Just remember to mark serious posts like this with the NSFW tag

Galef lies about her own past statements as much as the rest of the rationalists, so there’s that.

for an example, this one sticks in my head:

Take this video. It’s a specific claim, summarised in this quote:

Bayesian reasoning was never meant to mean plugging numbers into Bayes’ Rule

we never meant that you should, ahahaha, use the formula we kept going on and on and on about for fucking ever and referred people to EY’s Javascript Bayes calculator as if that was the sure fire 100% effective evangelistic conversion tool of choice - or that you should think in terms of the thing called “Bayesian epistemology” that existed well before we started claiming our prejudices were numbers

i.e., this is direct advocacy of literary Bayesianism: thinking that if you just say things in the correct form of words, then correct reasoning will come out.

This results, both predictably and observably, in bias laundering, reification of one’s own prejudices, and confidently stating percentage confidence levels so as to give the audience the impression you did any working to get to a number you’re pulling out of your ass.

Of course, it was Galef personally who taught the “Building Bayes Habits” workshop at CFAR, in which she … taught students how to do Bayes in their heads.

So Galef didn’t just lie about the general claim about rationalists, she also didn’t mention the bit where she’d personally taught the thing that the rationalists do that she claimed they didn’t ahaha how could you think that.

Aside from the excellent comment clawsoon made about previous sneers, Julia is an example of how unclear communication frequently leads to spending too much time on shallow, mundane ideas.

Mostly this takes the form of the classic Rationalist move of using jargon when beige prose would be more appropriate. The mistake there is jargon has a cost: it makes ideas seem special regardless of their merits.

So if I say “I’ve been thinking about this thing called the Scout Mindset” it has this aura of substance and novelty to it. It might lead me to spend thousands of hours of work writing a book. It might lead you to think “wow I’d love to buy a hardcover discussing the Scout Mindset, no waiting around for the paperback for me please”.

But if I said “I’ve been thinking about how it’s important to engage with ideas and listen actively” I’m not likely to spend thousands of hours writing a book, and your reaction is probably going to be: “I agree”.

Is she still anti the humanities? Because bad media literacy is a serious problem among STEM lords (and the populace in general). And a massive red flag for me on how seriously to take someone.

Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow is a fun read and will give you most anything worthwhile you’d get from slogging through Yudkowsky. There’s also You Are Not So Smart and a million other ways to bone up on logical fallacies without getting in a funnel to Mencius Moldbug.

Lots of rationalists, like all of us, have some good ideas mixed in with the bad ones. If you want to browse through past sneers on Galef:

https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/search?q=galef&restrict_sr=on&include_over_18=on

Apart from CFAR being bad and her being the chief evangelist/gateway drug for entry into the acausal robot god death cult, whatever. She’s… fine.

EDIT: and I want to make clear, she’s not at all separate from all that, she is integral to their legitimization.

There’s nothing wrong with trying to be more open-minded, it’s just that rationalists aren’t particularly good at it.

Like, what do we mean by ‘rationalism as an idea’? Do we mean the idea of trying to think better? Yud and co. are not nearly so impressive as to have a monopoly on that.

I stopped listening to her podcast when Massimo left.

I’m still conflicted on whether rationalism is a compelling idea corrupted or an inherently short-sighted one.

Rationalists are generally guilty of the usual waspish sin, assuming their social and cultural exposures are somehow particularly valuable and unique, and are linked to a source of Ur-Wisdom, while others are not.

Not a particularly new or rare error, this sort of chauvinism is a direct descendant of the phenomenon of religion turning into an ideology of having a One true source of goodness and salvation developing in post pagan Roman empire instead of religion being praxis of ritual to gain favor of deities of nature it previously was.

You can see quotes like “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” popping all over history that are functionally identical to the wanking of the rationalist community to their preferred beliefs.

A podcast I listen to recently went into (U.S.) “Constitutional Originalism” and why it’s fucking stupid. When I found out the person they were responding to had been advocating Originalism on Galef’s podcast, I was exactly 0 surprised

Here’s what I want to know – I haven’t read her book, but she’s shown up on a couple of podcasts I listen to, shilling her book. The overall idea of being open to new ideas is obviously a good thing, the problem is there’s so much bad information out there that if you do a full evaluation of every idea out there you’ll never do anything worthwhile. “Soldier” mindset is good a lot of the time just to filter out nonsense. The old “you should haven an open mind, but not so open your brain falls out” type of thing. Does she have anything useful to say on distinguishing these two cases, or is her involvement in rationalism a sign that her brain has fallen out so to speak, and she’s far too credulous on ideas with no merit?

She’s a libertarian. So brain worms

who is this?

We’re not your personal moral computer man. Make your own decisions about what’s ‘wrong with’ whoever, and then live with them.

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Lol, how bored are you that you’re just looking for a reason to cancel her