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Guess I'm a rationalist now

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Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#81

Post by nyrikki »

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.

'Reducibility' is a property if present that makes problems tractable or possibly practical.

What you are mentioning is called western reductionism by some.

In the western world it does map to Plato etc, but it is also a problem if you believe everything is reducible.

Under the assumption that all models are wrong, but some are useful, it helps you find useful models.

If you consider Laplacian determinism as a proxy for reductionism, Cantor diagonalization and the standard model of QM are counterexamples.

Russell's paradox is another lens into the limits of Plato, which the PEM assumption is based on.

Those common a priori assumptions have value, but are assumptions which may not hold for any particular problem.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#82

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #56
s1mplicissimus wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't hear people dismiss these risks very often as "You've just been reading too many science fiction novels" these days, which would have been the default response back in the 90s or 2000s. I've recently stumbled across the theory that "it's gonna go away, just keep your head down" is the crisis response that has been taught to the generation that lived through the cold war, so that's how they act. That bit was…

It's possible, but I think that's just a general human response when you feel like you're trapped between a rock and a hard place. I don't buy the marketing angle, because it doesn't actually make sense to me. Fear draws eyeballs, sure, but it just seems otherwise nakedly counterproductive, like a burger chain advertising itself on the brutality of its factory farms.

> like a burger chain advertising itself on the brutality of its factory farms

It’s rather more like the burger chain decrying the brutality as a reason for other burger chains to be heavily regulated (don’t worry about them; they’re the guys you can trust and/or they are practically already holding themselves to strict ethical standards) while talking about how delicious and juicy their meat patties are.

I agree about the general sentiment that the technology is dangerous, especially from a “oops, our agent stopped all of the power plants” angle. Just... the messaging from the big AI services is both that and marketing hype. It seems to get people to disregard real dangers as “marketing” and I think that’s because the actual marketing puts an outsized emphasis on the dangers. (Don’t hook your agent up to your power plant controls, please and thank you. But I somehow doubt that OpenAI and Anthropic will not be there, ready and willing, despite the dangers they are oh so aware of.)

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#83

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

derangedHorse wrote: post #48
junon wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got to that part, thought it was a joke, and then... it wasn't. Stopped reading thereafter. Nobody speaking like this will have anything I want to hear.

Is it not a joke? I’m pretty sure it was.

It doesn’t really read like a joke but maybe. Regardless, I guess I can at least be another voice saying it didn’t land. It reads like someone literally said that to him verbatim and he literally replied with a simple, “Yes.” (That said, while it seems charitable to assume it was a joke but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong to assume that.)

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#84

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

Fraterkes wrote: post #65
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…

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.

> I don’t really buy this at all

For what it’s worth, you seem to be agreeing with the person you replied to. Their main point is that this break down happens primarily because people identify as Rationalists (or whatever else). Taken from that angle, Rationalism as an identity does not appear to be useful.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#85

Post by cue_the_strings »

greener_grass wrote: post #6
cue_the_strings wrote: post #2

I feel like I'm witnessing something that Adam Curtis would cover in the last part of The Century of Self, in real time.

There was always an underlying Randian impulse to the EA crowd - as if we could solve any issue if we just get the right minds onto tackling the problem. The black-and-white thinking, group think, hero worship and charicaturist literature are all there.

I always wondered is it her direct influence, or is it just that those characteristics naturally "go together".

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#87

Post by dv_dt »

contrarian1234 wrote: post #9

The article made me think deeper about what rubs me the wrong way about the whole movement I think there is some inherent tension btwn being "rational" about things and trying to reason about things from first principle.. And the general absolutist tone of the community. The people involved all seem very... Full of themselves ? They don't really ever show a sense of "hey, I've got a thought, maybe I haven't considere…

The rationalist discussions rarely consider what should be the baseline assumption of what if one or more of the logical assumptions or associations are wrong. They also tend to not systematically plan to validate. And in many domains - what could hold true for one moment can easily shift.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#88

Post by ImaCake »

felipeerias wrote: post #26
contrarian1234 wrote: post #9

The article made me think deeper about what rubs me the wrong way about the whole movement I think there is some inherent tension btwn being "rational" about things and trying to reason about things from first principle.. And the general absolutist tone of the community. The people involved all seem very... Full of themselves ? They don't really ever show a sense of "hey, I've got a thought, maybe I haven't considere…

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…

>The problem with trying to reason everything from first principles is that most things didn’t actually came about that way.

This is true for science and rationalism itself. Part of the problem is that "being rational" is a social fashion or fad. Science is immensely useful because it produces real results, but we don't really do it for a rational reason - we do it for reasons of cultural and social pressures.

We would get further with rationalism if we remembered or maybe admitted that we do it for reasons that make sense only in a complex social world.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#89

Post by js8 »

contrarian1234 wrote: post #9

The article made me think deeper about what rubs me the wrong way about the whole movement I think there is some inherent tension btwn being "rational" about things and trying to reason about things from first principle.. And the general absolutist tone of the community. The people involved all seem very... Full of themselves ? They don't really ever show a sense of "hey, I've got a thought, maybe I haven't considere…

> The people involved all seem very... Full of themselves ?

Kinda like Mensa?

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#90

Post by jes5199 »

josephg wrote: post #59
ineedaj0b wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

rationalism got pretty lame the last 2-3 years. imo the peak was trying to convince me to donate a kidney. post-rationalism is where all the cool kids are and where the best ideas are at right now. the post rationalists consistently have better predictions and the 'rationalists' are stuck arguing whether chickens suffer more getting factory farmed or chickens cause more suffering eating bugs outside. they also let SF…

Where do the post rats hang out these days? I got involved in the stoa during covid until the online community fragmented. Are there still events & hangouts?

postrats were never a coherent group but a lot of people who are at https://vibe.camp this weekend probably identify with the label. some of us are still on twitter/X
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