Guess I'm a rationalist now • Hacker News Board

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#411

Post by zahlman » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 7:22 PM UTC

Bjartr wrote: post #110

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…

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…

> 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.

Well said. Rationalism is about doing rationalism, not about being a rationalist.

Paul Graham was on the right track about that, though seemingly for different reasons (referring to "Keep Your Identity Small").

> If you're saying "well actually, I'm right" more often than "oh wow, maybe I'm wrong", you've failed as a rationalist.

On the other hand, success is supposed to look exactly like actually being right more often.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#412

Post by jrm4 » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 7:22 PM UTC

jrm4 wrote: post #185

mathattack wrote: post #182

Logic is an awesome tool that took us from Greek philosophers to the gates on our computers. The challenge with pure rationalism is checking the first principles that the thinking comes from. Logic can lead you astray if the principles are wrong, or you miss the complexity along the way. On the missing first principles, look at Aristotle. One of the history's greatest logicians came to many false conclusions. On miss…

Yup, can't stress the word "tool" enough. It's a "tool," it's a not a "magic window into absolute truth." Tools can be good for a job, or bad. Carry on.

looks like I riled up the Rationalists, huh

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#413

Post by zahlman » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 7:24 PM UTC

the_af wrote: post #297

mariusor wrote: post #291

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…

>but you just know it comes with a high degree of smugness and false modesty

No; I know no such thing, as I have no good reason to believe it, and plenty of countering evidence.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#414

Post by jhbadger » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 7:25 PM UTC

noname120 wrote: post #326

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…

> 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. Do you have examples of that? I have a different perception, mo…

As Adam Becker shows in his book, EAs started out being reasonable "give to charity as much as you can, and research which charities do the most good" but have gotten into absurdities like "it is more important to fund rockets than help starving people or prevent malaria because maybe an asteroid will hit the Earth, killing everyone, starving or not".

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#415

Post by notahacker » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 7:29 PM UTC

ToValueFunfetti wrote: post #312

bakuninsbart wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wytham Abbey was bought mainly to host internal workshops and "retreats", as outlined by the people who bought it https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xof7iFB3uh8Kc53bG/... https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yggjKEeehsnmMYnZd/...

As far as I know it's never hosted an impress-the-oligarch fundraiser, which as you say would at least have a logic behind it[1] even if it might seem distasteful.

For a philosophy which started out from the point of view that much of mainstream aid was spent with little thought, it was a bit of an end of Animal Farm moment.

(to their credit, a lot of people who identified as EAs were unhappy. If you drew a Venn diagram of the people that objected, people who sneered at the objections[2] and people who identified as rationalists you might only need two circles though...)

[1]a pretty shaky one considering how easy it is to impress American billionaires with Oxford architecture without going to the expense of operating a nearby mansion as a venue, particularly if you happen to be a charitable movement with strong links to the university... [2]obviously people are only objecting to it for PR purposes because they're not smart enough to realise that capital appreciates and that venues cost money, and definitely not because they've got a pretty good idea how expensive upkeep on little used medieval venues are and how many alternatives exist if you really care about the cost effectiveness of your retreat, especially to charitable movements affiliated with a university...

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#416

Post by jandrese » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 7:29 PM UTC

noname120 wrote: post #326

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…

> 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. Do you have examples of that? I have a different perception, mo…

One example is Newcomb's problem. It presupposes a ridiculous scenario where a godlike being acts irrationally and then people try to base their life around "winning" the game that will never ever happen to them.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#417

Post by mise_en_place » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 7:30 PM UTC

jonstewart wrote: post #307

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.

Yeah. It's not like everything's a Talmudic dialectic.

"I haven't done anything!" - A Serious Man

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#418

Post by ajkjk » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 7:31 PM UTC

johhnylately535 wrote: post #409

ajkjk wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a theory of what's happening, both with you here in this comment section and with the rationalists in general. Humans are generally better at perceiving threats than they are at putting those threats into words. When something seems "dangerous" abstractly, they will come up with words for why---but those words don't necessarily reflect the actual threat, because the threat might be hard to describe. Neverthele…

I finally gave in and created an account because of your comment. It's beautifully put. I would only perhaps add that, to me, the neo-rationalist thing looks the most similar to things that don't work yet attract hardcore "true believers". It's a pattern repeated through the ages, perhaps most intimately for me in the seemingly endless parades of computer system redesigns: software, hardware, or both. Randomly one mi…

(Thank you) I agree, although I do think that the rationalists and EAs are way better than most of the other narrowband groups, as you call them, out there, such as the Metaverse or Crypto people. The rationalists are at least mostly legitimately motivated by morality and not just by a "blow it all up and replace it with something we control" philosophy (which I have come to believe is the belief-set that only a person who is convinced that they are truly powerless comes to). I see the rationalists as failing due to a skill issue as well: because they have so-defined themselves by their rationalism, they have trouble understanding the things in the world that they don't have a good rational understanding of, such as morality. They are too invested in words and truth and correctness to understand that there can be a lot of emotional truth encoded in logical falsehood.

edit: oh, also, I think that a good part of people's aversion to the rationalists is just a reaction to the narrowband quality itself, not to the content. People are well-aware of the sorts of things that narrowband self-justifying philosophies lead to, from countless examples, whether it's at the personal level (an unaccountable schoolteacher) or societal (a genocidal movement). We don't trust a group unless they specifically demonstrate non-narrowbandedness, which means being collectively willing to change their behavior in ways that don't make sense to them. Any movement that co-opts the idea of what is morally justifiable---who says that e.g. rationality is what produces truth and things that run counter to it do not---is inherently frightening.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#419

Post by genewitch » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 7:32 PM UTC

verall wrote: post #284

genewitch wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not what i am speaking to. I don't know the number, and neither do you. you'd have to call those 5000 CPS caseworkers and ask them what their caseload is (it's 69 per caseworker on average across the US. that's a third of a million cases, in aggregate across all caseworkers) my wife's caseload (adults) "floats around fifty."

> not what i am speaking to My misunderstanding then - what are you speaking to? Even reading this comment, I still don't understand.

>> 37.4%? That's 27m kids! How can CPS run so many investigations? That's 4k investigations a day over 18 years,

> 800 people with my wife's qualifications and caseload is equivalent to 4000/day. there's ~5000 caseworkers in the US

I don't know what the number of children in the system is. as i said in the comment you replied to, here. but the average US CPS worker caseload is 69 cases. which is over 300,000 children per year, because there are ~5000 CPS caseworkers in the US.

I was only speaking to "how do they 'run' that many investigations?" as if it's impossible. I pointed out it's possible with ~1000 caseworkers.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#420

Post by zahlman » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 7:34 PM UTC

NoGravitas wrote: post #126

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…

> incubated the neoreactionary movement that is currently dominant in US politics

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

You are presenting a highly contentious worldview for the sake of smearing an outgroup. Please don't. Further, the smear relies on guilt by association that many (including myself) would consider invalid on principle, and which further doesn't even bear out on cursory examination.

At least take a moment to see how others view the issue. "Reliable Sources: How Wikipedia Admin David Gerard Launders His Grudges Into the Public Record" https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik... includes lengthy commentary on Sandifer (a close associate of Gerard)'s involvement with rationalism, and specifically on the work you cite and its biases.