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Guess I'm a rationalist now

scottaaronson.blog

391–400 of 1001 posts

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#391

Probably the most useful book ever written about topics adjacent to capital-R Rationalism is "Neoreaction, A Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right" [1], by Elizabeth Sandifer. Though the topic of the book is nominally the Alt-Right, a lot more of it is about the capital-R Rationalist communities and individuals that incubated the neoreactionary movement that is currently dominant in US politics. It's probably…

> Probably the most useful book

You mean "probably the book that confirms my biases the most"

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#392

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalist_community "In particular, several women in the community have made allegations of sexual misconduct, including abuse and harassment, which they describe as pervasive and condoned." There's weird sex stuff, logically, it's a cult.

Most weird sex stuff takes place outside of cults, so that doesn't follow.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you just know they actually mean "MoreRight". I'm not affiliated with the rationalist community, but I always interpreted "Less Wrong" as word-play on how "being right" is an absolute binary: you can either be right, or not be right, while "being wrong" can cover a very large gradient. I expect the community wanted to emphasize how people employing the specific kind of Bayesian iterative reasoning they were prosely…

> I always interpreted "Less Wrong" as word-play on how "being right" is an absolute binary Specifically (AFAIK) a reference to Asimov’s description[1] of the idea: > [W]hen people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than…

Cool, I didn't know the quote, nor that it was inspiration for the name. Thank you.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#394
post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you just know they actually mean "MoreRight". I'm not affiliated with the rationalist community, but I always interpreted "Less Wrong" as word-play on how "being right" is an absolute binary: you can either be right, or not be right, while "being wrong" can cover a very large gradient. I expect the community wanted to emphasize how people employing the specific kind of Bayesian iterative reasoning they were prosely…

> I'm not affiliated with the rationalist community, but I always interpreted "Less Wrong" as word-play on how "being right" is an absolute binary: you can either be right, nor not be right, while "being wrong" can cover a very large gradient. I know that's what they mean at the surface level, but you just know it comes with a high degree of smugness and false modesty. "I only know that I know nothing" -- maybe, but…

Sometimes people enjoy being clever not because they want to rub it in your face that you're not, but because it's fun. I usually try not to take it personally when I don't get the joke and strive to do better next time.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might kind of point to real life people having too much of what is now called, "rationality" , and very little of what used to be called "wisdom" ?

Wisdom tends to resemble shallow aphorisms despite being framed as universal. Rather than interrogating wisdom's relevance or depth, many people simply repeat it uncritically as a shortcut to insight. This reflects more about how people use wisdom than the content itself, but I believe that behavior contributes to our perception of the importance of wisdom. It frequently reduces complex problems into comfortable over…

[deleted]

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#396
I think I'm missing something important.

My understanding of "Rationalists" is that they're followers of rationalism; that is, that truth can be understood only through intellectual deduction, rather than sensory experience.

I'm wondering if this is a _different_ kind of "Rationalist." Can someone explain?

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#398
post #119

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.

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…

It's not a nice response but I would say: don't be so lazy. Struggle through the hard stuff.

I say this as someone who had the opposite experience: I had a decent humanities education, but an abysmal mathematics education, and now I am tackling abstract mathematics myself. It's hard. I need to read sections of works multiple times. I need to sit down and try to work out the material for myself on paper.

Any impression that one discipline is easier than another probably just stems from the fact that you had good guides for the one and had the luck to learn it when your brain was really plastic. You can learn the other stuff too, just go in with the understanding that there's no royal road to philosophy just as there's no royal road to mathematics.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#399
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what Rationalism(tm) is. The basic trope is showing off how smart you are and what I like to call "intellectual edgelording." The latter is basically a fetish for contrarianism. The big flex is to take a very contrarian position -- according to what one imagines is the prevailing view -- and then defend it in the most creative way possible. Intellectual edgelording gives us shit like neoreaction ("mona…

Thank you for finally making this make sense to me.

Another thing that's endemic in Rationalism is a kind of specialized variety of the Gish gallop.

It goes like this:

(1) Assert a set of priors (with emphasis on the word assert).

(2) Reason from those priors to some conclusion.

(3) Seamlessly, without skipping a beat, take that solution as valid because the reasoning appears consistent and make that part of a new set of priors.

(4) Repeat, or rather recurse since the new set of priors is built on previous iterations.

The entire concept of science is founded on the idea that you can't do that. You have to stop and touch grass, which in science means making observations or doing experiments if possible. You have to see if the conclusion you reached actually matches reality in any meaningful way. That's because reason alone is fragile. As any programmer knows, a single error or a single mistaken prior propagates and renders the entire tree invalid. Do this recursively and one error anywhere in this crystalline structure means you've built a gigantic tower of bullshit.

I compare it to the Gish gallop because of how enthusiastically they do it, and how by doing it so fast it becomes hard to try to argue against. You end up having to try to counter a firehose of Oh So Very Smart complicated exquisitely reasoned nonsense.

Or you can just, you know, conclude that this entire method of determining truth is invalid and throw the entire thing in the trash.

A good "razor" for this kind of thing is to judge it by its fruit. So far the fruit is AI hysteria, cults like the Zizians, neoreactionary political ideology, Sam Bankman Fried, etc. Has anything good or useful come from any of this?

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#400

I think I'm missing something important. My understanding of "Rationalists" is that they're followers of rationalism; that is, that truth can be understood only through intellectual deduction, rather than sensory experience. I'm wondering if this is a _different_ kind of "Rationalist." Can someone explain?

It's a terrible name that collides with the older one you're thinking of
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