156. Less Wrong, Rationality, and Logicbros | THUNK 

Scariest thing I've watched all October

My main fear with stuff like this is that it can easily become cult-like and fulfill the human need to belong in away that fulls biases of conformity.

Definately one of you most interesting vids. Never heard the term Logic Bros before but it covers so many of the "Skeptical Community" video makers and commenters out there. I've definately met many of them in the comments section and you sum them up nicely. A lot of them very clueless people who have developed competance at a kind of rhetorical/logic which will work against average people without philisophical education and fan their egos but do little else. On the other hand logic as an ideology and it being used as surrgate religion for gaining power over other people using simlar tactics to religion is a subject I'm interested in. The similarity with which people deploy Logical Fallacies and Bible quotations to try and bulldoze people amuses me. At the beginning you mention how logicians justify themselves by contrasting logic with fractured thinking and dogmaticism. This is similar to those atheists who make videos like, "Answers to the 10 Most Ridiculous Things Christians Say," then pat themselves on the back for being so intelligent. I used to comment, wouldn't it be better to make a video. "Answers to the 10 Best Arguments Christians make." they never ever do though. It's the same with logic. For someone like Less Wrong to convince me they would not have to contrast logic with dogmatism, they would have to contrast it with Praxis, Pragmatism and Empiricism. Which I would guess is not the game.

I feel kind of weird whenreading about this sort of thing. I suffer from perpetual underconfidence and often worry I'm completely wrong about things. So I'm usually the one who fact-checks the quote from the opposing party that sounds too good to be true, or looks at the paper that supposedly pwns me. I don't look at every paper because I eventually need to sleep, but especially on issues that matter to me, I tend to think "what if I'm wrong" and look. I'm not saying I've never done this, though I must admit I don't remember any incidents. It's more that I tend to be more concerned with being correct than feeling correct, and I've had no alternative but to alter my worldview accordingly in the past in order to keep myself aligned with new information. not that constantly doubting yourself is fun.

I have struggled with this problem in the past as well and the solution i came up with is to just have some got damn humility about the beliefs you hold. If a person has gotten far enough in their rational thinking to apply that knowledge to their worldview and to their philosophy then they should be aware of the fallability of human thinking. If you are aware of all the biases and fallacies affecting your rational thinking and still claim that your conclusion, which you reached using just that rational thinking, has to be infallable then that is nothing short of pretentiousness. This also takes me back to the principles of thunk video 135 and arguing to learn. If one doesn't hold any humility regarding their own viewpoint when they enter a discussion, then they aren't just showing a lack of respect to the other person. They are also doing something deprimental to their own understanding of the subject by denying themself the chance to learn from the other persons viewpoint and better understand the shortcomings of their own. This is the truth no matter who actually starts out with the strongest understanding of the subject and as such it's always better to have some humility about your beliefs, even if you are confident in being right. That's my conclusion atleast.

Damnit Josh, I didn't need this ethical crisis right now! Curse you and your consistent ability to remind us in a timely and thoughtful fashion to appraise our own beliefs and not just those of others! For real though, excellent video. I feel like you're keeping a lot of people here, myself included, a little more honest with this channel.

This video is great stuff I stumbled upon and also a needed discussion. This reminds me of something I read where a spiritual teacher cautioned that the ego can use anything for its own purposes, including spirituality, and people can fall into traps of spiritual egoism and spiritual materialism. Even the practice of dissolving the ego can become something for the ego to reinforce itself. It’s definitely a knife’s edge as you say.

I knew this day would come.

Prehaps LessWrong may be filled with wanna be rationals, but his greatest work "rationality: Ai To Zombie" is a collection of the best essays about this topic and I am quite happy to see the author is humble and works for AI safety ethics. To quote from Cultish countercultishness: " Cults feed on groupthink, nervousness, desire for reassurance. You cannot make nervousness go away by wishing, and false self-confidence is even worse. But so long as someone needs reassurance-even reassurance about being a rationalist-that will always be a flaw in their armor. A skillful swordsman focuses on the target, rather than glancing away to see if anyone might be laughing. When you know what you’re trying to do and why, you’ll know whether you’re getting it done or not, and whether a group is helping you or hindering you."

It is worth mentioning that those issues are a part of the conversation in the LessWrong community as well. I don't know how your channel treats links so, in the name of caution, I will drop a link to a prominent example as a reply to this comment.

Absolutely been on both ends of logicbroism, though I like to think I left a lot of it behind... How far back do you go in your own writing before you hate the author?

Wow, that's some content, I like you

Metacognition is what you need, to check and balance your own thinking.

Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem is the scariest. But this video is also terrifying. On the other hand, as a mathematician, I understand that one must have axioms, self-evident truths, to reason from.

Brilliant insights. Especially at 4:48.

I'm glad to see these thoughts shared. Refreshed even. And also unsettled. Tools in the wrong hands can be dangerous indeed and I frequently struggle in trusting that I'm using my own properly. It's nice to know I'm not alone in that endeavor. As far as being a part of a group, I feel the struggle there too. The moment I start seeing the forest for the trees is the moment I become disillusioned with membership and am desperate to escape. Less Wrong though. I may just check it out. Thanks for you insight!

