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Guess I'm a rationalist now

scottaaronson.blog

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Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#181

Post by lsp »

ImaCake wrote: post #88
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…

>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 wou…

A lot of people really need to be reminded of this.

I originally came to this critique via Heidegger, who argues that enlightenment thinking essentially forgets / obscures Being itself, a specific mode of which you experience at this very moment as you read this comment, which is really the basis of everything that we know, including science, technology, and rationality. It seems important to recover and deepen this understanding if we are to have any hope of managing science and technology in a way that is actually beneficial to humans.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#182

Post by mathattack »

Logic is an awesome tool that took us from Greek philosophers to the gates on our computers. The challenge with pure rationalism is checking the first principles that the thinking comes from. Logic can lead you astray if the principles are wrong, or you miss the complexity along the way.

On the missing first principles, look at Aristotle. One of the history's greatest logicians came to many false conclusions.

On missing complexity, note that Natural Selection came from empirical analysis rather than first principles thinking. (It could have come from the latter, but was too complex) [1]

This doesn't discount logic, it just highlights that answers should always come with provisional humility.

And I'm still a superfan of Scott Aaronson.

[0] https://www.wired.com/story/aristotle-was-wrong-very-wrong-b...

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2400494

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#183

Post by nradov »

impossiblefork wrote: post #162
philipov wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yep, the biggest threat posed by AI comes from the capitalists who want to own it.

I actually think the people developing AI might well not get rich off 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 h…

When railroads were first being built across the continental USA, those companies also had high valuations (for the time). Most of them ultimately went bankrupt or were purchased for a fraction of their peak valuation. But the tracks remained, and many of those routes are still in use today.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#184

Post by jrm4 »

My eyes started to glaze over after a bit; so what I'm getting here is there a group that calls themselves "Rationalists," but in just about every externally meaningful sense, they're smelling like -- perhaps not a cult, but certainly a lot of weird insider/outsider talk that feels far from rational?

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#185

Post by jrm4 »

mathattack wrote: post #182

Logic is an awesome tool that took us from Greek philosophers to the gates on our computers. The challenge with pure rationalism is checking the first principles that the thinking comes from. Logic can lead you astray if the principles are wrong, or you miss the complexity along the way. On the missing first principles, look at Aristotle. One of the history's greatest logicians came to many false conclusions. On miss…

Yup, can't stress the word "tool" enough.

It's a "tool," it's a not a "magic window into absolute truth."

Tools can be good for a job, or bad. Carry on.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#186

Post by nradov »

ummonk wrote: post #129
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…

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.

The precautionary principle is stupid. If people had followed it then we'd still be living in caves.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#187

Post by kragen »

mathattack wrote: post #182

Logic is an awesome tool that took us from Greek philosophers to the gates on our computers. The challenge with pure rationalism is checking the first principles that the thinking comes from. Logic can lead you astray if the principles are wrong, or you miss the complexity along the way. On the missing first principles, look at Aristotle. One of the history's greatest logicians came to many false conclusions. On miss…

The ‘rationalist’ group being discussed here aren't Cartesian rationalists, who dismissed empiricism; rather, they're Bayesian empiricists. Bayesian probability turns out to be precisely the unique extension of Boolean logic to continuous real probability that Aristotle (nominally an empiricist!) was lacking. (I think they call themselves “rationalists” because of the ideal of a “rational Bayesian agent” in economics.)

However, they have a slogan, “One does not simply reason over the joint conditional probability distribution of the universe.” Which is to say, AIXI is uncomputable, and even AIXI can only reason over computable probability distributions!

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#188

Post by wannabebarista »

Bjartr wrote: post #110
samuel wrote: post #67

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…

This reminds me of undergrad philosophy courses. After the intro logic/critical thinking course, some students can't resist seeing affirming the antecedent and post hoc fallacies everywhere (even if more are imagined than not).

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#189

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

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…

> They don't really ever show a sense of "hey, I've got a thought, maybe I haven't considered all angles to it, maybe I'm wrong - but here it is".

Aren't these the people who started the trend of writing things like "epistemic status: mostly speculation" on their blog posts? And writing essays about the dangers of overconfidence? And measuring how often their predictions turn out wrong? And maintaining webpages titled "list of things I was wrong about"?

Are you sure you're not painting this group with an overly-broad brush?

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#190

Post by exoverito »

amarcheschi wrote: post #31
wffurr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure precisely it not very rational about that link. Did you have a specific point you were trying to make with it?

Yes, that they're not "rational". If you take a look at the biodiversity survey here https://reflectivealtruism.com/2024/12/27/human-biodiversity... 1/3 of the users at acx actually support flawed scientific theories that would explain iq on a scientific basis. The Lynn study on iq is also quite flawed https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations If you want to read about human biodiversity, https://e…

Human ethnic groups are measurably different in genetic terms, as based on single nucleotide polymorphisms and allelic frequency. There are multiple PCA plots of the 1000 Genomes dataset which show clear cluster separation based on ancestry:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Example-Ancestry-PCA-plo...

We know ethnic groups vary in terms of height, hair color, eye color, melanin, bone density, sprinting ability, lactose tolerance, propensity to diseases like sickle cell anemia, Tay-Sachs, stomach cancer, alcoholism risk, etc. Certain medications need to be dosed differently for different ethnic groups due to the frequency of certain gene variants, e.g. Carbamazepine, Warfarin, Allopurinol.

The fixation index (Fst) quantifies the level of genetic variation between groups, a value of 0 means no differentiation, and 1 is maximal. A 2012 study based on SNPs found that Finns and Swedes have a Fst value of 0.0050-0.0110, Chinese and Europeans at 0.110, and Japanese and Yoruba at 0.190.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2675054/

A 1994 study based on 120 alleles found the two most distant groups were Mbuti pygmies and Papua New Guineans at a Fst of 0.4573.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Full_Fst_Average.png

In genome wide association studies, polygenic score have been developed to find thousands of gene variants linked to phenotypes like spatial and verbal intelligence, memory, and processing speed. The distribution of these gene variants is not uniform across ethnic groups.

Given that we know there are genetic differences between groups, and observable variation, it stands to reason that there could be a genetic component for variation in intelligence between groups. It would be dogmatic to a priori claim there is absolutely no genetic component, and pretty obviously motivated out of the fear that inequality is much more intractable than commonly believed.

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