy fluffy low density content. I ask what is on the page they just read and their first reaction is to look at it again. I describe barely related thoughts I had reading the page, the character of the author from their choice of words, they look at me as if I've done just the thing you aren't suppose to.
But "a lot more" is not a bounded heuristic. A good communicator would use more words to defend and idea than to present it, but way less than a bad communicator.
Defending rambling texts on the basis of "ideas take more words to defend them" is defending the incorrect idea that quantity is a quality in itself. Some ideas are self evident, some ideas can be defended in short well laid out arguments.
Even if a idea is complicated and requires a relatively long explanation. If that is the smallest possible defense, it would still be succinct even if the text is long.
It's a mix of bad writing ability, contrived arguments (coming up with weird hypotheticals or simulating what an opponent would say), cargo-culting rationalist thought leaders (Yarvin, Scott, Yudkowsky, gwern) and the concealing of unsavory ideas.
There's also a culture of not knowing when to stop posting and touch grass - when all your friends are way too online and probably also rationalists and much of your identity and status is tied to online posting, you invest a lot in cultivating that social identity and signaling to your community, even to a degree that would look unhealthy to normies.
Obscurantism as a form of deliberate concealment is definitely a large part of it, and reinforces the idea that rationalism is essentially a post-modern take on libertarianism.
> nicotine is addictive, and is bad for you even if you don't smoke it
meh, this is legitimately disputed today, for example as there are less smokers today lung cancer has gone down but Parkinson's disease has gone up, suggesting nicotine does have some cognitive benefits
Not sure about earlier, but during WWI cigarettes were smoked at incredible scale, to help deal with the stresses and horrors of war. Ensuring an ample supply to front-line troops was major gov't priority.
This is linking to the appendix of a generally positive post (it's called "A Love Song to Nicotine") where the author caveats that some people report that they have indeed encountered addiction issues.
Weird that this is how OP chose to support their argument.
Indeed, it seems to me that nicotine may indeed have beneficial effects in some contexts.
It is also readily apparent to me that nicotine is bad for us, generally and broadly.
The combination leaves wiggle room for nicotine to be a net-good lever on certain mechanisms. I do think it's best to avoid it; It's a challenging double-edged sword.
The molecular biology of how it's maybe-good and maybe-bad is probably the most useful aspect of it. It's a strange sort of bronchodilator and has weird and ambiguous antiinflammatory properties. (Which seem to tie in to how it is addictive: Short-term bronchodilation and oddly-shaped short-term antiinflammatory properties turn into bronchoconstriction and proinflammatory effects as time passes from taking nicotine, which feels like it would be rather inductive to generating a craving for more nicotine.)
Re. Parkinson's: Wild guess, addled brain hunching on nebulous perspectives, but I do think that nicotine's protective effects against Parkinson's are indeed related to the bronchodilation and antiinflammatory aspects, and more specifically it seems to me that Parkinson's has pulmonary basis. I think we're nuking our lungs in many subtle ways that in some of us cause the dam of cell death in the substantia nigra to break. How might we be nuking our lungs? Say… Air pollution, incl. microplastics and plasticizers, various disruptors of fine pulmonary epithelium and metabolic function and neuroendocrine autonomic control. And I'd think that once we start to lose fine autonomic control by way of loss of dopamine cells in the substantia nigra, we'd be poised to enter a vicious cycle of further loss of pulmonary foundations.
Oh, I assure you that I don't trust my imagination on this!
Hence the disclaimer that it's super guessy what I wrote.
So I come to this perspective having had reason to look into synucleopathic disorders like Parkinson's and Lewy body dementia. Read a ton of literature as best I could. (Regular people can read academic literature. To actionable insight. It just takes some care regarding certainty, and one must work with doctors with anything significant. It's a… help the doctor help you thing.)
And indeed: Pesticides. That New York times article mentions paraquat.
It's interesting to look at how pesticides might bring about Parkinson's. Cell death in the substantia nigra.
It's interesting with paraquat that it's especially and specifically destructive to the lung. As well as generally-yet-specifically inducing oxidative stress, which seems as far as I can tell to kind of be… the cause of death so to speak?, for the crucial substantia nigra cells. The Wikipedia page on paraquat underpins this pulmonary impact reasonably well I think, well enough for the sake of discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraquat
Then there's stuff like this: "Elevated PM2.5 concentrations were significantly correlated with an increased risk of PD among patients with COPD. Furthermore, exposure to high PM2.5 levels can further increase the risk of PD." – Association between PM2.5 exposure and risk of Parkinson’s disease in individuals with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in Taiwan: a nested case-control study, https://www.e-epih.org/journal/view.php?doi=10.4178/epih.e20...
And this: "This nationwide retrospective cohort study demonstrates that [Parkinson's disease] risk is significantly increased in patients with [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease] compared with those of the general population." — The association between chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and Parkinson's disease: a nationwide population-based retrospective cohort study, https://academic.oup.com/qjmed/article-abstract/108/1/39/158...
Then I've been surprised and sort of amazed to read studies of the OTC compound ambroxol in Parkinson's. These seem to show that ambroxol has protective effects against Parkinson's, even seemingly curbing the progression of the full clinical manifestation of the disease. Ambroxol is an over-the-counter mucolytic and "cough syrup" thing. It also happens to have specific antioxidant properties – redox-adjusting properties? – and in general very complex and very interesting effects on neuronal signaling; "Ambroxol is a potent inhibitor of the neuronal Na+ channels, explaining its anaesthetic effect", as per Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambroxol
Ambroxol has extensive effects on fine pulmonary function "through several mechanisms, including breaking up phlegm, stimulating mucus production, and stimulating synthesis and release of surfactant by type II pneumocytes."
And! Get this: "Ambroxol is also anti-inflammatory, reducing redness in a sore throat. It reduces the release of inflammatory cytokines and histamines in cell cultures. It also acts as an antioxidant, scavenging free radicals and hypochloric acid generated by neutrophils.[14] These two effects explain its effect in treating acute lung injury caused by paraquat.[7]"
On an internet where almost every atypical person can find a niche to fit their oddities, rationalism is one of the bubbles for people who are strongly inclined toward (and have the time for) very long, clever-sounding essays. Pretty much everything else is downstream of that bias, so there's no real prospect of improvement.
A smart, very good writer will write something and get to the point quickly. Articles are mostly a page or less.
Writing like that respects people's time.
Many bloggers could do with writing things more briefly.
The author of this piece also makes a very good point that often long pieces go into weird corners of their own argument without thinking about their own assumptions.
It's all about understanding the medium. The Economist makes a wide-ranging, newsstand magazine that isn't too far different of a medium than like a weekend Financial Times paper. I think blogs, or free-ish or frequently publishing substances, naturally slot into that kind of medium where you want to pack the most info and analysis into a deftly concise format.
