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Guess I'm a rationalist now

scottaaronson.blog

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Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#461

Post by johnfn »

lukas099 wrote: post #381

This is vibe-based, but I think the Rationalists get more vitriol than they deserve. Upon reflecting, my hypothesis for this is threefold: 1. They are a community —they have an in-group, and if you are not one of them you are by-definition in the out-group. People tend not to like being in other peoples' out-groups. 2. They have unusual opinions and are open about them. People tend not to like people who express opin…

HN judges rationality quite severely. I mean, look at this thread about Mr. Beast[1], who it's safe to say is a controversial figure, and notice how all the top comments are all pretty charitable. It's pretty funny to take the conversation there and then compare the comments to this article.

Scott Aaronson - in theory someone HN should be a huge fan of, from all reports a super nice and extremely intelligent guy who knows a staggering amount about quantum mechanics - says he likes rationality, and gets less charity than Mr. Beast. Huh?

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41549649

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#462

Post by notahacker »

fatbird wrote: post #255
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how this is a response to what I wrote. Can you explain?

I think GP is saying that their epistemic humility is a pretense, a pose. They do a lot of throat clearing about quantifying their certainty and error checking themselves, and then proceed to bring about very consequential outcomes anyway for absurd reasons with predictable side effects that they should have considered but didn't.

Yeah. It's not that they never express uncertainty so much as they like to express uncertainty as arbitrarily precise and convenient-looking expected value calculations which often look like far more of a rhetorical tool to justify their preferences (I've accounted for the uncertainty and even given a credence as low as 14.2% I'm still right!) than a decision making heuristic...

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#463

Post by Aurornis »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #189
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…

> 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…

I grew up with some friends who were deep into the early roots of online rationalism, even slightly before LessWrong came online. I've been around long enough to recognize the rhetorical devices used in rationalist writings:

> 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 titled "list of things I was wrong about"?

There's a lot of in-group signaling in rationalist circles like the "epistemic status" taglines, posting predictions, and putting your humility on show.

This has come full-circle, though, and now rationalist writings are generally pre-baked with hedging, both-sides takes, escape hatches, and other writing tricks that make it easier to claim they weren't entirely wrong in the future.

A perfect exaple is the recent "AI 2027" doomsday scenario that predicts a rapid escalation of AI superpowers followed by disaster in only a couple years: https://ai-2027.com/

If you read the backstory and supporting blog posts from the authors they are filled to the brim with hedges and escape hatches. Scott Alexander wrote that it was something like "the 80th percentile of their fast scenario", which means when it fails to come true he can simple say it wasn't actually his median prediction anyway and that they were writing about the fast scenario. I can already predict that the "We were wrong" article will be more about what they got right with a heavy emphasis on the fact that it wasn't their real median prediction anyway.

I think this group relies heavily on the faux-humility and hedging because they've recognized how powerful it is to get people to trust them. Even the comment above is implying that because they say and do these things, they must be immune from the criticism delivered above. That's exactly why they wrap their posts in these signals, before going on to do whatever they were going to do anyway.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#464

Post by lowbloodsugar »

teamonkey wrote: post #422
lukas099 wrote: post #381

This is vibe-based, but I think the Rationalists get more vitriol than they deserve. Upon reflecting, my hypothesis for this is threefold: 1. They are a community —they have an in-group, and if you are not one of them you are by-definition in the out-group. People tend not to like being in other peoples' out-groups. 2. They have unusual opinions and are open about them. People tend not to like people who express opin…

> This is vibe-based You mean an empirical observation

Three examples of feelings-based conclusions were presented. There is what is so, and how you feel about them. By all means be empirical about what you felt, and maybe look into that. “How this made me feel” describes the cause of how we got the USA today.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#465

Post by astrange »

josephg wrote: post #59
ineedaj0b wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

rationalism got pretty lame the last 2-3 years. imo the peak was trying to convince me to donate a kidney. post-rationalism is where all the cool kids are and where the best ideas are at right now. the post rationalists consistently have better predictions and the 'rationalists' are stuck arguing whether chickens suffer more getting factory farmed or chickens cause more suffering eating bugs outside. they also let SF…

Where do the post rats hang out these days? I got involved in the stoa during covid until the online community fragmented. Are there still events & hangouts?

They're a group called "tpot" on twitter, but it's unclear what's supposed to be good about them.

There's kind of two clusters, one is people who talk about meditation all the time, the other is center-right people who did drugs once. I think the second group showed up because rationalists are not-so-secretly into scientific racism (because they believe anything they see with numbers in it) and they just wanted to hang out with people like that.

There is an interesting atmosphere where it feels like they observed California big tech 1000x engineer types and are trying to cargo cult the way those people behave. I'm not sure what they get out of it.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#466

Post by tome »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #357
tome wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious how you assess, relatively speaking, the shittiness of defence of genocide versus false claims of genocide.

[flagged]

Interesting conclusion, since I didn't make a claim either way.

Still, for the record, other independent observers have documented the practices and explained why they don't meet the definition of genocide, John Spencer and Natasha Hausdorff to name two examples. It seems by no means clear that it's valid to make a claim of genocide. I certainly wouldn't unless I was really, really certain of my claim, because to get such a claim wrong is equally egregious to denying a true genocide, in my opinion.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#469

Post by notahacker »

thom wrote: post #223
NoGravitas wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always seen the breathless Singularitarian worrying about AI Alignment as a smokescreen to distract people from thinking clearly about the more pedestrian hazards of AI that isn't self-improving or superhuman, from algorithmic bias, to policy-washing, to energy costs and acceleration of wealth concentration. It also leads to so-called longtermism - discounting the benefits of solving current real problems and fo…

The Singularitarians were breathlessly worrying 20+ years ago, when AI was absolute dogshit - Eliezer once stated that Doug Lenat was incautious in launching Eurisko because it could've gone through a hard takeoff. I don't think it's just an act to launder their evil plans, none of which at the time worked.

Fair. OpenAI totally use those arguments to launder their plans, but that saga has been more Silicon Valley exploiting longstanding rationalist beliefs for PR purposes than rationalists getting rich...

Eliezer did once state his intentions to build "friendly AI", but seems to have been thwarted by his first order reasoning about how AI decision theory should work being more important to him than building something that actually did work, even when others figured out the latter bit.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#470

Post by astrange »

jcranmer wrote: post #362
dcminter wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I don't think that podcast has very in-depth observations. It's just another iteration of east coast culture media people who used to be on Twitter a lot, isn't it?

> the fertile soil which is perfect for growing cults

This is true but it's not rationalism, it's just that they're from Berkeley. As far as I can tell if you live in Berkeley you just end up joining a cult.

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