251–260 of 1001 posts
* 20 somethings who are clearly on spectrum * Group are "special" * Centered around a charismatic leader * Weird sex stuff Guys we have a cult!
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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.
I think you’re mostly right. But also that it isn’t what the Yudkowsky is (was?) trying to do with it. I think he’s trying to distill useful tools which increase baseline rationality. Religions have this. It’s what the original philosophers are missing. (At least as taught, happy to hear counter examples)
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 tit…
When big money got involved, the tone shifted a lot. One phrase that really stuck with me is "exceptional talent". Everyone in EA was suddenly talking about finding, involving, hiring exceptional talent at a time where there was more than enough money going around to give some to us mediocre people as well.
In the case of EA in particular circlejerks lead to idiotic ideas even when paired with rationalist rhetoric, so they bought mansions for team building (how else are you getting exceptional talent), praised crypto (because they are funding the best and brightest) and started caring a lot about shrimp welfare (no one else does).
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My impression is that many rationalists enjoy believing that they update their beliefs, but in practice they're human and just as attached to preconceived notions as anyone else. But if you go around telling everyone that updating is your super-power, you're going to be a lot less humble about your own failures to do so. If you want to see how human and tribal rationalists are, go criticize the movement as an outside…
Yes, I've never met anyone who stated they have "strong opinions, weakly held" who wasn't A) some kind of arsehole and B) lying.
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They're behind Anthropic and were behind openai being a nonprofit. They're behind the friendly AI movement and effective altruism. They're responsible for funneling huge amounts of funding away from domain experts (effective altruism in practice means "Oxford math PhD writes a book report about a social sciences problem they've only read about and then defunds all the NGOs"). They're responsible for moving all the AI…
I don't see how this is a response to what I wrote. Can you explain?
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While this was an interesting and enjoyable read, it doesn't seem to be a “rationalist ‘coming out’”. On the contrary, he's just saying he would have liked going to a ‘rationalist’ meeting.
The last paragraph discusses how he's resisted the label and then he closes with “the rationalists have walked the walk and rationaled the rational, and thus they’ve given me no choice but to stand up and be counted as one of them.” He’s clearly identifying as a rationalist there
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Aren't you doing the same thing?
No, I read the comment in full, analyzed its reasoning quality, elaborated on the self-undermining epistemological implications of its content, and then related that to the epistemic and discourse norms we aspire to here. My dismissal of it is anything but shallow, though I am of course open to hearing counterarguments, which you have fallen short of offering.
Someone spending a lot of time to build one or multiple skills doesn't make them an expert on everything, but when they start talking like they are an expert on everything because of the perceived difficulties of one or more skills then red flags start to pop up and most reasonable people will notice them and swiftly call them out.
For example Elon Musk saying "At this point I think I know more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive on earth" even if you rationalize that as an out of context deadpan joke it's still completely correct to call that out as nonsense at the very least.
The more a person rationalizes statements like ("AI WILL KILL US ALL") these made by a person or cult the more likely it is that they are a cult member and they lack independent critical thinking, as they outsourced their thinking to group. Maybe their thinking is "the best thoughts", in-fact it probably is, but it's dependent on the group so their individual thinking muscle is weaken, which increases their morbidity (Airstricking a data center will get you killed or arrested by the US Gov. So it's better for the individual to question such statements rather than try to rationalize them using unprovable nonsense like god or AGI).
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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.
No, Guru Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote an essay about how people asking "This isn’t a cult , is it?" bugs him, so it's fine actually. https://www.readthesequences.com/Cultish-Countercultishness
Edit: Oh, but you call him "Guru" ... so on reflection you were probably (?) making the same point... (whoosh, sorry).
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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.
Exact same thing happened with fiber optic cable layers in the late 1990s. On exactly the same routes!
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…
I think the rationalists have failed to humanize themselves. They let their thinkpieces define them entirely, but a studiously considered think piece is a narrow view into a person. If rationalists were more publicly vulnerable, people might find them more publicly relatable.