This video deserves many more views.

this is like an AA meeting for us internet denizens with a superior intellect than the poor, poor layman, bless their souls i think captain d has a talk related to staving off the logicbro inside us all. i may be misremembering tho

Amazing description, loved it

Was it a conscious decision to not put the direct Patreon link in the video description? I know it is visually displayed briefly at the end of the video...but you'd be suprised how many more clicks it may get if more prominently displayed as a hyperlink there. ...I say this because I shamefully never noticed it in the video until AFTER I Googled "Thunk Patreon" in disbelief it didn't already exist (it obviously does). In the end I found it and joined of course, but idiot proofing never hurts when it comes to generating web traffic right? #unsolicitedonlinepresenceMGMTadvice This is one of the best channel on RU-vid BTW. It's saved under my "unequivocally good for humanity" list of web content...it's a short list.

Could anyone expand a bit on the "citing papers that I've not read" subject? Where exactly does the problem lie? I thought it was ok to cite papers I've not read because doing so did not imply that I had read them. Related to this, one point I can think of is there might be papers that disagree with each other and not mentioning it would not be nice.

damn, I gotta stop being a logicbro.

6:15 I guess as usual Nietzsche was on to something significant about human cognition...

There's the obvious punchline missing from this video: specifically, the scariest thing they *did* think of. Of course, Elizabeth Sandifer got a whole book out of it.

Do you read Dan Luu's blog? He seems to be very good at being rational.

by this logic i should consider the Idea itself to be potentially misleading or the idea that it may be misleading to be misleading

Sophisticated

what would we do if today was our last day

Liked for mentioning of less wrong. I'd love it if you discussed some of eleizers writings!

Long term project

I have no idea what you just said

hello, mhhhh yes, a big mac and. mhhhh three, no, four colas, thank

The scariest thing about this video is when you unironically said "the collapse of Western Civilization." That's a pretty well-known dogwhistle at this point... You should think about what you really mean and what both yourself and others picture in their minds when you say that. People who explicitly say they fear the collapse of Western Civilization are typically Nazis, in the current state of things. And it makes sense that it'd be used that way; when you say "Western Civilization", even though you might actually be referring to a school of thought or a geographic region, I think we can agree that the phrase conjures up images of white people. This goes in the opposite direction: if you really mean "white people" when you say "Western Civilization", then you can hide your true intentions behind the sanitized meaning. It'd be much easier to protect the discourse from exploitation if everyone who wasn't intentionally using "Western Civilization" and similar terms as dogwhistles would just stop using them whatsoever. This way, there will be a clearer division between Nazi propaganda and more academic discourse -- and it will be more difficult to disguise one as the other. Thinking about the way you used the phrase, from the perspective of a person in the process of being radicalized by the far right, this person has been fed a narrative of a group of outsiders (non-white people, migrants, Muslims, Jews, LGBT+ people, social justice advocates, and communists) trying to collapse "Western Civilization" (the white race). When they get to the end of this video, and you tell them that fearing the collapse of "Western Civilization" is justified, what they hear is reinforcement of that narrative fed to them by the far right, which is certainly not what you intended. In fact, Nazi discourse is specifically designed to exploit these connotations so it can slip into more "civil" discussion without seeming to lose continuity, sort of like a Mott and Bailey argument. To avoid helping the Nazis, we must try to break that continuity, either explicitly or by simply a avoiding the dogwhistles altogether. This way, it will be harder for Nazis to embed themselves into the discourse.

You make a good point, but I'm going to logic bro you for a second. One of the common distinctions you'll find on LW is the difference between instrumental rationality and epistemic rationality. Instrumental rationality is what you're discussing here where you taking your intellectual faculties and align them with a specific goal. Epistemic rationality is arguing specifically about the truth of things. Yes, learning some rhetorical rational-sounding tricks can be abused or misused. But this is basically true of anything. Dan Kahan's cultural cognition work is also good here.

ahah, that was nice :D

I've never heard the term but shouldn't it be "Logic Bro" or maybe hyphenated.

Logicbros! Lol

I checked out LessWrong a few years back and my god it is an echo chamber and a cult around Yudcuntski. They his writings like the Bible. When what he writes doesn't make sense, they desperately try to interpret it in a favourable way. There's a pathological aversion to actual work done in philosophy. Instead they prefer sitting on their assess and coming up with basic ideas 1st year philosophy students learn about in their first week, except philosophy students are actually exposed to a range of ideas and criticisms. There's also not much looking in depth into scientific literature; rather it's enough to find something which agrees with you and Yudcraptree

Reason is a slave.

Dude, are you telling that LessWrong has some kind of logical fallacy that they don't notice? You are very welcome in this community then. Do you think that we don't understand the structure of the brain or how brain reinforces bad ideas? I don't see how anything you are saying can be applied to LessWrong, to be honest. Also, everybody in the community warns everyone else about issues with weaponized rationality.

It's funny, that you simply assume climate change to be true.