If you want to write long form, please use a medium where that is naturally part of that medium. Quarterly magazines, books, full length investigative pieces, etc. An important part of WHY longer form writing works in those media is that the author is understood and expected to have devoted much more time and work into it, and doesn't output content so frequently. In other words, respect the axiom that the medium is also the message.
When I open a general article and it starts with things like:
In a cold autumn in 1967, a barely awake scientist in the now defunct Institute of XYZ thought he'd go through his lab notes as he has done for the past 3 years since leaving the serene setting of the University of...
It is pretty funny that the premise of the article is "silly rationalist bloggers, with their long arguments, links to studies, evidence, debate" and then the "alternative" to that being presented is "here's a link to 4 tweets"
My point is that people, lacking common sense, got themselves addicted to nicotine after reading this blog post. I'm not trying to refute the science here, which would be both far longer of an endeavor and not what my blog post is about.
It’s called a gish gallop. Rationalists are masters at bullshitting, and the best way to do that is to say so many things that people can’t really devote the time to proving you wrong. If they do try, you counter with even more words until they give up. Rhetorically it’s where they feel most comfortable.
It's like those HN commenters who just spew links to cherry picked sources at you when you call them out for misleading people. I consider the rationalists a little bit higher brow since they're at least DIYing (or were before AI) the words and the arguments and responsible for all that verbosity whereas any idiot can cherry pick links.
This is a funny juxtaposition; I grew up creationist, and 'gish gallop' of course originated as something the rationalists [0] used to describe the creationists! 'rationalist' may have shifted slightly as a descriptor, but honestly perhaps the shoe has always fit pretty well.
There's a lot of parallels between rationalist belief in AI and religious belief in God. Roko's Basilisk is just rewarmed Pascal's Wager. The singularity is just the apocalypse / rapture. There's similar group dynamics with high priests (tech CEOs), theologians (Yud, SA), sacred texts (various substacks, lesswrong), heresies (logical fallacies)...
I'm not the only one who's noticed it:
"Why do tech CEOs sound like doomsday cult leaders?"
I see this said all the time and I think it's almost entirely wrong.
(Short version: those parallels aren't terribly close and one can find plenty similar parallels in things that no one thinks are religion-like. Long version: read on.)
"Roko's Basilisk is just rewarmed Pascal's Wager". I don't think it really is, but in any case it's something that so far as I can make out rationalists generally don't agree with and don't give any thought to except when it gets trotted out yet again as an illustration of how crazy rationalists are.
"The singularity is just the apocalypse / rapture". Both are hypothetical future events that would change the world a lot. Beyond that the match doesn't seem very close. The Christian apocalypse narrative is, above all else, about Good Versus Evil. A battle between God and his enemies! A grand judgement in which the living and the dead are all consigned to eternal bliss or eternal destruction! Us against Them! And there's none of that in what people say about technological singularities. (Well, except for Roko's basilisk, I guess. But, again, that isn't actually a thing anyone believes in or gives any thought to.)
"High priests (tech CEOs)". I don't think I've ever seen anything written by rationalists that treats tech CEOs as high priests. Here are a few quotations from recent highly-upvoted Less Wrong comments from high-karma LW users; each was the first thing I found in a search that seemed like it was expressing any sort of opinion on the CEO in question: "Sam Altman has systematically dismantled all of OpenAI's oversight, and betrayed the promises OpenAI made to humanity." "I would add that Elon Musk is not trustworthy and has been strongly suspected of manipulating the recommendation of X ..." "The best executives are very strong generalists, and the best managers are chosen to be strong performers in the task that they are managing other people to do. Elon is widely known to be a strong engineer, as well as a strong designer, and spends much of his time arguing details of that kind of work with his reports. Mark Zuckerberg is known to do similarly." First two are very strongly negative. Third is positive but a long way from setting either of the people involved up as high priests. I didn't find anything very specifically pro or con Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, or Jeff Bezos.
(A lot of internet-rationalists were pretty keen on Elon Musk back in the day, but so were a lot of other people. And there was an infamous post in which Yudkowsky wrote about how major-company CEOs and hedge fund managers and eminent professors seemed really impressive when he met them, which is cringey but not obviously wrong and in any case falls well short of calling anyone high priests -- and the comments below it are full of people saying things like "have you considered that maybe one way you get to be a CEO is by being good at looking impressive?".)
"theologians (Yud, SA)": if "theologian" just means "person who thinks about things and whose writings are respected" then, sure, Yudkowsky and Alexander are "theologians", but then literally every field will have its "theologians". Donald Knuth wrote some big books that everyone respects, and sometimes the word "bible" is attached to them! Clearly he's a theologian and computer science is just another religion! (Actually, Knuth is a theologian, a little bit; see https://archive.org/details/316bibletextsill0000knut.)
"sacred texts": see above.
"heresies (logical fallacies)": heresies are doctrines that arise within a particular religion and are officially rejected by it; to anyone outside the religion they're an irrelevance. Logical fallacies are definitely not that...
I'm not going to get drawn into a thousands paragraph debate about rationalists belief, so this will be my only reply and I'll welcome your rebottle.
Your evidence isn't very convincing. I think the singularity is actually framed as a battle between good and evil. How else could Sam Altman be accused of betraying humanity if what his company does isn't framed as that? Moreover, that quote pretty much proves what I'm saying about tech CEOs, how the rationalists view them. There's no "betrayal" here, Sam is and always has been a craven capitalist. One would only feel betrayed by him if they believe in him as someone who violated an implicitly shared dogma.
And that's the big reason for the fallout you're identifying. Early on people like Sam Altman and Elon Musk pretended to be saving humanity through their investments and corporations. It was a marketing ploy and rationalists bought into it hook line and sinker. Of course it was always a ruse, of course these guys were never going to deliver, because at the end of the day their goals were to become rich. Which they achieved. So now the world-saving facade is dropped, and the rationalists who bought into it are none too pleased. Even this line:
"Elon is widely known to be a strong engineer, as well as a strong designer, and spends much of his time arguing details of that kind of work with his reports. Mark Zuckerberg is known to do similarly."
Is very flattering of Musk's and Zuckerberg's supposed engineering prowess. One only need look at the Cyber Truck to understand what kind of designer and engineer Musk is.
> Clearly he's a theologian and computer science is just another religion!
I mean you could take it in that direction. Various cults like the cult of Apple that flourished around Steve Jobs, who himself was a bit of a cult leader. There's a cult around Elon Musk. The thing that's missing is the deity of AI, which is unique to the rationalist community. You might even be able to say that academia is a religion that's formed around to worship science, and there's a lot of parallels between religion there too, down to the dresses and funny hats.
> every field will have its "theologians"
They're theologians when they talk of theology rather than theory. Knuth is a practician. People talking about the singularity are like the guy on the street saying the end is nigh, and people writing blogs about it are essentially priests saying the same thing from a pulpit, the equivalent of theologians are the ones writing scientific papers about it.
> If someone mixes up "A implies B" and "B implies A" or something, you don't need to be an internet-rationalist to think they're wrong or to criticize their argument.
