What the fuck am I reading lmao.
Guess I'm a rationalist now
441–450 of 1001 posts
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#442Some of the comments here remind me of online commentary about some place called "the orange site". Always wondered who they were talking about...
Can't stand that place. Those people are all so sure that they're right about everything.
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#443Earlier 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…
The confluence of Bay Area rationalism and academic philosophy means a lot of other EA space is given to discussing hypotheticals in longwinded forum posts, blogs and papers. Some of those are well-trod utilitarian debates, others take it towards uniquely EA arguments like asserting that given that there could be as many as 10^31 future humans, essentially anything which claims to reduce existential risk - no matter how implausible the mechanism - has higher expected value than doing stuff that would certainly save human lives. An apparently completely unironic forum argument asked their fellow EAs to consider the possibility that given various heroic assumptions, the sum total of the suffering caused to mosquitos by anti-malaria nets might in fact be larger than the suffering caused by malaria they prevent. Obviously not a view shared by EAs who donate to antimalaria charities, but absolutely characteristic of the sort of knots EAs like to tie themselves in - it even has its own jokey jargon ('the rebugnant conclusion' and 'taking the train to crazy town') to describe adjacent arguments and the impulse to pursue them.
The newsletter is of course far more to the point than that, but even then you'll notice half of it is devoted to understanding the emotional state and intentions of LLMs...
It is of course entirely possible to identify as an "Effective Altruist" whilst making above-average donations to charities with rigorous efficacy metrics and otherwise being completely normal, but that's not the centre of EA debate or culture....
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#444[flagged]
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#445Scott Aaronson, the man who turned scrupulosity into a weapon against his own psyche is a capital R rationalist? Yeah, this surprises absolutely nobody.
"YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE: I have now joined the club everyone assumed I was already a member of."
It's his personal blog, the only people whose attention he's asking for are the people choosing to wander over there to see what he's up to.
Not his fault that people deemed it interesting enough to upvote to the front page of HN.
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#446The narcissism in this movement is insufferable. I hope the conditions for its existence will soon pass and give way to something kinder and more learned.
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Who is "they" exactly, and how can they estimate the probability of a future event based on zero priors and a total lack of scientific evidence?
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
Feels like "they are wrong and smug" is enough reason to dislike the movement
Bashir: Even when they're neither? Garak: Especially when they're neither.
The comment I replied to conceded wrongness and smugness but is still somehow confused why otherwise intelligent ppl dislike the movement. I was hoping to clear it up for them
Extra points for that comment's author implying that people who don't like the wrong and smug movement are unintelligent and protecting their egos, thus personally proving its smugness
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#449Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Therefore, nothing can produce greater positive expected value than preventing existential risks—so working to reduce these risks becomes the highest priority. Incidentally, the flaw in this theory is in thinking you understand what all the existential risks are . Suppose you clock "malicious AI" as a huge risk and then hamper AI, but it turns out the bigger risk is not doing space exploration, which AI would have…
> Incidentally, the flaw in this theory is in thinking you understand what all the existential risks are. Rationalist community understands that very well. They even know how to put bounds on the unknowns and their own lack of information. > The thing evolution teaches us is that diversity is a group survival trait. Anybody insisting "nobody anywhere should do X" is more likely to cause an ELE than prevent one. Right…
> They even know how to put bounds on the unknowns and their own lack of information.
No they don't. They think they can do this because they've accidentally reinvented the philosophy "logical positivism", which philosophers gave up on because it doesn't work. (This is similar to how they accidentally reinvented reconstructing arguments and called it "steelmanning".)
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#450Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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-...
You mean people projecting this problem onto them with zero evidence beyond their own preconceptions and an occasional stereotype they read online?
HN should be better than this.