> I always interpreted "Less Wrong" as word-play on how "being right" is an absolute binary
Specifically (AFAIK) a reference to Asimov’s description[1] of the idea:
> [W]hen people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
That book, IMO, reads very much like a smear attempt, and not one done with a good understanding of the target.
The premise, with an attempt to tie capital-R Rationalists to the neoreactionaries though a sort of guilt by association, is frankly weird: Scott Alexander is well-known among the former to be essentially the only prominent figure that takes the latter seriously—seriously enough, that is, to write a large as-well-stated-as-possible survey[1] followed by a humongous point-by-point refutation[2,3]; whereas the “cult leader” of the rationalists, Yudkowsky, is on the record as despising neoreactionaries to the point of refusing to discuss their views. (As far as recent events, Alexander wrote a scathing review of Yarvin’s involvement in Trumpist politics[4] whose main thrust is that Yarvin has betrayed basically everything he advocated for.)
The story of the book’s conception also severely strains an assumption of good faith[5]: the author, Elizabeth Sandifer, explicitly says it was to a large extent inspired, sourced, and edited by David Gerard, a prominent contributor to RationalWiki and r/SneerClub (the “sneerers” mentioned in TFA) and Wikipedia administrator who after years of edit-warring got topic-banned from editing articles about Scott Alexander (Scott Siskind) for conflict of interest and defamation[6] (including adding links to the book as a source for statements on Wikipedia about links between rationalists and neoreaction). Elizabeth Sandifer herself got banned for doxxing a Wikipedia editor during Gerard's earlier edit war at the time of Manning's gender transition, for which Gerard was also sanctioned[7].
I always find it interesting that when the topic of rationalists' fixation on neoreactionary topics comes into question, the primary defenses are that it's important to look at controversial ideas and that we shouldn't dismiss novel ideas because we don't like the group sharing them.
Yet as soon as the topic turns to criticisms of the rationalist community, we're supposed to ignore those ideas and instead fixate on the messenger, ignore their arguments, and focus on ad-hominem attacks that reduce their credibility.
It's no secret that Scott Alexander had a bit of a fixation on neoreactionary content for years. The leaked e-mails showed he believed there to be "gold" in some of their ideas and he enjoyed the extra traffic it brought to his blog. I know the rationalist community has been working hard to distance themselves from that era publicly, but dismissing that chapter of the history because it feels too much like a "smear" or because we're not supposed to like the author feels extremely hypocritical given the context.
There are certain parts of the history of the rationalist movement that its enemies are orders of magnitude more "fixated" on than rationalists ever were, Neoreaction and the Basilisk being the biggest.
Part of evaluating unusual ideas is that you have to get really good at ignoring bad ones. So when somebody writes a book called "Neoreaction: a Basilisk" and claims that it's about rationality, I make a very simple expected-value calculation.
> when the topic of rationalists' fixation on neoreactionary topics comes into question, the primary defenses are that it's important to look at controversial ideas and that we shouldn't dismiss novel ideas because we don't like the group sharing them.
No. Rationalists do say that it's important to do those things, because that's true. But it is not a defense of a "fixation on neoreactionary topics", because there is no such fixation. It only comes across as a fixation to people who are unwilling to even understand what they are denigrating.
You will note that Scott Alexander is heavily critical of neoreaction.
> Yet as soon as the topic turns to criticisms of the rationalist community, we're supposed to ignore those ideas and instead fixate on the messenger, ignore their arguments, and focus on ad-hominem attacks that reduce their credibility.
No. Nobody said that those criticism should be ignored. What was said is that those criticism are invalid, because they are. It is not ad-hominem against Sandifer to point out that Sandifer is trying to insinuate untrue things about Alexander. It is simply observing reality. Sandifer attempts to describe Alexander, Yudkowsky et. al. as supportive of neoreactionary thought. In reality, Alexander, Yudkowsky et. al. are strongly-critical-at-best of neoreactionary thought.
> The leaked e-mails showed he believed there to be "gold" in some of their ideas
Phonemic / morphological spelling is a thing (or rather a range of things). E.g. Belarusian is spelled phonetically, but Russian spelling is closer to phonemic—while the Belarusian standard could be used to spell the Moscow variety of Russian pretty painlessly, for those of Vologda or Ryazan it would be a downgrade. (This does not stop standardized textbooks or tests from only touching on spelling mistakes that are natural in Moscow, but that’s another story.)
(With the one for sh, ш, having been borrowed from the Hebrew for sh/s/th, ש.)