That's not exactly what I'm talking about, logical fallacies are fine and you should point them out when it's relevent. What I mean is for example if you're talking to a rationalist, and you make an appeal to emotion, that's regarded as an invalid argument. Or an even better example is when you make an appeal to authority when it matters, and you get into an argument about whether it's valid or invalid ad hominem. In normal discourse, people make emotional and authoritative arguments and those are valid to consider. In rationalist communities, that's considered a logical fallacy, and the discussion is over. So more often than not when you're talking to a rationalist, the conversation devolves into a debate about which fallacies are being applied and whether they're valid or invalid, because the only thing they'll consider is logos. The doctrine here is that pathos and ethos are invalid forms of persuasion. This is why they're so comfortable rejecting expertise.
If you think it's likely that there will be a singularity and it will be bad, then you'll regard someone working toward it as bad. That doesn't mean that there's any good-versus-evil-ness about the singularity itself. Whereas Armageddon is specifically a battle of good against evil, the Last Judgement is specifically a separation of people into (something like) good versus evil, etc.
The "betrayal" line is saying that OpenAI was founded as, supposedly, an ethical company trying to make sure that AI worked out for the good of humanity, and Altman is failing to live up to that. It doesn't have anything to do with any high view of Altman personally.
I agree that that line is more positive about both Musk and Zuckerberg than either deserves. But the claim wasn't "some rationalists think too highly of tech CEOs", it was "rationalists think about tech CEOs like religious people think about their high priests", and the point is that nothing I've found suggests that that's so. Sometimes people say nice things about (say) Mark Zuckerberg, sometimes not so nice (there was one comment where someone suggested that a different approach to AI safety might have resulted in "Mark Zuckerberg stamping on a face for ever") but no more of it than in the world at large is looking reverently to them as authorities.
If you're happy also saying that computer science and academia in general are religions, then fair enough, but at this point I think saying "X is a religion" is no longer really saying anything.
I don't know whether you're right or wrong in saying that rationalists are too unwilling to accept arguments that are logically invalid but persuasive in other ways, but this seems a long way from saying that logical fallacies are to rationalists as heresies are to (say) Christians.
I should maybe clarify that when I say "I see this said all the time" I don't mean specifically the version targeted at internet-rationalists. There's the version aimed at singularitarians (not all internet-rationalists are singularitarians nor vice versa) and a slightly different version claiming that atheism is just another religion, and so forth. The general template is: Thing X is just another religion / just warmed-over Christianity, because here are half a dozen things about it that have some loose resemblance to some religious thing. I find such things uniformly unconvincing; it seems to me that one can draw loose parallels between almost anything and almost anything else.
And: where are the rationalists', or the singularitarians', or the atheists', sacred places? what are their regular religious rituals? what organization corresponds for them to churches and the like? what things are they obliged to believe, as opposed to believing by definition as a member of whatever group? what ancient traditions do they preserve or claim to preserve? Of course you can have a religion without any single one of those things, but the more common features of religion a thing doesn't have the less plausible it is to call it a religion.
I've never seen an argument like this that if applied consistently wouldn't equally assert that many academic disciplines, large companies, political movements, etc., are "religions".
I see this quote being thrown around a lot as if it supports the article's point, but this quote is just some of the most famously smart, skilled, and effortful people ever admitting even they cannot condense their knowledge that much.
I don't think historical "sorry for the wall of text"s by famous intellectuals is the dunk on walls of text that people seem to think it is.
To me it's clearly the opposite. They could condense but did not have the time to do so. And I struggle to understand how the opposite conclusion could be reached when the explanation is right there, leaving little margin to extrapolation.
> I don't think historical "sorry for the wall of text"s by famous intellectuals is the dunk on walls of text that people seem to think it is.
It is a bit overused phrase, but I find it to be absolutely correct -- to make something concise without losing meaning and not being overly dry is both a skill and also lots of effort. I don't think it is impossible, it is just that often it is not worth it.
>I see this quote being thrown around a lot as if it supports the article's point, but this quote is just some of the most famously smart, skilled, and effortful people ever admitting even they cannot condense their knowledge that much.
But that’s explicitly not what the quote says - it’s not that they can’t, it’s that it takes work.
Consider when blogger Gwern explained that nicotine, actually, is not addictive, and is good for you, as long as you don't smoke it, over the course of 9,000 words, with over 100 references. It turns out, actually, nicotine is addictive, and is bad for you even if you don't smoke it, as you probably already obviously knew.
The first sentence is a link to the Gwern essay, which does indeed have over 100 references and is rigorously argued and appropriately caveated.
The second sentence is a link to a Substack essay, which has two screenshots of two individuals self-reporting “nicotine bad” on Twitter, one of whom smoked it.
By the content and construction of these sentences, the author makes it abundantly clear that he finds the second overwhelmingly more convincing than the first, and that the second essentially refutes the first.
Given that the only evidentiary standard this author appears to be able to apply is “how much does this agree what what I already believe”, I find that I agree with his claim that extra words don’t make his articles better, and I would extend this to say that fewer words would make them better still, with perfection achieved when the number of words reaches zero.
Yes, I hate to admit I am/was someone that assumed nicotine is bad, but Gwern's article is fascinating and well researched. This was a poor hill to die on for this article.
No nicotine is actually basically bad. Basically all the scientific evidence we have on nicotine products is that it’s bad and addictive. It is a stimulant though, which means it can, potentially, help people with conditions like ADHD. But then again, we have real medicine for those, that we know works.
All the people who think nicotine is not that bad have clearly not used it long enough, and aren’t addicted enough. There does come a point where it will feel like your bones are trying to escape your body when you dare relinquish from nicotine. Then, it will be clear it is bad.
If there are any doubts nicotine is bad, simply ask nicotine users. And by that I mean, not the people who used Zyn once or twice to study for an exam.
This kind of reasoning is exactly the kind that overlooks literally everything Gwern wrote in the essay. What do you mean that it's "basically bad"? And which long time users shall I ask? The exact point Gwern is making through reviewing the research is that you will never become "addicted enough" for it be a problem if it's used responsibly. This seems to be the same point that the substack post author is making linked to in the OP's linked post.
Perhaps your point is that "everyone becomes addicted enough for it to be bad eventually". Which is patently false. There are plenty of addictive substances that people are legitimately addicted to where people use them for years and actually experience health benefits. Caffeine and coffee being one example.
Your other point is also incorrect: nobody really knows why ADHD medicines work. And sometimes they don't. There are cases where a patient has to try 3 or 4 different medications and perhaps in combination before they start to work, or nothing works. And this is of course because we don't really know what causes ADHD or any kind of attention problem that responds to stimulants. Secondly, not all stimulants are effective at treating ADHD and related neural conditions. Caffeine is notably fairly useless for ADHD, typically making patients drowsy more than anything.
