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Comment by elendilm | Hacker News Reader

I remember reading back in 2014 (IIRC) Yudkowsky's explanation of the Bayes theorem. It was genuinely good. Some sort of first principles introduction.

HPMOR was entertaining as well. Death as the last enemy to be destroyed placed his priorities where his mouth is.

For a brief time back then I used to visit Lesswrong and many comments including Yudkowsky's were plain stupid (which was not hard to reason at all) but coming from folks who valued themselves as first principles thinkers was an oxymoron.

But his timeless equations (IIRC), Bayes theorem explanation and HPMOR were all remarkable and I will always appreciate those works.

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I hate seeing all the blind negativity towards the rationalists, both because the general idea of improving structured thinking is good, and because there were some great essays on Lesswrong and adjacent blogs over the years. People who can’t see that are blinded by their own bias.

That said, the most interesting people and discussions seem to have moved on, and now it’s more of a social club. I haven’t read anything compelling from there for a long time. Adjacent bloggers like Scott still put out interesting writing, but their output has dropped significantly.

Good to know. Haven't been following them as I was busy with our work.

I empathize with you on the sentiment of adversity against rationality but disagree on the implications.

Usually sentences uttered by anyone contains compressed in it the state of the mind and the thought process leading upto it.

Thus people blindly hating rationality makes it easy for us to decipher their state. Those who follow the cult worship likewise reveals their own state. So weild it as a weapon. Everybody is human and susceptible to be fallible. Truth doesn't care that it is Yudkowsky and hence true.

So I wouldn't be bothered by the opinions of the masses. Hope this helps. Cheers.

My favorite writing of his is:

https://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues

Revisiting after 10 years, it was nice reading through all those virtues again. Thank you for sharing the link.

After more than 2 decades of continuous building and problem solving, I see a lot of good things in that article and a handful of places where it goes wrong but was not apparent at the time.

But the content is solid as a general path to correctness and truth. In hindsight, a lot of those virtues were not just good, but correct. The nameless void at the end is the most potent of them all.

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