And yet there have been some ligatures converted into letters following sound changes, as in ЪІ > Ы for [ɨ] (in Russian and Belarusian) or ІО > Ю for [ʉ] (in Bulgarian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian).
The umlaut comes from an e written above the letter, and is thus historically distinct from the diaeresis aka tréma (as in Noël, naïve). I first realized after that looking at Fraktur street signs in Vienna, where it is more like two vertical lines, but the most immediate understanding will probably come after looking at the lowercase e in a table of Kurrentschrift[1].
Which, incidentally, is missing in TFA. Funny how thoroughly the Nazis managed to erase that piece of German legacy (and the only modern Latin-script cursive distinct not coming from the familliar Irish>Italian lineage).
Worth remembering that all of the people you mention were Bulgarian Eastern Orthodox monks and missionaries, so for them Greek was both the international vernacular and geographically close.
Cyril and Methodius were in fact Greek Christians, baptized as Constantine and Michael. They only later adopted monk names that they are ultimately remembered as. Now, considering that the Byzantines (or "Eastern Romans") were in conflict with Slavs since long before the brothers were born, it's unlikely for their family to be of Slavic background and at the same time for their father to be in a prominent military position (droungarios).
The script that came to be known as Cyrilic was developed by Cyril and Methodius' followers, after they were exiled from Great Moravia (by the bishop that replaced Methodius), so it's safe to assume that those in that group were not Bulgarians either.
Define "wrong"? Ctrl-Fn-Super-Alt has been used for ages by everyone except IBM/Lenovo and Apple[1], and (for what it's worth) Fn left of Ctrl is explicitly not recommended by ISO[2].
When I started in computers, the CTRL key is where CAPS sits nowadays. At some point it moved.
To me, it makes no sense to me to make less-reachable the key that gets used the most. To reach the current CTRL key, I have to bend and twist my hand so that the pinky finger can reach the CTRL key. I never use the CAPS LOCK key, which is sitting under and adjacent to where the pinky rests.
Ah. Yes, OK, I sympathize with this sentiment but also feel it’s something of a lost cause for mass-produced keyboards. As far as Ctrl moving from one position to another, from what I can find it’s more that the two options coexisted for while, and eventually the current (and arguably worse) one outcompeted the other.
Specifically:
- The ADM-3A[1] (mid ’70s) had Ctrl above Shift and apparently no Caps Lock.
- The Lisp machines[2,3] (late ’70s to mid ’80s) had Ctrl below Shift and Rub Out above Shift.
- The IBM 3270 series (from the early ’70s onwards) terminals (those that were capable of lower-case input) are pictured in Wikipedia[4] with a Caps Lock above Shift and no Ctrl (which agrees with their input model) but I get the impression that IBM produced a bajillion keyboard variations for these.
- The Model F variants for the XT and the AT (first half of the ’80s) has Ctrl above left Shift, Alt below it, and Caps Lock below right Shift[5], as well as 5×2 function keys on the left and no separate arrow keys; the later Model M variants (1985 onwards) use the modern layout; yet once again, looking at the separate pages for the Model F and the Model M, I get the impression that IBM simply produced a bajillion different versions of them.
- The ANSI standard to which the appellation of “ANSI layout” refers is ANSI X3.154-1988, so presumably things had settled by then?..
> In a microservices mesh architecture, you can't really run anything locally at all, and the test environment is often not configured to allow hooking up a stepping debugger.
I don't often use a debugger, and I still feel the need to point out Visual Studio could step into DCOM RPCs across machines in the first release of DCOM, ca. 1995. (The COM specification has a description of how that is accomplished.)
> Strongest was Cells[0], a library for Common Lisp CLOS. The earliest reference I can find is 2002[1], making it over 20 years old.
How about Microsoft DirectAnimation[1] from 1998, literally designed under the direction of Conal Elliott? Serious question, for what it’s worth, I’ve always wondered if all discussions of this thing are lost to time or if nobody cared for it to begin with.
I've always been baffled that people think spreadsheets are like dataframes when the really interesting thing has always been you can write formulas that refer to each other and the engine figures out the updating. Most of the times I've written a spreadsheet I haven't used the grid as a grid but just a place I can write some labels, some input fields and formulas.
well it is both an easy way to compute in a dataframe context and a reactive programming paradigm. When combined, it gives a powerful paradigm for throwing data-driven UI, albeit non scalable (in terms of maintenance, etc.).
Specifically (AFAIK) a reference to Asimov’s description[1] of the idea:
> [W]hen people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
[1] https://skepticalinquirer.org/1989/10/the-relativity-of-wron...
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