It's like cocaine. It is bad, no doubt. It is also a stimulant. If Gwern had written about cocaine instead of nicotine it would have likely gotten a different reception, but it actually would have been roughly the same kind of article.
It's probably not like cocaine, not even close. Gwern would not have written about cocaine like he did write about nicotine because it has virtually no benefits for the reasons he was investigating it.
Ironically, the Substack essay which was linked to is titled "A Love Song to Nicotine" and is all about how the author enjoys using nicotine for productivity boosts, and doesn't feel like he experiences many downsides to using it.
I don't have a horse in the "is nicotine good/bad" race, but having lots of references and being argued to death isn't a proxy for being true. Gwern is a former wikipedia admin so peppering everything with references and going line by line, usenet style, to demolish someone's argument is his bread and butter. That just makes him an excellent rhetorician in the online community of people who relate to this argumentative style (typically people who read wikipedia a lot), not a source of truth. When it comes to fields I know a bit more about it's pretty easy to see through the irrelevant citation gish gallop.
> By the content and construction of these sentences, the author makes it abundantly clear that he finds the second overwhelmingly more convincing than the first, and that the second essentially refutes the first.
> Given that the only evidentiary standard this author appears to be able to apply is “how much does this agree what what I already believe”
Mainstream medical science along with common sense point to nicotine being addictive and bad for you. I don't really feel the need to interrogate that view, especially when "interrogating" in this context would mean spending dozens of hours of my life going line-by-line through each reference and trying to understand the context of a field which, frankly speaking, neither me nor the author of the article have any business trying to evaluate. The only winning move is not to play.
> Mainstream medical science along with common sense point to nicotine being addictive and bad for you.
Gwern's article cites many, many peer reviewed journal articles (aka mainstream medical science) about how nicotine's addictiveness is overblown, and you're citing three tweets.
Common sense points to you being clueless in all of your writing, even though I haven't read it, and I don't really feel the need to interrogate that view.
Citing individual papers is not how you do science. Science requires the full context of an entire domain, which may include high quality papers which contradict each other.
Mm, of course, the already-too-long and too-heavily-referenced essay just needed to be longer and more referenced, then it would count as Science, which would give it the standing to be allowed to challenge those two tweets.
In general, I don’t think there is a reasonable standard that can be applied to both the essay and the putatively refuting tweets that will privilege the latter. Juxtaposing the two was an own goal.
To bring things full circle, I’ve heard that in the rationality community, it’s actually high status to publicly change your mind and disavow your argument when you realise it’s flawed. I think that’s a neat piece of social technology.
> The second sentence is a link to a Substack essay
The author of the second essay here! It's a pro-nicotine one — the OP just linked to the very end of it. Moreover Gwern himself reviewed my essay during Inkhaven (https://www.inkhaven.blog/), a 30-posts-in-30-days program.
I asked Gwern explicitly if he ever feels responsible for getting some people addicted to nicotine. His answer was something along of the lines of: “No, I explicitly warned people that (1) vaping/smoking is addictive and (2) if you ever was addicted to nicotine, even sublingual nicotine is enough to get people addicted”.
I do think it's important to warn people that they should be careful with the substance and watch their usage, so I included the screenshots in my essay!
He should have reasonably foreseen that that would be the exact effect.
Most normal people reading his piece would come away with the opposite conclusion.
The title alone: "On the benefits and lack of demerits of nicotine (research up to 2015)"
Is enough to make people go 'oh, that's ok then' without investing in trying to understand the subtlety of the argument made. You can add 500 references and spend 30K words but you've already lost by the first line of the article.
Most countries have laws that tax all tobacco sales and direct those proceeds into public education campaigns that warn of the dangers of nicotine. These are multi-million-dollar PR campaigns; I like gwern’s essays but they don’t stand a chance against that level of background radiation. A normal person essentially cannot be convinced that nicotine is safe.
(To clarify the Gwernpost, nicotine isn't primarily addictive but habit forming. So for instance if you get your nicotine from cigarettes you end up habituated to smoking cigs, and so on. But you can use it to habituate to anything else as well.)
They are also very repetitive. When I started reading it (back in 2015 I think?) I thought that they had some interesting info, but needed a good editor to remove at least 60% of the material; many chapters argued the exact same point as the previous chapter, with a slightly different analogy. Also many are responses to other blogs of the time, which also isn't interesting to read in a book since you don't have any context. Very tiresome to read.
“Do not be rash with your mouth,
And let not your heart utter anything hastily before God.
For God is in heaven, and you on earth;
Therefore let your words be few.
For a dream comes through much activity,
And a fool’s voice is known by his many words.” -Ecclesiastes 5:2
"Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself.
Answer a fool according to his folly (some translations "as his folly deserves"), lest he be wise in his own eyes." - Proverbs 26:4,5
I think part of what's happening is that the bad ideas and bad reasoning get diluted among 9000 words and 100 references. It's hard to put your finger on one sentence and say "here's where you're wrong", because the conclusion does not (obviously) rest on any one sentence. It rests more on the volume of words.
But "proof by volume" is not actually a thing. (I mean, it's a technique that can be effective in practice, but logically, it's not valid whatsoever.)
How do you answer something like that? If you try a point-by-point rebuttal, you're going to be into it 9000 words yourself (at least), and it is rarely worth it. I think that's "don't answer a fool according to his folly".
"Answer him as his folly deserves" is less clear to me. Is that to just flat out say that his ideas are foolish? Is it to give a concise one-paragraph statement of why his conclusion is folly? I think the latter is preferable (if you can). I mean, the rationalist is just going to claim that you haven't engaged with his arguments, though you can reply "no I didn't; your conclusion is so wrong that I don't need to engage with how you got there". And the concise rebuttal may be helpful to bystanders.
I think it comes from their culture "growing up" in hostile parts of the internet (twitter, Reddit, HN, etc) and so having to hedge every statement with excruciating delineation of edge cases and precise scoping lest some sneering jerks leave drive by comments that twist their words into some straw man that the local majority will be against.
Basically it's a defense mechanism against adversarial HN commenter type behavior that's been cargo culted a couple times over and doesn't actually service it's original purpose anymore and is just a groups signaling mechanism.
I'm not being funny, but how do you expect to find a receptive audience for your belief system when you apparently write off a variety of audiences as 'sneering POSs' who are out to get you from the start?
First off, it's not my belief system. I'm not a rationlist.
Second off, I didn't call the whole audience "sneering POS's". I only implied it. Regardless of whether they're 5% or 50% those types are sufficiently plentiful in the comments, here and elsewhere, such that anyone posting stuff that's against the grain will be quickly predated upon by them unless their take is hedged in a nearly airtight manner.
I feel that preemptively insulting critics as acting in bad faith comes across as merely thin-skinned towards criticism. Putting ideas in a public forum is licence for critique, and I think it's important to assume good faith in critics unless there's specific evidence of individual bad faith.
