I hate when I spend a lot of time puzzling out a perspective on mental illness and then it turns out my boyfriend already thought of it five years ago
well my version incorporates the social model of disability so there
To be fair, I pretty much just took a bunch of Eliezer posts and did a find-replace on whatever he was talking about with “mental illness”. He’s the one the rest of us have been plagiarizing all these years.
All of these ideas have been floating around since long before Eliezer articulated them. Even the Bayes net formulation of concepts had been done before (though maybe not written about for casual audiences, I dunno).
I think Eliezer did a great service in writing these ideas up. But they are not his ideas, and I’m really worried that a lot of people read LessWrong, see that Eliezer is right about this stuff, assume he came up with it all, and then go on to believe him about everything else.
I got into Eliezer’s writing on Overcoming Bias in college precisely because he was the second writer I read to articulate some ideas that the first had convinced me were true and important. Eliezer writes in a much more popularizing mode, and Rorty never wrote Harry Potter fanfic, so Eliezer has some big advantages. On the other hand, Rorty comes across as much less smug, an he writes in a sort of clean academic style that’s harder to dismiss and handles technical points much more precisely.
Oh interesting, I’ve never heard of Rorty. Recommendations for where to start reading? I pretty much always like reading about this stuff.
(Though admittedly I much prefer RAW’s conclusion of “therefore you should remain uncertain of everything, and continually expose yourself to new perspectives to avoid getting trapped in a harmful worldview” to Eliezer’s implied conclusion of “now you are more rational than everyone else, and you can go around feeling superior about it”.)
This is the opposite of Eliezer’s conclusion, see eg here