people are mentioning that they do this for a reason, which explains away that behavior, so yeah, it kinda does change the fact of whether they are being condescending.

it is true but irrelevant to the original topic that this is more money than the global poor ever see, and that this is more money that most people get to have. i don't think anyone was arguing that this represents zero privilege

https://www.lesswrong.com/w/epistemology

https://www.lesswrong.com/w/priors

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2x67s6u8oAitNKF73/ (a post noting that the foundational problems in mech interp are grounded in philosophical questions about representation ~150 years old)

https://www.lesswrong.com/w/consciousness (the page on consciousness first citing the MIT and Stanford encyclopedias, then providing a timeline from Democritus, through Descartes, Hobbes,... all the way to Nagel, Chalmers, Tegmark).

There is also sort of a meme of interest in Thomas Kuhn: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HcjL8ydHxPezj6wrt/book-revie...

See also these attempts to refer and collate prior literature: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qc7P2NwfxQMC3hdgm/rationalis...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xg3hXCYQPJkwHyik2/the-best-t...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SXJGSPeQWbACveJhs/the-best-t...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HLJMyd4ncE3kvjwhe/the-best-r...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bMmD5qNFKRqKBJnKw/rigorous-p...

Now, one may disagree with the particular choices or philosophical positions taken, but it's pretty hard to say these people are ignorant or not trying to be informed about what prior thinkers have done, especially compared to any particular reference culture, except maybe academics.

As for the thing about Aella, I feel she's not as much of a thought leader as you've surmised, and I think doesn't claim to be. My personal view is that she does some interesting semi-rigorous surveying that is unlikely to be done elsewhere. She's not a scientist/statistician or a total revolutionary but her stuff is not devoid of informational value either. Some of her claims are hedged adequately, some of them are hedged a bit inadequately. You might have encountered some particularly (irrationally?) ardent fans.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/85mfawamKdxzzaPeK/any-good-c...

I personally don't have that much of an interest in this topic, so I can't critique them for quality myself, but they may at least be of relevance to you.

On "considering what should be the baseline assumption":

https://www.lesswrong.com/w/epistemology

https://www.lesswrong.com/w/priors, particularly https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hNqte2p48nqKux3wS/trapped-pr...

On the idea that "rationalists think that they can just apply rationality infinitely to everything":

https://www.lesswrong.com/w/bounded-rationality

On the critique that rationalists are blind to the fact that "reason isn't the only thing that's important", generously reworded as "reason has to be grounded in a set of human values", some of the most philosophically coherent stuff I see on the internet is from LW:

https://www.lesswrong.com/w/metaethics-sequence

https://www.lesswrong.com/w/human-values

On "systematically plan to validate":

https://www.lesswrong.com/w/rationality-verification

https://www.lesswrong.com/w/making-beliefs-pay-rent

On "what could hold true for one moment could easily shift":

https://www.lesswrong.com/w/black-swans

https://www.lesswrong.com/w/distributional-shifts

https://www.lesswrong.com/w/forecasting-and-prediction

It's rather different for a community to say that's a standard they aspire to, which is a lot less ridiculously grandstanding of a position IMO.

Like mathematical logic (in the intersection of math and philosophy) didn't have that many true predecessors and was developed very far by maybe only 5-10 individuals cumulatively, or information theory was basically established by Claude Shannon and maybe two other guys, or various aspects of convex optimization or Fourier analysis were only developed in the 80s or so, it stands to reason that the AI-related applications of various aspects of philosophy are ripe to be developed now. (By contrast, we don't see, as much, people on LW trying to redo linear algebra from the ground up, nor more "mature" aspects of philosophy.)

(If anything, I think it's more feasible than ever before, also, for a bunch of relative amateurs to non-professionally make real intellectual contributions, like noticeably moreso than 100 or even 20 years ago. That's what increasing the baseline levels of education/wealth/exposure to information was intended to achieve, on some level, isn't it?)

"shunned" in particular is a really strong word, e.g, global health and biosecurity are two of the named categories at the most central EA events:

https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ea-global/events/ea-global...

They can't really be blamed for the fact that others go on to take the ideas more seriously than they intended.

(If anything, I think that at least in person, most rationalists are far less confident and far less persuasive than the typical person in proportion to the amount of knowledge/expertise/effort they have on a given topic, particularly in a professional setting, and they would all be well-served to do at least a normal human amount of "write and explain persuasively rather than as a mechanical report of the facts as you see them".)

(Also, with all communities there will be the more serious and dedicated core of the people, and then those who sort of cargo-cult or who defer much, or at least some, of their thinking to members with more status. This is sort of unavoidable on multiple levels-- for one, it's quite a reasonable thing to do with the amount of information out there, and for another, communities are always comprised of people with varying levels of seriousness, sincere people and grifters, careful thinkers and less careful thinkers, etc. (see mobs-geeks-sociopaths))

(Obviously even with these caveats there are exceptions to this statement, because society is complex and something about propaganda and consequentialism.)

Alternately, I wonder if you think there might be a better way of "writing unconfidently", like, other than not writing at all.

edit: my apologies, that was someone else in the thread. I do feel like between the two comments though there is a "damned if you do, damned if you don't". (The original quote above I found absurd upon reading it.)

I'm not sure if this counterpoint generalizes entirely to the original critique, since certainly LessWrongers aren't usually posting about or discussing math as if they've discovered it-- usually substantially more niche topics.

You want to say this guy's experience isn't reproducible? That's one thing, but that's probably not the case unless you're assuming they're pretty stupid themselves.

You want to say that it Is reproducible, but that "that doesn't mean AI can think"? Okay, but that's not what the thread was about.

I do not expect to go through the process I just described for more than a few hours a year, so I don't think the net loss to my time is huge. I think that the most relevant counterfactual scenario is that I don't learn anything about how these things work at all, and I cope with my problem being unfixed. I don't think this is unusual behavior, to the degree that it's I think a common point of humor among Linux users: https://xkcd.com/963/ https://xkcd.com/456/

This is not to mention issues that are structurally similar (in the sense that search is expensive but verification is cheap, and the issue is generally esoteric so there are reduced returns to learning) but don't necessarily have anything to do with the Linux kernel: https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/42611

I wonder if you're arguing against a strawman that thinks that it's not necessary to learn anything about the basic design/concepts of operating systems at all. I think knowledge of it is fractally deep and you could run into esoterica you don't care about at any level, and as others in the thread have noted, at the very least when you are in the weeds with a problem the LLM can often (not always) be better documentation than the documentation. (Also, I actually think that some engineers do on a practical level need to know extremely little about these things and more power to them, the abstraction is working for them.)

Holding what you learn constant, it's nice to have control about in what order things force you to learn them. Yak-shaving is a phenomenon common enough that we have a term for it, and I don't know that it's virtuous to know how to shave a yak in-depth (or to the extent that it is, some days you are just trying to do something else).