This is basically a dunk piece. Scott’s and gwern’s posts are often long because they contain arguments, which ironically the author does not use, other to point to one gwern post. He says that rationalists substitute thoroughness for verbosity when gwern’s post does the exact opposite!
It’s easy to dismiss the argument with “lol nicotine bad”, but I think it’s good to examine studies on the addictiveness of nicotine when not smoked, and not assume it would be just like smoking. There are plenty of things that seem obvious but are not and it’s always good to be rigorous.
What the author here misses is that the verbosity is often a signal of work done.
It's like the "alternatives considered" section in a design doc or RFC: it shows you've thought through different approaches, considered trade-offs, etc. It's a little like showing your work combined with taking the reader on a journey.
I think Scott in particular just really enjoys writing. He is very articulate and obviously just brimming with clever connections and turns of phrase. And he can generate a lot of words very easily.
When I was younger, sometimes I would just get carried away by the splendor and awe of it all and soak in the 25,000 word articles (or whatever they are.)
Today I would say that either he has fallen off a little, or I've just grown a little weary of the form, but I don't really get the same rush out of his writing anymore; and I notice more of the motivated reasoning and cheap tricks.
Still, sometimes I'll come across one of his posts and think 'damn, Scott's still got it.'
Also literally the post he links to for "its bad actually" is a blog about how it's great and not very addictive and just has some tweets from people who apparently didn't pay attention to the nicotine gum/patch/pouch recommendation in gwern's post and instead started using various forms of tobacco. Very sloppy all around.
I think it's pretty simple. To prioritize concision, you need to value other people's time more than stroking your own ego. A lot of "rationalists" are just people who, more than anything else, think they are smarter than other people and desperately need to prove it. This naturally means they don't respect other people's time and it naturally leads to voluminous prose.
The post's clearest claim is that rationalists "lack wisdom" and makes a circular argument - posts are too long because they lack the wisdom to make shorter posts, and the evidence for the lack of wisdom is the length of the posts. It says nothing useful or with predictive power. Another claim is that they didn't read an article by Scott Alexander, they didn't have much to say about it, and somehow conclude that makes them wiser, or a better writer, or superior in some vague way.
I may as well ask why so many replies, and responses to rationalist posts are empty posturing, sneering, ad-hom attacks, and writing so much while being so insubstanial. That post could be replaced by Bart Simpson bashing a saucepan shouting "I AM SO GREAT" and it would be no less informative.
> "even the rare one that contains some good ideas"
"Tee hee lols, cutting insight from superior mind, zing, burn, am I so great, or am I so great? I hope you feel wiser for reading my wisdom. Imagine how much worse this would be if I committed that sin of 'adding detail and nuance'. Also I'm not going to do the one thing I said they should do - interrogate the assumptions I made at the start."
> "Tee hee lols, cutting insight from superior mind, zing, burn, am I so great, or am I so great? I hope you feel wiser for reading my wisdom. Imagine how much worse this would be if I committed that sin of 'adding detail and nuance'. Also I'm not going to do the one thing I said they should do - interrogate the assumptions I made at the start."
It's actually quite interesting to me that even relatively mild jabs get dismissed by rationalists as "sneering." "Sneering" is what they are most averse to: as if the worst crime is simply to choose not to engage with something or be dismissive of it on its face. Something that is extremely normal to do.
Take this HN thread, here are some comments that could all be replaced with "because <someone else> is dumber than me" and convey the same meaning:
- "It's because you read too slowly."
- "Most of them are too smart to have brief thoughts, but not smart enough to have succinct ones"
- "they confuse their ideological preference with rationality"
- "When one is “full of shit” as they say, the shit needs to spill out somewhere."
- "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit."
- "a culture of not knowing when to stop posting and touch grass"
- "Rationalism is for people who have the reading skill. If someone prefers short videos, it means that the doors of rationalism is closed for him."
Extremely normal to do, and boring to read. At least Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary is witty with its scathing putdowns. None of these is a good contribution by the HN guidelines (thoughtful, effortful, edit out snark and sneering). Why is it "actually quite interesting" that people who want to focus on evidence and logic are averse to sneering as if that's surprising - who isn't averse to it? (NB. 'simply choosing not to engage' and 'ad-hom the author' are different, btw).
i think there is room for word vomit overexplaining every little nuance, detail, and caveat as a style of writing especially if one is trying to be through and “rational”, but I think it takes much more skill to condense the meat of a subject
451 comments
[ 0.15 ms ] story [ 66.3 ms ] thread(ie "honest caveats" wording comes from a reward for being honest about drawbacks instead of covering them up)
Note Opus 5.5 is much less likely to do it.
I am a fan of falsely attributed quotes...
> Usually that false quote is attributed to Blaise Pascal, but I have also seen it being attributed to Albert Einstein.
Balzac published first, Pascal second:
* https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
Its not about short-form content, its about the unneeded over verbosity being a sign of a failure of communication.
Following Grice's maxims of communication, you can infer that they are either poor communicators or worse trying to hide something.
Defending rambling texts on the basis of "ideas take more words to defend them" is defending the incorrect idea that quantity is a quality in itself. Some ideas are self evident, some ideas can be defended in short well laid out arguments.
Even if a idea is complicated and requires a relatively long explanation. If that is the smallest possible defense, it would still be succinct even if the text is long.
There's also rhetorical advantage in spewing so much stuff that you snow your reader under a blizzard; what's worse, some of that tends to be true.
There's also a culture of not knowing when to stop posting and touch grass - when all your friends are way too online and probably also rationalists and much of your identity and status is tied to online posting, you invest a lot in cultivating that social identity and signaling to your community, even to a degree that would look unhealthy to normies.
Therefore they use a kickstarter or aliexpress style torrent of argument and features to try to cudgel you into agreement.
meh, this is legitimately disputed today, for example as there are less smokers today lung cancer has gone down but Parkinson's disease has gone up, suggesting nicotine does have some cognitive benefits
https://psychotechnology.substack.com/p/a-love-song-to-nicot...
It doesn’t say the exact opposite to me?
Weird that this is how OP chose to support their argument.
It is also readily apparent to me that nicotine is bad for us, generally and broadly.
The combination leaves wiggle room for nicotine to be a net-good lever on certain mechanisms. I do think it's best to avoid it; It's a challenging double-edged sword.
The molecular biology of how it's maybe-good and maybe-bad is probably the most useful aspect of it. It's a strange sort of bronchodilator and has weird and ambiguous antiinflammatory properties. (Which seem to tie in to how it is addictive: Short-term bronchodilation and oddly-shaped short-term antiinflammatory properties turn into bronchoconstriction and proinflammatory effects as time passes from taking nicotine, which feels like it would be rather inductive to generating a craving for more nicotine.)
