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Guess I'm a rationalist now

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Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#301

Post by danans »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #285
NoGravitas wrote: post #130

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…

>s a smokescreen to distract people from thinking clearly about the more pedestrian hazards of AI that isn't self-improving or superhuman, Anything that can't be self-improving or superhuman almost certainly isn't worthy of the moniker "AI". A true AI will be born into a world that has already unlocked the principles of intelligence. Humans in that world would be capable themselves of improving AI (slowly), but the A…

> We don't even have anything resembling real AI at the moment. Generative models are probably some blind alley.

I think that the OP's point was that it doesn't matter whether it's "real AI" or not. Even if it's just a glorified auto-correct system, it's one that has the clear potential to overturn our information/communication systems and our assumptions about individuals' economic value.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#302

Post by jdmichal »

troyastorino wrote: post #276
jandrese wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The overlap between the Effective Altruism community and the Rationalist community is extremely high. They’re largely the same people. Effective Altruism gained a lot of early attention on LessWrong, and the pessimistic focus on AI existential risk largely stems from an EA desire to avoid “temporal-discounting” bias. The reasoning is something like: if you accept that future people count just as much as current peopl…

I'm not familiar with any of these communities. Is there also a general bias towards one side between "the most important thing gets the *most* resources" and "the most important thing gets *all* the resources"? Or, in other words, the most important thing is the only important thing?

IMO it's fine to pick a favorite and devote extra resources to it. But that turns less fine when one also starts working to deprive everything else of any oxygen because it's not your favorite. (And I'm aware that this criticism applies to lots of communities.)

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#303

Post by FeepingCreature »

dcminter wrote: post #258
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Extreme eagerness to disavow accusations of cultishness ... doth the lady protest too much perhaps? My hobby is occasionally compared to a cult. The typical reaction of an adherent to this accusation is generally "Heh, yeah, totally a cult." Edit: Oh, but you call him "Guru" ... so on reflection you were probably (?) making the same point... (whoosh, sorry).

> Extreme eagerness to disavow accusations of cultishness ... doth the lady protest too much perhaps?

You don't understand how anxious the rationalist community was around that time. We're not talking self-assured confident people here. These articles were written primarily to calm down people who were panickedly asking "we're not a cult, are we" approximately every five minutes.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#304

Post by throwawaymaroon »

sixo wrote: post #139
greener_grass wrote: post #75

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.

To the Stem-enlightened mind, the classical understanding and pedagogy of such ideas is underwhelming, vague, and riddled with language-game problems, compared to the precision a mathematically-rooted idea has. They're rederiving all this stuff not out of obstinacy, but because they prefer it. I don't really identify with rationalism per se, but I'm with them on this--the humanities are over-cooked and a humanity edu…

[dead]

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#305

Post by entropicdrifter »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #248
pavlov wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

China hasn't shown that their railroad buildout will work. My understanding is they currently aren't making enough return to payoff debt, yet alone plan for future maintenance. Historically the command economy type stuff looks great in the early years, it's later on we see if that is reality. 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…

The USA today is in a robber baron phase. We only briefly left it for about 2 generations due to the rise of labor power in the late 1800s/early 1900s. F.D.R. was the compromise president put into place to placate labor and prevent a socialist revolution.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#307

Post by jonstewart »

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…

I think the thing that rubs me the wrong way is that I’m a classic cynic (a childhood of equal parts Vonnegut and Ecclesiastes). My prior is “human fallibility”, and, nope, I am doing pretty well, no need to update it. The rationalist crowd seems waaaaay too credulous. Also, like Aaronson, I’m a complete normie in my personal life.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#308

Post by FeepingCreature »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #168
Bjartr wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Chapter 67. https://www.readthesequences.com/Knowing-About-Biases-Can-Hu... (And since it's in the book, and people know about it, obviously they're not doing it themselves.)

Also the Valley of Bad Rationality tag. https://www.lesswrong.com/w/valley-of-bad-rationality

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#309

Post by ARandumGuy »

cubefox wrote: post #296
ARandumGuy wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least one cult originates from the Rationalist movement, the Zizians [1]. A cult that straight up murdered at least four people. And while the Zizian belief system is certainly more extreme then mainstream Rationalist beliefs, it's not that much more extreme. For more info, the Behind the Bastards podcast [2] did a pretty good series on how the Zizians sprung up out of the Bay area Rationalist scene. I'd highly re…

[flagged]

Ziz did leave the rationalist movement, but to imply there's no link is simply dishonest. Ziz spent a lot of time in the Bay area Rationalist scene, and a lot of her belief system has clear Rationalist origins (such as timeless decision theory and the general obsession with an all-powerful AI). Ziz did not come up with this stuff in a vacuum, she got it from being a rationalist.

Also, I'm not sure if you did this intentionally, but Ziz is a trans woman. She may have done some awful shit, but that doesn't justify misgendering her.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#310

Post by kryogen1c »

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 ?

Yes, rationalism is not a substitute for humility or fallibility. However, rationalism is an important counterpoint to humanity, which is orthogonal to rationalism. But really, being rational is only binary - you cant be anything other than rational or irrational. You're either doing what's best or you're not. That's just a hard pill for most people to swallow.

To use the popular metaphor, people are drowning all over the world and we're all choosing not to save them because we don't want to ruin our shoes. Look in the mirror and try and comprehend how selfish we are.

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