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Guess I'm a rationalist now

scottaaronson.blog

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Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#331
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rationalist discussions rarely consider what should be the baseline assumption of what if one or more of the logical assumptions or associations are wrong. They also tend to not systematically plan to validate. And in many domains - what could hold true for one moment can easily shift.

100% Rationalism is an ideal, yet those who label themselves as such do not realize their base of knowledge could be wrong. They lack an understanding of epistemology and it gives them confidence. I wonder if these 'rationalists' are all under age 40, they havent seen themselves fooled yet.

This seems like exactly the opposite of everything I've read from the rationalists. They even called their website "less wrong" to call attention to knowing that they are probably still wrong about things, rather than right about everything. A lot of their early stuff is about cognitive biases. They have written a lot about "noticing confusion" when their foundational beliefs turn out to be wrong. There's even an essay about what it would feel like to be wrong about something as fundamental as 2+2=4.

Do you have specific examples in mind? (And not to put too fine a point on it, do you think there's a chance that you might be wrong about this assertion? You've expressed it very confidently...)

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#332

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…

The notion that our moral obligation somehow demands we reduce the suffering of wild animals in an ecosystem, living their lives as they have done since predation evolved and as they will do long after humans have ceased to be, is such a wild misunderstanding of who we are and what we are and what the universe is. I love my Bay Area friends. To quote the great Gwen Stefani, “This sh!t is bananas.”

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not the case. Effective altruists give to dozens of different causes, such as malaria prevention, environmentalism, animal welfare, and (perhaps most controversially) extinction risk. It can't tell you which root values to care about. It just asks you to consider whether the charity is impactful.

Even if an individual person chooses to direct all their donations to a single cause, there's no way to get everyone to donate to a single cause (nor is EA attempting to). Money gets spread around because people have different values.

It absolutely does take some money away from other causes, but only in the sense that all charities do: if you give a lot to one charity, you may have less money to give to others.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The general idea is that on the margin (in the economics sense), more resources should go to the most effective+neglected thing, and.the amount of resources I control is approximately zero in a global sense, so I personally should direct all of my personal giving to the highest impact thing.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#335
post #139

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…

If you contextualise the outmoded ideas as part of the Great Conversation [1], and the story of how we reached our current understanding, rather than objective statements of fact, then they becomes a lot more valuable and worthy of study.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Conversation

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, la…

…but that just sounds like scientific racism. Rather than judging an individual on their actual intelligence, these kinds of statistical trends allow you to justify judging an individual based on their race, because you feel you can credibly claim that race is an acceptable proxy for their genome, is an acceptable proxy for their intelligence. Or for their trustworthiness, or creativity, or sexuality, or dutifulness,…

Well, the rational thing is obviously to be scared of what ideas sound like.

> Rather than judging an individual on their actual intelligence

Actual intelligence is hard to know! However, lots of factors allow you to make a rapid initial estimate of their actual intelligence, which you can then refine as required.

(When the factors include apparent genetic heritage, this is called "racism" and society doesn't like it. But that doesn't mean it doesn't work, just that you can get fired and banned for doing it.)

((This is of course why we must allow IQ tests for hiring; then there's no need to pay attention to skin color, so liberals should be all for it.))

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Maybe it's actually going to be rather benign and more boring than expected Maybe, but generally speaking, if I think people are playing around with technology which a lot of smart people think might end humanity as we know it, I would want them to stop until we are really sure it won't. Like, "less than a one in a million chance" sure. Those are big stakes. I would have opposed the Manhattan Project on the same pri…

Do you think opposing the manhattan project would have lead to a better world? note, my assumption is not that the bomb would not have been developed. Only that by opposing the manhattan project the USA would not have developed it first.

My answer is yes, with low-moderate certainty. I still think the USA would have developed it first, and I think this is what is suggested to us by the GDP trends of the US versus basically everywhere else post-WW2.

Take this all with more than a few grains of salt. I am by no means an expert in this territory. But I don't shy away from thinking about something just because I start out sounding like an idiot. Also take into account this is post-hoc, and 1940 Manhattan Project me would obviously have had much, much less information to work with about how things actually panned out. My answer to this question should be seen as separate to the question of whether I think dodging the Manhattan Project would have been a good bet, so to speak.