Re. Parkinson's: Wild guess, addled brain hunching on nebulous perspectives, but I do think that nicotine's protective effects against Parkinson's are indeed related to the bronchodilation and antiinflammatory aspects, and more specifically it seems to me that Parkinson's has pulmonary basis. I think we're nuking our lungs in many subtle ways that in some of us cause the dam of cell death in the substantia nigra to break. How might we be nuking our lungs? Say… Air pollution, incl. microplastics and plasticizers, various disruptors of fine pulmonary epithelium and metabolic function and neuroendocrine autonomic control. And I'd think that once we start to lose fine autonomic control by way of loss of dopamine cells in the substantia nigra, we'd be poised to enter a vicious cycle of further loss of pulmonary foundations.
but idk, just sayin lol
Actual evidence in the real world points to pesticides causing the rise in Parkinson’s:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/opinion/parkinsons-pestic...
Hence the disclaimer that it's super guessy what I wrote.
So I come to this perspective having had reason to look into synucleopathic disorders like Parkinson's and Lewy body dementia. Read a ton of literature as best I could. (Regular people can read academic literature. To actionable insight. It just takes some care regarding certainty, and one must work with doctors with anything significant. It's a… help the doctor help you thing.)
And indeed: Pesticides. That New York times article mentions paraquat.
It's interesting to look at how pesticides might bring about Parkinson's. Cell death in the substantia nigra.
It's interesting with paraquat that it's especially and specifically destructive to the lung. As well as generally-yet-specifically inducing oxidative stress, which seems as far as I can tell to kind of be… the cause of death so to speak?, for the crucial substantia nigra cells. The Wikipedia page on paraquat underpins this pulmonary impact reasonably well I think, well enough for the sake of discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraquat
Then there's stuff like this: "Elevated PM2.5 concentrations were significantly correlated with an increased risk of PD among patients with COPD. Furthermore, exposure to high PM2.5 levels can further increase the risk of PD." – Association between PM2.5 exposure and risk of Parkinson’s disease in individuals with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in Taiwan: a nested case-control study, https://www.e-epih.org/journal/view.php?doi=10.4178/epih.e20...
And this: "This nationwide retrospective cohort study demonstrates that [Parkinson's disease] risk is significantly increased in patients with [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease] compared with those of the general population." — The association between chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and Parkinson's disease: a nationwide population-based retrospective cohort study, https://academic.oup.com/qjmed/article-abstract/108/1/39/158...
Then I've been surprised and sort of amazed to read studies of the OTC compound ambroxol in Parkinson's. These seem to show that ambroxol has protective effects against Parkinson's, even seemingly curbing the progression of the full clinical manifestation of the disease. Ambroxol is an over-the-counter mucolytic and "cough syrup" thing. It also happens to have specific antioxidant properties – redox-adjusting properties? – and in general very complex and very interesting effects on neuronal signaling; "Ambroxol is a potent inhibitor of the neuronal Na+ channels, explaining its anaesthetic effect", as per Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambroxol
Ambroxol has extensive effects on fine pulmonary function "through several mechanisms, including breaking up phlegm, stimulating mucus production, and stimulating synthesis and release of surfactant by type II pneumocytes."
And! Get this: "Ambroxol is also anti-inflammatory, reducing redness in a sore throat. It reduces the release of inflammatory cytokines and histamines in cell cultures. It also acts as an antioxidant, scavenging free radicals and hypochloric acid generated by neutrophils.[14] These two effects explain its effect in treating acute lung injury caused by paraquat.[7]"
At that point I was like <...
it's very funny to have written SO MUCH WORDS under the link "Why is every rationalist blog post way too long?", aaahahah
Especially in a context where most scientists blame pesticides?
A smart, very good writer will write something and get to the point quickly. Articles are mostly a page or less.
Writing like that respects people's time.
Many bloggers could do with writing things more briefly.
The author of this piece also makes a very good point that often long pieces go into weird corners of their own argument without thinking about their own assumptions.
If you want to write long form, please use a medium where that is naturally part of that medium. Quarterly magazines, books, full length investigative pieces, etc. An important part of WHY longer form writing works in those media is that the author is understood and expected to have devoted much more time and work into it, and doesn't output content so frequently. In other words, respect the axiom that the medium is also the message.
In a cold autumn in 1967, a barely awake scientist in the now defunct Institute of XYZ thought he'd go through his lab notes as he has done for the past 3 years since leaving the serene setting of the University of...
I immediately close it.
This is not the point, but I’m very confused by the link that is linked as evidence on that line? It doesn’t match the sentence it’s attached to
Link in question: https://psychotechnology.substack.com/p/a-love-song-to-nicot...
[0] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page
I'm not the only one who's noticed it:
"Why do tech CEOs sound like doomsday cult leaders?"
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/social-trends/article-w...
(Short version: those parallels aren't terribly close and one can find plenty similar parallels in things that no one thinks are religion-like. Long version: read on.)
"Roko's Basilisk is just rewarmed Pascal's Wager". I don't think it really is, but in any case it's something that so far as I can make out rationalists generally don't agree with and don't give any thought to except when it gets trotted out yet again as an illustration of how crazy rationalists are.
"The singularity is just the apocalypse / rapture". Both are hypothetical future events that would change the world a lot. Beyond that the match doesn't seem very close. The Christian apocalypse narrative is, above all else, about Good Versus Evil. A battle between God and his enemies! A grand judgement in which the living and the dead are all consigned to eternal bliss or eternal destruction! Us against Them! And there's none of that in what people say about technological singularities. (Well, except for Roko's basilisk, I guess. But, again, that isn't actually a thing anyone believes in or gives any thought to.)
"High priests (tech CEOs)". I don't think I've ever seen anything written by rationalists that treats tech CEOs as high priests. Here are a few quotations from recent highly-upvoted Less Wrong comments from high-karma LW users; each was the first thing I found in a search that seemed like it was expressing any sort of opinion on the CEO in question: "Sam Altman has systematically dismantled all of OpenAI's oversight, and betrayed the promises OpenAI made to humanity." "I would add that Elon Musk is not trustworthy and has been strongly suspected of manipulating the recommendation of X ..." "The best executives are very strong generalists, and the best managers are chosen to be strong performers in the task that they are managing other people to do. Elon is widely known to be a strong engineer, as well as a strong designer, and spends much of his time arguing details of that kind of work with his reports. Mark Zuckerberg is known to do similarly." First two are very strongly negative. Third is positive but a long way from setting either of the people involved up as high priests. I didn't find anything very specifically pro or con Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, or Jeff Bezos.
(A lot of internet-rationalists were pretty keen on Elon Musk back in the day, but so were a lot of other people. And there was an infamous post in which Yudkowsky wrote about how major-company CEOs and hedge fund managers and eminent professors seemed really impressive when he met them, which is cringey but not obviously wrong and in any case falls well short of calling anyone high priests -- and the comments below it are full of people saying things like "have you considered that maybe one way you get to be a CEO is by being good at looking impressive?".)
