Endorse weirdness. No, really.

insert title here

I was recently having a discussion where I had a hard time articulating how rationalists are pretentious. I think I have now caught it. ¹

In Order of the Phoenix, there is a scene where Harry Potter sees Thestrals, and is weirded out by the fact that other students do not seem to notice at all.

Then Luna tells him: “You’re just as sane as I am.”

This line, and manner of thought, carries immense weight.

On a meta level, it can be read as ridiculing - Luna is someone who gets bullied and bad-mouthed for her weirdness and apparent insanity.

But true sanity is not looking sane. True sanity is observing the evidence you see and drawing sensible conclusions. Luna is hearing what Harry is observing, and telling him - he is someone who sees things other people do not.[claudism-1]

Epistemic humility

Rationalists do the first one. Almost nobody in the community does the second one consistently.

HPMOR Luna

HPMOR as case study: Yudkowsky rewrites Luna as secretly rational, a hidden agent with a plan. This is blue reconstructing green. He literally cannot write her as she is and have her be valuable.

What got lost: Luna’s social function in canon is that she makes people feel seen without evaluating them. She never treats anyone as a broken bayesian. This is why I classify her as Ravenclaw-Hufflepuff (Hufflepuff as her tertiary function) and I think the lack of Hufflepuff (that does also plague me) is one reason why many rationalists fail to see Luna for who she really is. (And of course for context, HPMOR Harry is someone who is clearly primary Ravenclaw, with tertiary Slytherin and Gryffindor depending on the context and his “dark side”, and is self-aware of the fact that he’d be happier in Hufflepuff. (But in real life, if we cannot bring the hufflepuffy comfort and care into rationalist spaces, that is a skill issue. Many peope gravitate to the rationalist community because of weirdness. But we’re scared to endorse it. But if you have good epistemics you’re not really going to accidentally start believing in horoscopes or religion or some other epistemic bogeyman even if we have some fun and loving kindness for the differences in our worldviews.)))

(NOTE: (TODO: add footnote) see the rationalist fic that I think gets Luna quite well: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zb3hWt99i9Fm93KPq/luna-lovegood-and-the-chamber-of-secrets-part-1-1 )

Carlsmith’s on green illustrates how rationalists fail to see green (the MTG color) which I think is conceptually very close to the part we are talking about here. A true rationalist Luna needs to keep her side that embraces people’s differences with each other,

• The value diversity connection: if you can only respect other people’s values by modeling them as “perhaps they have information I don’t,” you’ve already flattened the thing. Sometimes people value differently because they are different, and that’s fine, and it doesn’t require an epistemic justification.
• This matters especially for AI moral patienthood (your home turf): if we can’t extend ontological hospitality to humans with weird values, we have no chance with minds that are actually alien
• Personal note: this is an aspiration, not a achievement. Channeling more Luna. Soft curiosity over hard gripping.
• Close with something about Desna / butterflies / the stance being inherently unstable and that’s the point

(TODO: consider adding a full section on epistemic generosity after the humility section. Talkign about how cultivate epistemic humility, how to make it not depressing as fuck.) [claudism-1]: When I was writing this post, a thing Claude commented about this sentence was: “The move from ‘you’re just as sane as I am’ being read as a joke to it being literally true and the most epistemically generous thing anyone says to Harry in the entire series — that’s the beat doing its work.” I think it is beautifully put. Generosity is a virtue for a reason, and rationalists acutely need more positive ways to express epistemic generosity - the constant criticality is not actually optimal for truthseeking.

misc stuff that will get cut in the final post

TLDR I wrote for telegram / discord: core concepti (claude coinas tän): epistemic generosity

liittyy oleellisesti mtg vihreään

hahmo joka tätä embodyää: luna lovegood

viba: cultivate, embrace, love value differences, instead of grudgingly admitting people are “allowed” to have different values.

benefit: disagreement should be fun! it can be intense, it can hurt, but it shouldn’t be this megaserious thing where the stakes of a single convo are life and death.

sometimes the stakes of changing someones mind are life and death, but you’re not gonna change it by treating every convo with life and death ferocity.