161–170 of 1001 posts
Probably the most useful book ever written about topics adjacent to capital-R Rationalism is "Neoreaction, A Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right" [1], by Elizabeth Sandifer. Though the topic of the book is nominally the Alt-Right, a lot more of it is about the capital-R Rationalist communities and individuals that incubated the neoreactionary movement that is currently dominant in US politics. It's probably…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always seen the breathless Singularitarian worrying about AI Alignment as a smokescreen to distract people from thinking clearly about the more pedestrian hazards of AI that isn't self-improving or superhuman, from algorithmic bias, to policy-washing, to energy costs and acceleration of wealth concentration. It also leads to so-called longtermism - discounting the benefits of solving current real problems and fo…
yep, the biggest threat posed by AI comes from the capitalists who want to own it.
Instead, unless there's a single winner, we will probably see the knowledge on how to train big LLMs and make them perform well diffuse throughout a large pool of AI researchers, with the hardware to train models reasonably close to the SotA becoming more quite accessible.
I think the people who will benefit will be the owners of ordinary but hard-to-dislodge software firms, maybe those that have a hardware component. Maybe firms like Apple, maybe car manufacturers. Pure software firms might end up having AI assisted programmers as competitors instead, pushing margins down.
This is of course pretty speculative, and it's not reality yet, since firms like Cursor etc. have high valuations, but I think this is what you'd get from the probably pressure if it keeps getting better.
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I thought these people were the ones that were all about most effective applications of altruism? Or is that a different crowd?
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 ba…
Yeah, the whole community side to rationality is, at best, questionable. But the tools of thought that the literature describes are invaluable with one very important caveat . The moment you think something like "I am more correct than this other person because I am a rationalist" is the moment you fail as a rationalist. It is an incredibly easy mistake to make. To make effective use of the tools, you need to become…
It's very telling that some of them went full "false modesty" by naming sites like "LessWrong", when you just know they actually mean "MoreRight".
And in reality, it's just a bunch of "grown teenagers" posting their pet theories online and thinking themselves "big thinkers".
> “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...
Also... > they gave off some (not all) of the vibes of a cult ...after describing his visit with an atmosphere that sounds extremely cult-like.
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I don't think "maybe it's benign" is where anti doomers are coming from, more like, "there are also costs to not doing things". The doomer utilitarian arguments often seem to involve some sort of infinity or really large numbers (much like EAs) which result in various kinds of philosophical mugging. In particular, the doomer plans invariably result in some need for draconian centralised control. Some kind of body or…
It's just the slippery-slope fallacy: if X then obviously Y will follow, and there will be no further decisions, debate or time before it does.
“If X, then surely Y will follow! It’s a slippery slope! We can’t allow X!”
They call out the name of the fallacy they are committing BY NAME and think that it somehow supports their conclusion?
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Oh, see here's the secret. Lots of people THINK they are always right. Nobody is.
The problem is you can read a lot of books, study a lot of philosophy, practice a lot of debate. None of that will cause you to be right when you are wrong. It will, however, make it easier for you to sell your wrong position to others. It also makes it easier for you to fool yourself and others into believing you're uniquely clever.
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 ba…
Yeah, the whole community side to rationality is, at best, questionable. But the tools of thought that the literature describes are invaluable with one very important caveat . The moment you think something like "I am more correct than this other person because I am a rationalist" is the moment you fail as a rationalist. It is an incredibly easy mistake to make. To make effective use of the tools, you need to become…
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…
These folks have a bunch of money because we allowed them to privatize the commons of 20th century R&D mostly funded by the DoD and done at places like Bell Labs, Thiel and others saw that their interests had become aligned with more traditional arch-Randian goons, and they've captured the levers of power damn near up to the presidency.
This has quite predictably led to a real mess that's getting worse by the day, the economic outlook is bleak, wars are breaking out or intensifying left right and center, and all of this traces a very clear lineage back to allowing a small group of people privatize a bunch of public good.
It was a disaster when it happened in Russia in the 90s and its a disaster now.
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…
Rationalists have always rubbed me the wrong way too but your argument against AI doomerism is weird. If you care about first principles, how about the precautionary principle? "Maybe it's actually benign" is not a good argument for moving ahead with potentially world ending technology.