"theologians (Yud, SA)": if "theologian" just means "person who thinks about things and whose writings are respected" then, sure, Yudkowsky and Alexander are "theologians", but then literally every field will have its "theologians". Donald Knuth wrote some big books that everyone respects, and sometimes the word "bible" is attached to them! Clearly he's a theologian and computer science is just another religion! (Actually, Knuth is a theologian, a little bit; see https://archive.org/details/316bibletextsill0000knut.)
"sacred texts": see above.
"heresies (logical fallacies)": heresies are doctrines that arise within a particular religion and are officially rejected by it; to anyone outside the religion they're an irrelevance. Logical fallacies are definitely not that...
Your evidence isn't very convincing. I think the singularity is actually framed as a battle between good and evil. How else could Sam Altman be accused of betraying humanity if what his company does isn't framed as that? Moreover, that quote pretty much proves what I'm saying about tech CEOs, how the rationalists view them. There's no "betrayal" here, Sam is and always has been a craven capitalist. One would only feel betrayed by him if they believe in him as someone who violated an implicitly shared dogma.
And that's the big reason for the fallout you're identifying. Early on people like Sam Altman and Elon Musk pretended to be saving humanity through their investments and corporations. It was a marketing ploy and rationalists bought into it hook line and sinker. Of course it was always a ruse, of course these guys were never going to deliver, because at the end of the day their goals were to become rich. Which they achieved. So now the world-saving facade is dropped, and the rationalists who bought into it are none too pleased. Even this line:
"Elon is widely known to be a strong engineer, as well as a strong designer, and spends much of his time arguing details of that kind of work with his reports. Mark Zuckerberg is known to do similarly."
Is very flattering of Musk's and Zuckerberg's supposed engineering prowess. One only need look at the Cyber Truck to understand what kind of designer and engineer Musk is.
> Clearly he's a theologian and computer science is just another religion!
I mean you could take it in that direction. Various cults like the cult of Apple that flourished around Steve Jobs, who himself was a bit of a cult leader. There's a cult around Elon Musk. The thing that's missing is the deity of AI, which is unique to the rationalist community. You might even be able to say that academia is a religion that's formed around to worship science, and there's a lot of parallels between religion there too, down to the dresses and funny hats.
> every field will have its "theologians"
They're theologians when they talk of theology rather than theory. Knuth is a practician. People talking about the singularity are like the guy on the street saying the end is nigh, and people writing blogs about it are essentially priests saying the same thing from a pulpit, the equivalent of theologians are the ones writing scientific papers about it.
> If someone mixes up "A implies B" and "B implies A" or something, you don't need to be an internet-rationalist to think they're wrong or to criticize their argument.
That's not exactly what I'm talking about, logical fallacies are fine and you should point them out when it's relevent. What I mean is for example if you're talking to a rationalist, and you make an appeal to emotion, that's regarded as an invalid argument. Or an even better example is when you make an appeal to authority when it matters, and you get into an argument about whether it's valid or invalid ad hominem. In normal discourse, people make emotional and authoritative arguments and those are valid to consider. In rationalist communities, that's considered a logical fallacy, and the discussion is over. So more often than not when you're talking to a rationalist, the conversation devolves into a debate about which fallacies are being applied and whether they're valid or invalid, because the only thing they'll consider is logos. The doctrine here is that pathos and ethos are invalid forms of persuasion. This is why they're so comfortable rejecting expertise.
If you think it's likely that there will be a singularity and it will be bad, then you'll regard someone working toward it as bad. That doesn't mean that there's any good-versus-evil-ness about the singularity itself. Whereas Armageddon is specifically a battle of good against evil, the Last Judgement is specifically a separation of people into (something like) good versus evil, etc.
The "betrayal" line is saying that OpenAI was founded as, supposedly, an ethical company trying to make sure that AI worked out for the good of humanity, and Altman is failing to live up to that. It doesn't have anything to do with any high view of Altman personally.
I agree that that line is more positive about both Musk and Zuckerberg than either deserves. But the claim wasn't "some rationalists think too highly of tech CEOs", it was "rationalists think about tech CEOs like religious people think about their high priests", and the point is that nothing I've found suggests that that's so. Sometimes people say nice things about (say) Mark Zuckerberg, sometimes not so nice (there was one comment where someone suggested that a different approach to AI safety might have resulted in "Mark Zuckerberg stamping on a face for ever") but no more of it than in the world at large is looking reverently to them as authorities.
If you're happy also saying that computer science and academia in general are religions, then fair enough, but at this point I think saying "X is a religion" is no longer really saying anything.
I don't know whether you're right or wrong in saying that rationalists are too unwilling to accept arguments that are logically invalid but persuasive in other ways, but this seems a long way from saying that logical fallacies are to rationalists as heresies are to (say) Christians.
Logical fallacies do nothing to show an argument is wrong.
All they do is demonstrate that a chain of reasoning cannot be a logical proof that the conclusion must be true, given its premises.
Dismissing arguments because "they're fallacious" is actually not so far removed from dismissing ideas because they're heretical.
In each case, what matters is whether the ideas are true, not whether your interlocutor proved rigorously it is true.
And: where are the rationalists', or the singularitarians', or the atheists', sacred places? what are their regular religious rituals? what organization corresponds for them to churches and the like? what things are they obliged to believe, as opposed to believing by definition as a member of whatever group? what ancient traditions do they preserve or claim to preserve? Of course you can have a religion without any single one of those things, but the more common features of religion a thing doesn't have the less plausible it is to call it a religion.
I've never seen an argument like this that if applied consistently wouldn't equally assert that many academic disciplines, large companies, political movements, etc., are "religions".
"I would have written a shorter letter, but did not have the time." - Blaise Pascal in “Lettres Provinciales,” 1657.
I don't think historical "sorry for the wall of text"s by famous intellectuals is the dunk on walls of text that people seem to think it is.
It is a bit overused phrase, but I find it to be absolutely correct -- to make something concise without losing meaning and not being overly dry is both a skill and also lots of effort. I don't think it is impossible, it is just that often it is not worth it.
But that’s explicitly not what the quote says - it’s not that they can’t, it’s that it takes work.
Which, TBH, matches the clear majority of AI boosters.
The second sentence is a link to a Substack essay, which has two screenshots of two individuals self-reporting “nicotine bad” on Twitter, one of whom smoked it.
By the content and construction of these sentences, the author makes it abundantly clear that he finds the second overwhelmingly more convincing than the first, and that the second essentially refutes the first.
Given that the only evidentiary standard this author appears to be able to apply is “how much does this agree what what I already believe”, I find that I agree with his claim that extra words don’t make his articles better, and I would extend this to say that fewer words would make them better still, with perfection achieved when the number of words reaches zero.
All the people who think nicotine is not that bad have clearly not used it long enough, and aren’t addicted enough. There does come a point where it will feel like your bones are trying to escape your body when you dare relinquish from nicotine. Then, it will be clear it is bad.
If there are any doubts nicotine is bad, simply ask nicotine users. And by that I mean, not the people who used Zyn once or twice to study for an exam.
