Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Guess I'm a rationalist now

scottaaronson.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 1001 posts

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#61

Post by tome »

voidhorse wrote: post #51
codehotter wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I view this as a political constraint, cf. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/lifeboat-games-and-backscra... . One's identity as Academic, Democrat, Zionist and so on demands certain sacrifices of you, sometimes of rationality. The worse the failure of empathy and rationality, the better a test of loyalty it is. For epistemic rationality, it would be best to https://paulgraham.com/identity.html , but for instrumental r…

[flagged]

I'm curious how you assess, relatively speaking, the shittiness of defence of genocide versus false claims of genocide.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#62

Post by tome »

simiones wrote: post #55
zaphar wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a Rationalist, however, nothing you said in your first paragraph is factual and therefore the resultant thesis isn't supported. In fact it ignores nearly 2-3000 years of history and ignores a whole bunch of surrounding context.

The 2-3000 years of history are entirely and wholly irrelevant. Especially as history shows clearly that the Palestinians are just as much the descendants of the ancient Israelites as the Jewish diaspora that returned to their modern land after the founding of modern Israel. The old population from before the Roman conquest never disappeared - some departed and formed the diaspora, but most stayed. Some converted to…

Is your claim that genetics determines who should live in a particular patch of land?

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#63

Post by FeteCommuniste »

simianparrot wrote: post #33
t_mann wrote: post #24

> “You’re [X]?! The quantum physicist who’s always getting into arguments on the Internet, and who’s essentially always right, but who sustains an unreasonable amount of psychic damage in the process?” > “Yes,” I replied, not bothering to correct the “physicist” part. Didn't read much beyond that part. He'll fit right in with the rationalist crowd...

No actual person talks like that —- and if they really did, they’ve taken on the role of a fictional character. Which says a lot about the clientele either way. I skimmed a bit here and there after that but this comes off as plain grandiosity. Even the title is a line you can imagine a hollywood character speaking out loud as they look into the camera, before giving a smug smirk.

I assumed that the stuff in quotes was a summary of the general gist of the conversations he had, not a word for word quote.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#64

Post by loose-cannon »

colordrops wrote: post #42
loose-cannon wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reducibility is usually a goal of intellectual pursuits? I don't see that as a fault.

What the person you are replying to is saying that some things are not reducible, i.e. the the vast array of complexity and detail is all relevant.

That's a really hard belief to justify. And what implications would that position have? Should biologists give up?

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#65

Post by Fraterkes »

codehotter wrote: post #43
Fraterkes wrote: post #14

[flagged]

I view this as a political constraint, cf. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/lifeboat-games-and-backscra... . One's identity as Academic, Democrat, Zionist and so on demands certain sacrifices of you, sometimes of rationality. The worse the failure of empathy and rationality, the better a test of loyalty it is. For epistemic rationality, it would be best to https://paulgraham.com/identity.html , but for instrumental r…

I don’t really buy this at all: I am more emotionally invested in things that I know more about (and vice versa). If Rationalism breaks down at that point it is essentially never useful.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#66

Post by riffraff »

FeteCommuniste wrote: post #63
simianparrot wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No actual person talks like that —- and if they really did, they’ve taken on the role of a fictional character. Which says a lot about the clientele either way. I skimmed a bit here and there after that but this comes off as plain grandiosity. Even the title is a line you can imagine a hollywood character speaking out loud as they look into the camera, before giving a smug smirk.

I assumed that the stuff in quotes was a summary of the general gist of the conversations he had, not a word for word quote.

I don't think GP objects to the literalness, as much as to the "I am known for always being right and I acknowledge it", which comes off as.. not humble.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#67

Post by samuel »

I'm currently reading Yudkowsky's "Rationality: from AI to zombies". Not my first try, since the book is just a collection of blog posts and I found it a bit hard to swallow due its repetitiveness, so I gave up after the first 50 "chapters" the first time I tried. Now I'm enjoying it way more, probably because I'm more interested in the topic now.

For those who haven't delved(ha!) into his work or have been pushed back by the cultish looks, I have to say that he's genuinelly onto something. There are a lot of practical ideas that are pretty useful for everyday thinking ("Belief in Belief", "Emergence", "Generalizing from fiction", etc...).

For example, I recall being in lot of arguments that are purely "semantical" in nature. You seem to disagree about something but it's just that both sides aren't really referring to the same phenomenon. The source of the disagreement is just using the same word for different, but related, "objects". This is something that seems obvious, but the kind of thing you only realize in retrospect, and I think I'm much better equipped now to be aware of it in real time.

I recommend giving it a try.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#69

Post by tome »

voidhorse wrote: post #68
tome wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious how you assess, relatively speaking, the shittiness of defence of genocide versus false claims of genocide.

[flagged]

But that's not my question. My question was between defence of genocide and false accusations of genocide. (Of course actual genocide is "shittier" -- in fact that's a breathtaking understatement!)

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#70

Post by jltsiren »

loose-cannon wrote: post #36
felipeerias wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with trying to reason everything from first principles is that most things didn’t actually came about that way. Both our biology and other complex human affairs like societies and cultures evolved organically over long periods of time, responding to their environments and their competitors, building bit by bit, sometimes with an explicit goal but often without one. One can learn a lot from unicellular org…

Reducibility is usually a goal of intellectual pursuits? I don't see that as a fault.

"Reductionist" is usually used as an insult. Many people engaged in intellectual pursuits believe that reductionism is not a useful approach to studying various topics. You may argue otherwise, but then you are on a slippery slope towards politics and culture wars.
Post reply on HN