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Guess I'm a rationalist now
361–370 of 1001 posts
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#362> “You’re [X]?! 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?” > “Yes,” I replied, not bothering to correct the “physicist” part. Didn't read much beyond that part. He'll fit right in with the rationalist crowd...
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.
The podcast Behind the Bastards described Rationalism not as a cult but as the fertile soil which is perfect for growing cults, leading to the development of cults like the Zizians (who both the Rationalists and Zizians are at pains to emphasize their mutual hostility to one another, but if you're not part of either movement, it's pretty clear how Rationalism can lead to something like the Zizians).
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
(The rationalists never took that label, it is falsely applied to them. The project is called rationality, not rationalism. Unfortunately, this is now so pervasive that there's no fixing it.)
Hmm, interesting. Might I trouble you for your definitions of rationality and rationalism? (Not a "gotcha". I really want to know.)
Sure! Rationality is what Eliezer called his project about teaching people to reason better (more empirically, more probabilistically) in the events I described over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44320919 .
I don't know rationalism too well but I think it was a historical philosophical movement asserting you could derive knowledge by reasoning from axioms rather than observation.
The primary difference here is that rationality mostly teaches "use your reason to guide what to observe and how to react to observations" rather than doing away with observations altogether; it's basically an action loop alternating between observation and belief propagation.
A prototypical/mathematical example of a pure LessWrong-type "rational" reasoner is Hutter's AIXI (a definition of the "optimal" next step given an input tape and a goal), though it has certain known problems of self-referentiality. Though of course reasoning in this way does not work for humans; a large part of the Sequences is attempts to port mathematically correct reasoning to human cognition.
You can kind of read it as a continuation of early-2000s internet atheism: instead of defining correct reasoning by enumerating incorrect logic, ie. "fallacies", it attempts to construct it positively, by describing what to do rather than just what not to do.
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rationalists have always rubbed me the wrong way too but your argument against AI doomerism is weird. If you care about first principles, how about the precautionary principle? "Maybe it's actually benign" is not a good argument for moving ahead with potentially world ending technology.
He wasn't saying "maybe it's actually going to be benign" is an argument for moving ahead with potentially world ending technology. He was saying that it might end up being benign and rationalists who say it's definitely going to be the end of the world are wildly overconfident.
No rationalist claims that it's “_definitely_ going to be the end of the world”. In fact they estimate to less than 30% the chance that AI becomes an existential risk by the end of the century.
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#365It's weird that "being interested in philosophy" is like... a movement. My background is in philosophy, but the rationalist vs nonrationalist debate seems like an undergraduate class dispute.
My old roommate worked for Open Phil, and was obsessed with AI Safety and really into Bitcoin. I never was. We still had interesting arguments about it all the time. Most of the time we just argued until we got to the axioms we disagreed on, and that was that.
You don't have to agree with the Rationalist™ perspective to apply philosophically rigorous thinking. You can be friends and allies with them without agreeing with all their views. There are strong arguments for why frequentism may be more applicable than bayesianism in different domains. Or why transhumanism is a pipe dream. They are still conversations that are worthwhile as long as you're not so confident in your position that you think you might learn something.
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#366The 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 reason we are here and exist today is because of great rationalist thinkers that were able to deduce and identify issues of survival well before they happened through the use of first principles.
The crazies and blind among humanity today can't think like that, its a deficiency people have, but they are still dependent on a group of people that are capable of that. A group that they are intent on ostracizing and depriving existence from in various forms.
You seem so wound up in the circular Paulo Freire based perspective that you can't think or see.
Bring things back to reality. If someone punches you in the face, you feel that fist hitting your face. You know someone punched you in the face. Its objective.
Imagine for a second and just assume that these people are right in their warnings, that everything they see is what you see, and all you can see is when you tip over a particular domino that has been tipped over in the past, a chain of dominoes falls over and at the end is the end of organized civilized society which tips over the ability to produce food.
