Don't isolate yourself

i’m not a lesswrong user, and i’ve sadly never had a lesswrong phase, so i can’t really praise or criticize it. but i find critiques of lesswrong extremely interesting - particularly the criticism that it’s largely disconnected from the outside world.

strangely enough, it reminds me of my mindset i was when i was… 10. ok so, my family went for a trip to japan at the time, and i got exposed to hentai, and for better or worse that permanently changed my brain and triggered my puberty. even my homeroom teacher said i’ve matured. it’s like i unlocked a superpower and i started to think a lot - tons of deep philosophy concepts and thought experiments… at least, deep to a 10 year old.

10 year old me did not know philosophy concepts back then, i only have my own concepts in my mind that i reference. i was basically isolated from the outside world, both in terms of practical applications, and the insanely rich history of existing thinkers from the span of human history. it’s not like i wasn’t aware that there are thinkers out there, but i don’t expect a 10 year old to go out of their way to study philosophy, much less understand them.

obviously, the group of 30 year old white guys from silicon valley jerking each other off are much smarter than one 10 year old in puberty jerking himself off. the only similarity is the limited practical applicability. 10 year old me’s deep philosophy didn’t inform my worldview, influence my decision-making, nor allow me to engaging in conversations with others. just like how lesswrong isn’t useful for studying philosophy because it only ever uses its own jargon and (existing) philosophy concepts (re)invented by itself.

instead of the repugnant conclusion, you cite Yudkowsky, E. (2007). Torture vs. Dust specks. Yes, it’s technically not the same thing. Yes, I’m sure the comments and the site are very insightful. However, why would i as an outsider ever study an internet forum, instead of the entire field of western philosophy?

the most extreme version of this phenomenon is crackpot science - extremely internally consistent systems, but they are not falsifiable, not practical, and not helpful towards the field. they start to fall apart once you start connect it to the outside world. i believe crackpots are intelligent people, just wasting their talent to pursue a delusion, when they could have made meaningful impact if they didn’t look down on the unremarkable.

and lastly, it reminds me of my current self. i said lesswrong community have a quality that makes you feel like you’re peeking into someone’s entire life, for a reason. when you have a shower thought about whether you’d rather one guy get tortured and 8 billion people get dust in their eyes, you don’t google for existing philosophical concepts. lesswrong embraces applying that principle to outside a person, kinda treating itself like a hivemind…? which is why i see a lot of similarities between lesswrong and personal wikis (like your obsidian vault), with lesswrong being structured like a hivemind’s wiki, with heavy use of internal links.

after all, wikis are meant to reflect how you (or your hivemind) perceive the world and the culmination of what you know. for example, for existing concepts, you’d link the [[Repugnant Conclusion]] note that contains what you know about the topic, which itself links to stuff on the web. if the value of note-taking is the connections, then you should link notes to the outside world as much as possible¹.