Most historians agree that Japan was going to lose one way or another by that point in the war. Truman argued that dropping the bomb killed fewer people in Japan than continuing, which I agree with, but that's a relatively small factor in the calculation.

The much bigger factor is that the success of the Manhattan Project as an ultimate existence proof for the possibility of such weaponry almost certainly galvanized the Soviet Union to get on the path of building it themselves much more aggressively. A Cold War where one side takes substantially longer to get to nukes is mostly an obvious x-risk win. Counterfactual worlds can never be seen with certainty, but it wouldn't surprise me if the mere existence proof led the USSR to actually create their own atomic weapons a decade faster than they would have otherwise, by e.g. motivating Stalin to actually care about what all those eggheads were up to (much to the terror of said eggheads).

This is a bad argument to advance when we're arguing about e.g. the invention of calculus, which as you'll recall was coinvented in at least 2 places (Newton with fluxions, Liebniz with infinitesimals I think), but calculus was the kind of thing that could be invented by one smart guy in his home office. It's a much more believable one when the only actors who could have made it were huge state-sponsored laboratories in the US and the USSR.

If you buy that, that's 5 to 10 extra years the US would have had in order to do something like the Manhattan Project, but in much more controlled, peace-time environments. The atmosphere-ignition prior would have been stamped out pretty quickly by later calculations of physicists to the contrary, and after that research would have gotten back to full steam ahead. I think the counterfactual US would have gotten onto the atom bomb in the early 1950s at the absolute latest with the talent they had in an MP-less world. Just with much greater safety protocols, and without the Russians learning of it in such blatant fashion. Our abilities to detect such weapons being developed elsewhere would likely have also stayed far ahead of the Russians. You could easily imagine a situation where the Russians finally create a weapon in 1960 that was almost as powerful as what we had cooked up by 1950.

Then you're more or less back to an old-fashioned deterrence model, with the twist that the Russians don't actually know exactly how powerful the weapons the US has developed are. This is an absolute good: You can always choose to reveal just a lower bound of how powerful your side is, if you think you need to, or you can choose to remain totally cloaked in darkness. If you buy the narrative that the US were "the good guys" (I do!) and wouldn't risk armaggedon just because they had the upper hand, then this seems like it can only make the future arc of the (already shorter) Cold War all the safer.

I am assuming Gorbachev or someone still called this whole circus off around the late 80s-early 90s. Gotta trim the butterfly effect somewhere.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#338

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…

Intelligence and rational thought is useful, but like any strategy it has its tradeoffs and limitations. No amount of intelligence can overcome the chaos of long time horizons, especially when we're talking about human civilization. IMHO it's reasonable to pick a long-term problem/risk and focus on solving it. But it's pure hubris to think rationality will give you anything approaching high confidence of what the biggest problems and risks actually are on a 20-50 year time horizon, let alone 200-500 years or longer.

The whole reason we even have time to think this way is because we are at the peak of an industrial civilization that has created a level of abundance that allows a lot of people a lot of time to think. But the whole situation that we live in is not stable at all, "progress" could continue, or we could hit a peak and regress. As much as we can see a lot of long-term trajectories (eg. peak oil, global warming), we really have no idea what will be the triggers and inflection points that change the social fabric in ways that are unforeseeable and quickly invalidate whatever prior assumptions all that deep thinking was resting upon. I mean 50 years ago we thought overpopulation was the biggest risk, and that thinking has completely flipped even without a major trajectory change for industrial civilization in that time.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#339

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…

for me it was very easy to determine what rubs me the wrong way:

>I guess I'm a rationalist now.

>Aren't you the guy who's always getting into arguments who's always right?

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#340
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't have an answer here either, but after suffering through the first few chapters of HPMOR, I've found that Yudk and others tech-bros posing as philosophers are basically like leaky, dumbed-down abstractions for core philosophical ideas. Just go to the source and read about utilitarianism and deontology directly. Yudk is like the Wix of web development - sure you can build websites but you're not gonna be a prop…

HPMOR is not supposed to be rigorous. It’s supposed to be entertaining in a way that rigorous philosophy is not. You could make the same argument about any of Camus’ novels but again that would miss the point. If you want something more rigorous yudkowsky has it, bit surprising to me to complain he isn’t rigorous without talking about his rigorous work.
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