Perhaps your point is that "everyone becomes addicted enough for it to be bad eventually". Which is patently false. There are plenty of addictive substances that people are legitimately addicted to where people use them for years and actually experience health benefits. Caffeine and coffee being one example.
Your other point is also incorrect: nobody really knows why ADHD medicines work. And sometimes they don't. There are cases where a patient has to try 3 or 4 different medications and perhaps in combination before they start to work, or nothing works. And this is of course because we don't really know what causes ADHD or any kind of attention problem that responds to stimulants. Secondly, not all stimulants are effective at treating ADHD and related neural conditions. Caffeine is notably fairly useless for ADHD, typically making patients drowsy more than anything.
> Given that the only evidentiary standard this author appears to be able to apply is “how much does this agree what what I already believe”
Mainstream medical science along with common sense point to nicotine being addictive and bad for you. I don't really feel the need to interrogate that view, especially when "interrogating" in this context would mean spending dozens of hours of my life going line-by-line through each reference and trying to understand the context of a field which, frankly speaking, neither me nor the author of the article have any business trying to evaluate. The only winning move is not to play.
Gwern's article cites many, many peer reviewed journal articles (aka mainstream medical science) about how nicotine's addictiveness is overblown, and you're citing three tweets.
Common sense points to you being clueless in all of your writing, even though I haven't read it, and I don't really feel the need to interrogate that view.
In general, I don’t think there is a reasonable standard that can be applied to both the essay and the putatively refuting tweets that will privilege the latter. Juxtaposing the two was an own goal.
To bring things full circle, I’ve heard that in the rationality community, it’s actually high status to publicly change your mind and disavow your argument when you realise it’s flawed. I think that’s a neat piece of social technology.
The author of the second essay here! It's a pro-nicotine one — the OP just linked to the very end of it. Moreover Gwern himself reviewed my essay during Inkhaven (https://www.inkhaven.blog/), a 30-posts-in-30-days program.
I asked Gwern explicitly if he ever feels responsible for getting some people addicted to nicotine. His answer was something along of the lines of: “No, I explicitly warned people that (1) vaping/smoking is addictive and (2) if you ever was addicted to nicotine, even sublingual nicotine is enough to get people addicted”.
I do think it's important to warn people that they should be careful with the substance and watch their usage, so I included the screenshots in my essay!
He should have reasonably foreseen that that would be the exact effect.
Most normal people reading his piece would come away with the opposite conclusion.
The title alone: "On the benefits and lack of demerits of nicotine (research up to 2015)"
Is enough to make people go 'oh, that's ok then' without investing in trying to understand the subtlety of the argument made. You can add 500 references and spend 30K words but you've already lost by the first line of the article.
The sequences are really books made up of chapters (blog posts). Most of those posts are relatively short.
“Do not be rash with your mouth, And let not your heart utter anything hastily before God. For God is in heaven, and you on earth; Therefore let your words be few. For a dream comes through much activity, And a fool’s voice is known by his many words.” -Ecclesiastes 5:2
I think part of what's happening is that the bad ideas and bad reasoning get diluted among 9000 words and 100 references. It's hard to put your finger on one sentence and say "here's where you're wrong", because the conclusion does not (obviously) rest on any one sentence. It rests more on the volume of words.
But "proof by volume" is not actually a thing. (I mean, it's a technique that can be effective in practice, but logically, it's not valid whatsoever.)
How do you answer something like that? If you try a point-by-point rebuttal, you're going to be into it 9000 words yourself (at least), and it is rarely worth it. I think that's "don't answer a fool according to his folly".
"Answer him as his folly deserves" is less clear to me. Is that to just flat out say that his ideas are foolish? Is it to give a concise one-paragraph statement of why his conclusion is folly? I think the latter is preferable (if you can). I mean, the rationalist is just going to claim that you haven't engaged with his arguments, though you can reply "no I didn't; your conclusion is so wrong that I don't need to engage with how you got there". And the concise rebuttal may be helpful to bystanders.
Basically it's a defense mechanism against adversarial HN commenter type behavior that's been cargo culted a couple times over and doesn't actually service it's original purpose anymore and is just a groups signaling mechanism.
Second off, I didn't call the whole audience "sneering POS's". I only implied it. Regardless of whether they're 5% or 50% those types are sufficiently plentiful in the comments, here and elsewhere, such that anyone posting stuff that's against the grain will be quickly predated upon by them unless their take is hedged in a nearly airtight manner.
It’s easy to dismiss the argument with “lol nicotine bad”, but I think it’s good to examine studies on the addictiveness of nicotine when not smoked, and not assume it would be just like smoking. There are plenty of things that seem obvious but are not and it’s always good to be rigorous.
It's like the "alternatives considered" section in a design doc or RFC: it shows you've thought through different approaches, considered trade-offs, etc. It's a little like showing your work combined with taking the reader on a journey.
When I was younger, sometimes I would just get carried away by the splendor and awe of it all and soak in the 25,000 word articles (or whatever they are.)
Today I would say that either he has fallen off a little, or I've just grown a little weary of the form, but I don't really get the same rush out of his writing anymore; and I notice more of the motivated reasoning and cheap tricks.
Still, sometimes I'll come across one of his posts and think 'damn, Scott's still got it.'
I may as well ask why so many replies, and responses to rationalist posts are empty posturing, sneering, ad-hom attacks, and writing so much while being so insubstanial. That post could be replaced by Bart Simpson bashing a saucepan shouting "I AM SO GREAT" and it would be no less informative.
> "even the rare one that contains some good ideas"
"Tee hee lols, cutting insight from superior mind, zing, burn, am I so great, or am I so great? I hope you feel wiser for reading my wisdom. Imagine how much worse this would be if I committed that sin of 'adding detail and nuance'. Also I'm not going to do the one thing I said they should do - interrogate the assumptions I made at the start."
It's actually quite interesting to me that even relatively mild jabs get dismissed by rationalists as "sneering." "Sneering" is what they are most averse to: as if the worst crime is simply to choose not to engage with something or be dismissive of it on its face. Something that is extremely normal to do.
- "It's because you read too slowly."
- "Most of them are too smart to have brief thoughts, but not smart enough to have succinct ones"
- "they confuse their ideological preference with rationality"
- "When one is “full of shit” as they say, the shit needs to spill out somewhere."
- "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit."
- "a culture of not knowing when to stop posting and touch grass"
- "Rationalism is for people who have the reading skill. If someone prefers short videos, it means that the doors of rationalism is closed for him."
Extremely normal to do, and boring to read. At least Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary is witty with its scathing putdowns. None of these is a good contribution by the HN guidelines (thoughtful, effortful, edit out snark and sneering). Why is it "actually quite interesting" that people who want to focus on evidence and logic are averse to sneering as if that's surprising - who isn't averse to it? (NB. 'simply choosing not to engage' and 'ad-hom the author' are different, btw).
This one is thoughtful correcr observation: "they confuse their ideological preference with rationality"
It is not snearing, it is factual description.