Iâd recommend being wary of any Deutsch-influenced stuff thatâs revolutionary or poly. I now think TCS and ARR were rather dangerous and were wrong in many ways.
Even if someone gets abstract rationality concepts right, which they may not, applying them to complex topics like relationships is really complicated and difficult. And even if all the comments in the article are correct, theyâre short and just give some hints and general guidance, leaving you with many books worth of blank pages to fill in the details yourself. When you fill in all those details, you could easily make tons of errors.
One of the main tricks of TCS and ARR is a very common one used by many other things. Basically itâs easier to criticize than to build. Everything has flaws. Itâs easier to point out flaws than to figure out something better. Is marriage perfect? No. Were there good points in some of the ARR critiques of marriage? Yes. Does that mean you should do some alternative to marriage? Not at all. There is no known alternative that couldnât be criticized a ton too. In a way you can see it as bias: selective attention about what to criticize by DD and SFC. (SFC btw wrote about this stuff when she was divorced, but now sheâs married and advocates marriage, but as far as I know she never explained why she was wrong before, what new things she learned that would change the minds of other people who had listened to her ARR writing.)
This is related to how offense tends to be easier than defense in debates. Lots of debates involve both sides going on offense and avoiding responding to most attacks. Politicians prefer being on offense too. Offense means criticizing other stuff rather than having to talk about the weaknesses of your stuff. The issue is partly due to biases in audiences: people should be more impressed by decent defenses than they are, but instead people often see an imperfect defense as an admission of some flaws and an admission of not having much offensive/criticism to say. If the other sideâs stuff wasnât attacked much during a debate, then people may incorrectly sorta assume its flawless.
Yeah, including discussions that havenât started yet, not just discussions in progress. And using the term âdiscussionâ very broadly, more like any sort of communication.
Also, suppose you donât read a book that has criticism of your ideas. If a critic told you to read it, then youâre blocking Paths Forward. But what if you just saw it on the internet? Youâre still blocking Paths Forward. The author of the book wrote criticism, which you found out about the existence of, and then you ignored that author instead of investigating. Even if heâs dead, youâre blocking the error correction he enabled by writing the book.
Not that you have to read every book you hear about that might be useful. There are valid reasons not to read a book. But âno one told me to read it, I just saw it online myself, so there was no âdiscussionâ of itâ isnât a good reason not to read it.