Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Guess I'm a rationalist now

scottaaronson.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 1001 posts

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#311

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

Certhas wrote: post #275
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think this is a valid point. But to some degree both can be true. I often felt when reading some of these type of texts: Wait a second, there is a wealth of thinking on these topics out there; You are not at all situating all your elaborate thinking in a broader context. And there absolutely is willingness to be challenged, and (maybe less so) a willingness to be wrong. But there also is an arrogance that "we are t…

That's a fair point. Speaking only for myself, I think I fail to understand why it's important to situate philosophical discussions in the context of all the previous philosophers who have expressed related ideas, rather than simply discussing the ideas in isolation.

I remember as a child coming to the same "if reality is a deception, at least I must exist to be deceived" conclusion that Descartes did, well before I had heard of Descartes. (I don't think this makes me special, it's just a natural conclusion anyone will reach if they ponder the subject). I think it's harmless for me to discuss that idea in public without someone saying "you need to read Descartes before you can talk about this".

I also find my personal ethics are stronly aligned with what Kant espoused. But most people I talk to are not academic philosophers and have not read Kant, so when I want to explain my morals, I am better off explaining the ideas themselves than talking about Kant, which would be a distraction anyway because I didn't learn them from Kant, we just arrived at the same conclusions. If I'm talking with a philosopher I can just say "I'm a Kantian" as shorthand, but that's really just jargon for people who already know what I'm talking about.

I also think that while it would be unusual for someone to (for example) write a guide to understanding relativity without once mentioning Einstein, it also wouldn't be a fundamental flaw.

(But I agree there's no certainly excuse for someone asserting that they're right because they're rational!)

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#312

Post by ToValueFunfetti »

bakuninsbart wrote: post #253
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Weirdly enough, both can be true. I was tangentially involved in EA in the early days, and have some friends who were more involved. Lots of interesting, really cool stuff going on, but there was always latent insecurity paired with overconfidence and elitism as is typical in young nerd circles. When big money got involved, the tone shifted a lot. One phrase that really stuck with me is "exceptional talent". Everyone…

>they bought mansions for team building

They bought one mansion to host fundraisers with the super-rich, which I believe is an important correction. You might disagree with that reasoning as well, but it's definitely not as described.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#313

Post by FeepingCreature »

greener_grass wrote: post #75
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…

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.

In AI finetuning, there's a theory that the model already contains the right ideas and skills, and the finetuning just raises them to prominence. Similarly in philosophic pedagogy, there's huge value in taking ideas that are correct but unintuitive and maybe have 30% buy-in and saying "actually, this is obviously correct, also here's an analysis of why you wouldn't believe it anyway and how you have to think to become able to believe it". That's most of what the Sequences are: they take from every field of philosophy the ideas that are actually correct, and say "okay actually, we don't need to debate this anymore, this just seems to be the truth because so-and-so." (Though the comments section vociferously disagrees.)

And it turns out if you do this, you can discard 90% of philosophy as historical detritus. You're still taking ideas from philosophy, but which ideas matters, and how you present them matters. The massive advantage of the Sequences is they have justified and well-defended confidence where appropriate. And if you manage to pick the right answers again and again, you get a system that actually hangs together, and IMO it's to philosophy's detriment that it doesn't do this itself much more aggressively.

For instance, 60% of philosophers are compatibilists. Compatibilism is really obviously correct. "What are you complaining about, that's a majority, isn't that good?" What is wrong with those 40% though? If you're in those 40%, what arguments may convince you? Repeat to taste.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#314

Post by ambicapter »

9rx wrote: post #263
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…

> And today the railroad system in the USA sucks compared to other developed countries and even China. Nonsense. The US has the largest freight rail system in the world, and is considered to have the most efficient rail system in the world to go along with it. There isn't much in the way of passenger service, granted, but that's because people in the US aren't, well, poor. They can afford better transportation option…

Yeah, a cheap transportation option is a terrible thing to have... /s

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#315

Post by whatshisface »

achierius wrote: post #174
loose-cannon wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a really hard belief to justify. And what implications would that position have? Should biologists give up?

Concretely we know that there exist irreducible structures, at least in mathematics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_finite_simpl... The largest of the finite simple groups (themselves objects of study as a means of classifying other, finite but non-simple groups, which can always be broken down into simple groups) is the Monster Group -- it has order 80801742479451287588645990496171075700575436800000…

That's not really true, otherwise every paper about it would be that many words long. The monster group can be "reduced" into its definition and its properties which can only be considered a few at a time. A person has a working memory of three to seven items.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#317

Post by Mond_ »

thomasjudge wrote: post #290
djoldman wrote: post #210

Just to confirm, this is about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalist_community and not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalism right?

Along these lines I am sort of skimming articles/blogs/websites about Lightcone, LessWrong, etc, and I am still struggling with the question...what do they DO?

Look, it's just an internet community of people who write blog posts and discuss their interests on web forums.

Asking "What do they do?" is like asking "What do Hackernewsers do?"

It's not exactly a coherent question. Rationalists are a somewhat tighter group, but in the end the point stands. They write and discuss their common interests, e.g. the progress of AI, psychiatry stuff, bayesianism, thought experiments, etc.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#318

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

danans wrote: post #301
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

If that has the potential to ruin economies, then the economic rot is so much more profound than anyone (me included) ever realized.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#319

Post by toasterlovin »

radicalbyte wrote: post #22

* 20 somethings who are clearly on spectrum * Group are "special" * Centered around a charismatic leader * Weird sex stuff Guys we have a cult!

Also:

* Communal living

* Sacred texts & knowledge

* Doomsday predictions

* Guru/prophet lives on the largesse of followers

It's rich for a group that claims to reason based on priors to completely ignore that they possess all the major defining characteristics of a cult.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#320

Post by nyeah »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #280
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…

> their initial conditions were highly artificial There has to be (or ought to be) a name for this kind of epistemological fallacy, where in pursuit of truth, the pursuit of logical sophistication and soundness between starting assumptions (or first principles) and conclusions becomes functionally way more important than carefully evaluating and thoughtfully choosing the right starting assumptions (and being willing…

Yes, there's a name for it. They're dumbasses.

“[...] Clevinger was one of those people with lots of intelligence and no brains, and everyone knew it except those who soon found it out. In short, he was a dope." - Joseph Heller, Catch-22 https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7522733-in-short-clevinger-...

Post reply on HN