241–250 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And today the railroad system in the USA sucks compared to other developed countries and even China. It turns out that boom-and-bust capitalism isn’t great for building something that needs to evolve over centuries. Perhaps American AI efforts will one day be viewed similarly. “Yeah, they had an early rush, lots of innovation, high valuations, and robber barons competing. Today it’s just stale old infra despite the h…
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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.
Scott Aaronson, the man who turned scrupulosity into a weapon against his own psyche is a capital R rationalist? Yeah, this surprises absolutely nobody.
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…
The premise, with an attempt to tie capital-R Rationalists to the neoreactionaries though a sort of guilt by association, is frankly weird: Scott Alexander is well-known among the former to be essentially the only prominent figure that takes the latter seriously—seriously enough, that is, to write a large as-well-stated-as-possible survey[1] followed by a humongous point-by-point refutation[2,3]; whereas the “cult leader” of the rationalists, Yudkowsky, is on the record as despising neoreactionaries to the point of refusing to discuss their views. (As far as recent events, Alexander wrote a scathing review of Yarvin’s involvement in Trumpist politics[4] whose main thrust is that Yarvin has betrayed basically everything he advocated for.)
The story of the book’s conception also severely strains an assumption of good faith[5]: the author, Elizabeth Sandifer, explicitly says it was to a large extent inspired, sourced, and edited by David Gerard, a prominent contributor to RationalWiki and r/SneerClub (the “sneerers” mentioned in TFA) and Wikipedia administrator who after years of edit-warring got topic-banned from editing articles about Scott Alexander (Scott Siskind) for conflict of interest and defamation[6] (including adding links to the book as a source for statements on Wikipedia about links between rationalists and neoreaction). Elizabeth Sandifer herself got banned for doxxing a Wikipedia editor during Gerard's earlier edit war at the time of Manning's gender transition, for which Gerard was also sanctioned[7].
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy...
[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-f...
[3] https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/24/some-preliminary-respo...
[4] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moldbug-sold-out
[5] https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no...
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...
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 remind me of the "Effective Altruism" crowd who get completely wound up in these hypothetical logical thought exercises and end up coming to insane conclusions that they feel trapped in because they got there using pure logic. Not realizing that their initial conditions were highly artificial so any conclusion they reach is only of academic value. There is a term for this. "Getting stuck up your own butt." It wo…
> “You’re Scott Aaronson?! 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?” Give me strength. So much hubris with these guys (and they’re almost always guys). I would have assumed that a rationalist would look for truth and not correctness. Oh wait, it’s all just a smokescreen for k…
That's exactly what Rationalism(tm) is. The basic trope is showing off how smart you are and what I like to call "intellectual edgelording." The latter is basically a fetish for contrarianism. The big flex is to take a very contrarian position -- according to what one imagines is the prevailing view -- and then defend it in the most creative way possible. Intellectual edgelording gives us shit like neoreaction ("mona…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And today the railroad system in the USA sucks compared to other developed countries and even China. It turns out that boom-and-bust capitalism isn’t great for building something that needs to evolve over centuries. Perhaps American AI efforts will one day be viewed similarly. “Yeah, they had an early rush, lots of innovation, high valuations, and robber barons competing. Today it’s just stale old infra despite the h…
You are comparing USA today to the robber baron phase, whose to say China isn't in the same phase? Lots of money being thrown at new railroads and you have Chinese leaders and best and management leaders chasing that money. When happens when it goes low budget/maintenance mode?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there is an arbitrage going on where STEM types who lack background in philosophy, literature, history are super impressed by basic ideas from those subjects being presented to them by stealth. Not saying this is you, but these topics have been discussed for thousands of years, so it should at least be surprising that Yudkowsky is breaking new ground.
Are there other philosophy- or history-grounded sources that are comparable? If so, I’d love some recommendations. Yudkowsky and others have their problems, but their texts have an interesting points, are relatively easy to read and understand, and you can clearly see which real issues they’re addressing. From my experience, alternatives tend to fall into two categories: 1. Genuine classical philosophy, which is usua…
It's almost offensive - are technologists so incapable of understanding philosophy that Yudk has to reduce it down to the least common denominator they are all familiar with - some fantasy world we read about as children?
Expecting rational thought to correspond to reality is like expecting a 6 million line program written in a hypothetical programming language invented in the 1700s to run bug free on a turing machine.
Tooling matters.