tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1030220433025894048.post7310037724932527489..comments2023-11-03T08:02:25.369-04:00Comments on AmericanScience: A Team Blog: Lovecraft, Science, and Epistemic SubculturesDavid Roth Singermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12841041983824755867noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1030220433025894048.post-7845399142305637382012-04-23T22:30:10.200-04:002012-04-23T22:30:10.200-04:00...meant to be funny.
There I go taking things to...<i>...meant to be funny.</i><br /><br />There I go taking things too seriously again... ah well.<br /><br /><i>I've never known what to make of Yudkowsky's boundary work between what he does and what academics do. What do you think it amounts to?</i><br /><br />Perhaps it's inevitable for any person who fancies hirself an intellectual and somehow (miraculously?) manages to make a living on it outside of the academy? To try to paint oneself as definitely separate but perhaps equal? The short answer is that I don't make anything specific of it yet, but it does seem to be worth noting.<br /><br />Perhaps relatedly, do you agree that LessWrong is largely a cult of personality? Yudkowsky is such a central force in the phenomenon. In that sense it seems quite different from Lovecraft's group (as you describe it) or from the chemtrailers.Alexandra Thornhttp://alexandra-thorn.dreamwidth.orgnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1030220433025894048.post-26412932401163820612012-04-20T12:02:39.071-04:002012-04-20T12:02:39.071-04:00Well, I don't have anything erudite to add. I...Well, I don't have anything erudite to add. I just want to say how glad I am to see you writing about Lovecraft in this context! His correspondence circles have interested me for awhile--boy do I wish someone would publish on this. You should get on that, Lee! Great stuff.Meganhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14981046524698212752noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1030220433025894048.post-65221779354040129972012-04-18T14:54:19.037-04:002012-04-18T14:54:19.037-04:00My statement about making neuroscientists skin cra...My statement about making neuroscientists skin crawl was overstated and meant to be funny. The gist of the sentiment, however, comes from hanging out with several neuroscientists in Pittsburgh. I once asked about the moral import of their research when I was hanging out with two of them. The first one said that the moral import was "almost exactly zero." The second one agreed.<br /><br />I'm not saying that the community called "neuroscience" is monolithic. There's probably a lot of variation. My instinct is that if we did an expert elicitation with neuroscientists their views would be pretty far away from that of LessWrong. But I could be wrong.<br /><br />I've never known what to make of Yudkowsky's boundary work between what he does and what academics do. What do you think it amounts to?Leehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14164091550633430973noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1030220433025894048.post-16210313947267069642012-04-18T14:02:44.648-04:002012-04-18T14:02:44.648-04:00Lee writes:
"But I also think that the crowd ...Lee writes:<br /><i>"But I also think that the crowd draws many normative lessons from scientific research that would make, for instance, a neuroscientists skin crawl."</i><br /><br />I'd like to hear this point elaborated. In particular, while I see a distinct normative culture surrounding LessWrong, I think the question of whether a neuroscientist would find the conclusions off-putting is likely to depend on which individual neuroscientist you talk to. I'm open to persuasion, but the claim you make here is not obvious without the inclusion of specific examples.<br />While I'm pretty sure that most scientists don't see themselves as being in the business of making normative claims, but that doesn't stop us from making normative leaps based on our science... often in some non-standard directions.<br /><br />What strikes me about the LessWrong phenomenon is not its normativity but the boundary that LessWrong -- or more clearly the Singularity Institute -- puts between itself and mainstream academia. Despite a clearly high opinion of his own intellect and research, Yudkowsky takes care to make sure that no one mistakes him for a mainstream scholar:<br /><i>"Though I have friends aplenty in academia, I don’t operate within the academic system myself. (For some reason, I write extremely slowly in formal mode.) I am not a Ph.D. and should not be addressed as 'Dr. Yudkowsky'."</i><br />See: http://yudkowsky.net/Alexandra Thornhttp://alexandra-thorn.dreamwidth.orgnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1030220433025894048.post-91299484603468604722012-04-16T22:39:26.658-04:002012-04-16T22:39:26.658-04:00Hank, I dig the point of your comment.
I'm a ...Hank, I dig the point of your comment.<br /><br />I'm a bit of a philosophical (methodological) conservative, like Lukas, and I want to hold terms like "ontology" and "epistemology" fairly steady and let them refer to what they've always referred to. So, for me, an epistemology is a theory of knowledge. I do *not* want to say that any people in these communities have epistemologies, unless, of course, they do. <br /><br />By referring them to them as "epistemic subcultures," I wanted to say that these groups make knowledge claims about the world that would not be accepted by a lot of people in mainstream science. That might be a "duh" statement.<br /><br />I think Less Wrong and chemtrailers are interesting case studies because there is a lot of distance between them. <br /><br />The Less Wrong crowd draws on a lot of mainstream cognitive science, behavioral econ, and such. I once witnessed two members argue about two different (but thoroughly "mainstream") epidemiological and statistical theories of inference and which was more rational. But I also think that the crowd draws many normative lessons from scientific research that would make, for instance, a neuroscientists skin crawl. At the same time, there's a lot of gray zone here: the program Radiolab (http://www.radiolab.org/) sometimes seems to offer advice about life. And there are plenty of books like Tancredi's _Hardwired Behavior: What Neuroscience Reveals about Morality_.<br /><br />The chemtrailers more clearly fall into the field of questionable knowledge claims (from the point of academic science). And I think the Less Wrong crowd would generally want to have nothing to do with chemtrails. I originally became interested in chemtrailers as a group because I was hanging out with one and she said, "Did you feel that rain yesterday? It felt so unnatural." She clearly believed that the "feel" of rain stood as some form of evidence. The community also often take pictures of chemtrails and gives testimony to how long the particular photographed thing in the sky was there. (The long duration of chemtrails supposedly speaks to how they are not contrails.) Finally, you can see a person discussing contrails in the context of gaia and prophesying for space aliens here: http://www.chemtrailcentral.com/forum/thread14489.html?sid=f75c1a5107059218af156fa2e4e13f5b.<br /><br />In other words, I think you see a lot of variance in the chemtrail community about how one goes about making claims. And I really doubt that there is any consensus in the group about the right methods. There's even disagreement about the purpose of the chemtrails: http://www.chemtrailcentral.com/chemfaq.shtml<br /><br />One interesting point is that what holds these communities together is an object of ostensible knowledge. How does the "interest" (in a that's interesting sense) of a group become an *interest* (in the political sense)? And how does this relate to knowledge?<br /><br />At the same time, I don't want to pretend that members of these groups don't have epistemologies. Some members of Less Wrong clearly do, and perhaps the groups focus on "rationality" just amounts to (a morally inflected) epistemology. As I've thought about doing interviews with these two communities, I've been fascinated mostly by questions that get at these issues about justifiable knowledge claims.Leehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14164091550633430973noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1030220433025894048.post-55105227967564770772012-04-16T01:11:28.243-04:002012-04-16T01:11:28.243-04:00Hey Lee – I'm wondering about "epistemic ...Hey Lee – I'm wondering about "epistemic subcultures" and the "epistemic status quo." I see the comparison (in the first case especially) to Knorr-Cetina, but what I want to hear your thoughts on in particular is the boundary between the epistemic and the epistemological. <br /><br />That is, does it matter at all whether the participants you're interested in have their own theories about the social or technical aspects and possibilities of knowledge and its formation? Do they have epistemologies, either explicit or implicit, that distinguish them? Or is this something simpler, about the structures of knowledge and its production that prevail (and the groups that get left out because they don't fit the categories such structures impose)?Hankhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02841787256060612291noreply@blogger.com