For the purpose of this thought experiment, the end of the world is visible and almost here, and you can't change those dominoes after they've tipped, and worse you see the majority of people trying to tip those dominoes over for short term profit believing nothing they ever do can break everything.
Would you not be frothing at the mouth trying to get everyone you cared about to a point where they pry that domino up before it falls? so you and your children will survive? It is something you can't unsee, it is a thing that cannot be undone. Its coming. What do you do? If you are sane, you try with everything you have to help them keep it from toppling.
Now peal this thought back a moment, adjust it where it is still true, but you can't see it and you can only believe what you see.
Would you approach this differently given knowledge of the full consequence knowing that some people can see more than you? Would you walk out onto a seemingly visibly stable bridge that an engineer has said not to walk out on? Would you put yourself in front of a dam cracks running up the side, when an evacuation order was given? What would the consequence be for doing that if you led along your family and children to such places ignoring these things?
There are quite a lot of indirect principles that used to be taught which are no longer taught to the average person and this blinds them because they do not recognize it and recognition is the first thing you need to be able to act and adapt.
People who cannot adapt fail Darwin's fitness. Given all potential outcomes in the grand scheme of things, as complexity increases 99% of all outcomes are death vs life at 1%.
It is only through great care that we carry things forward to the future, and empower our children to be able to adapt to the environments we create.
Finally, we have knowledge of non-linear chaotic systems where adaptability fails because of hysteresis, where no matter how much one prepares the majority given sufficient size will die, and worse there are cohorts of people who are ensuring the environment we will soon live in is this type of environment.
Do you know how to build an organized society from scratch? If there is no reasonable plan, then you are planning to fail. Rather than make it worse through inaction, get out of the way so someone can make it better.
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It really depends on why you are having a philosophical discussion. If you are talking among friends, or just because you want to throw interesting ideas around, sure! Be free, have fun.
I come from a physics background. We used to (and still) have a ton of physicists who decide to dable in a new field, secure in their knowledge that they are smarter than the people doing it, and that anything worthwhile that has already been thought of they can just rederive ad hoc when needed (economists are the only other group that seems to have this tendency...) [1]. It turned out every time that the people who had spent decades working on, studying, discussing and debating the field in question had actually figured important shit out along the way. They might not have come with the mathematical toolbox that physicists had, and outside perspectives that challenge established thinking to prove itself again can be valuable, but when your goal is to actually understand what's happening in the real world, you can't ignore what's been done.
[1] There even is an xkcd about this:
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#368Earlier 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…
I read the whole tree of responses under this comment and I could only convince myself that when people have no arguments they try to make you look bad. Most of criticisms are just "But they think they are better than us !" and the rest is "But sometimes they are wrong !" I don't know about the community and couldn't care less but their writings have brought me some almost life saving fresh air in how to think about…
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Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#369Earlier 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…
> caring a lot about shrimp welfare (no one else does).
Ah. I guess they are working out ecology through first principles, I guess?
I feel like a lot of the criticism of EA and rationalism does boil down to some kind of general criticism of naivete and entitlement, which... is probably true when applied to lots of people, regardless of whether they espouse these ideas or not.
It's also easier to criticize obviously doomed/misguided efforts at making the world a better place than to think deeply about how many of the pressing modern day problems (environmental issues, extinction, human suffering, etc.) also seem to be completely intractable, when analyzed in terms of the average individual's ability to take action. I think some criticism of EA or rationalism is also a reaction to a creeping unspoken consensus that "things are only going to get worse" in the future.
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a really hard belief to justify. And what implications would that position have? Should biologists give up?
I think that chemistry, physics, and mathematics, are engaged in a program of understanding their subject in terms of the sort of first principles that Descartes was after. Reduction of the subject to a set of simpler thoughts that are outside of it. Biologists stand out because they have already given up on that idea. They may still seek to simplify complex things by refining principles of some kind, but it's a "wha…
On the other hand, bio is the branch of science with a single accepted "theory of everything": evolution.