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Guess I'm a rationalist now

scottaaronson.blog

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Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#471
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…

  For example, I recall being in lot of arguments that are purely "semantical" in nature.
I believe this is what Wittgenstein called “language games”

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#472
post #328
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are clearly dismissing his experience without much though. If a park ranger stopped you in the woods and said there was a mountain lion up ahead would you argue that he doesn't have enough information to be sure from such a quick glance? Someone spending a lot of time to build one or multiple skills doesn't make them an expert on everything, but when they start talking like they are an expert on everything becaus…

If a park ranger said "I looked over the first 2% of the park and concluded there's no mountain lions" - that is, made an assessment on the whole from inspection of a narrow segment - I don't think I would take his word on the matter. If OP had more experience to support his statement, he should have included it, rather than writing a shallow, one-sentence dismissal.

I think the recently popular way of saying "I looked over 2% and assumed it generalizes" these days is to call the thing ergodic.

Which of course the blog article is not, but then at least the complaint wouldn't sound so obviously shallow.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#473

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.

At least one cult originates from the Rationalist movement, the Zizians [1]. A cult that straight up murdered at least four people. And while the Zizian belief system is certainly more extreme then mainstream Rationalist beliefs, it's not that much more extreme. For more info, the Behind the Bastards podcast [2] did a pretty good series on how the Zizians sprung up out of the Bay area Rationalist scene. I'd highly re…

There's a lot more than one of them. Leverage Research was the one before Zizians.

Those are only named cults though; they just love self-organizing into such patterns. Of course, living in group homes is a "rational" response to Bay Area rents.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#474

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…

> 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.

The rationalist community is most definitely not exclusive. You can join it by declaring yourself to be a rationalist, posting blogs with "epistemic status" taglines, and calling yourself a rationalist.

The criticisms are not because it's a cool club that won't let people in.

> They have unusual opinions and are open about them. People tend not to like people who express opinions different than their own.

Herein lies one of the problems with the rationalist community: For all of their talk about heterodox ideas and entertaining different viewpoints, they are remarkably lockstep in many of their opinions.

From the outside, it's easy to see how one rationalist blogger plants the seed of some topic and then it gets adopted by the others as fact. A few years ago a rationalist blogger wrote a long series postulating that trace lithium in water was causing obesity. It even got an Astral Codex Ten monetary grant. For years it got shared through the rationalist community as proof of something, even though actual experts picked it apart from the beginning and showed how the author was misinterpreting studies, abusing statistics, and ignoring more prominent factors.

The problem isn't differing opinions, the problem is that they disregard actual expertise and try ham-fisted attempts at "first principals" evaluations of a subject while ignoring contradictory evidence and they do this very frequently.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#475

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…

> And the general absolutist tone of the community. The people involved all seem very... Full of themselves ?

You'd have to be to actually think you were being rational about everything.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#476
post #408

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…

Calling yourself rationalists: frames everyone else as irrational. It reminds me Kier Starmers Labour, calling themselves "the adults in the room". Its a cheap framing trick, belying an emptiness on the people using it.

Pretty much every movement does this sort of thing.

Religions: "Catholic" actually means "universal" (implication: all the real Christians are among our number). "Orthodox" means "teaching the right things" (implication: anyone who isn't one of us is wrong). "Sunni" means "following the correct tradition" (implication: anyone who isn't one of us is wrong").

Political parties: "Democratic Party" (anyone who doesn't belong doesn't like democracy). "Republican Party" (anyone who doesn't belong wants kings back). "Liberal Party" (anyone else is against freedom).

In the world of software, there's "Agile" (everyone else is sluggish and clumsy). "Free software" (as with the liberals: everything else is opposed to freedom). People who like static typing systems tend to call them "strong" (everyone else is weak). People who like the other sort tend to call them "dynamic" (everyone else is rigid and inflexible).

I hate it too, but it's so very very common that I really hope it isn't right to say that everyone who does it is empty-headed or empty-hearted.

The charitable way to look at it: often these movements-and-names come about when some group of people picks a thing they particularly care about, tries extra-hard to do that thing, and uses the thing's name as a label. The "Rationalists" are called that because the particular thing they chose to focus on was rationality; maybe they do it well, maybe not, but it's not so much "no one else is rational" as "we are trying really hard to be as rational as we can".

(Not always. The term "Catholic" really was a power-grab: "we are the universal church, those other guys are schismatic heretics". In a different direction: the other philosophical group called "Rationalists" weren't saying "we think rationality is really important", they were saying "knowledge comes from first-principles reasoning" as opposed to the "Empiricists" who said "knowledge comes from sense experience". Today's "Rationalists" are actually more Empiricist than Rationalist in that sense, as it happens.)

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nature of unknowns is that you don't know them. What's the probability of AI singularity? It has never happened before so you have no priors and any number you assign will be pure speculation.

Same is true about anything you're trying to forecast, by definition of it being in the future. And yet people have figured out how to make predictions more narrow than shrugging.

"And the general absolutist tone of the community. The people involved all seem very... Full of themselves ?"

>And yet people have figured out how to make predictions more narrow than shrugging

And?

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#478

[flagged]

“I don’t like how they said it” and “I don’t like how this made me feel” is the aspect of the human brain that has given us Trump. As long as the idea that “how you feel about it” is a basis for any decision making, the world will continue to be fucked. The authors audience largely understand that “this made me feel” is an indication that introspection is required, and not an indication that the author should be ignored.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nature of unknowns is that you don't know them. What's the probability of AI singularity? It has never happened before so you have no priors and any number you assign will be pure speculation.

Same is true about anything you're trying to forecast, by definition of it being in the future. And yet people have figured out how to make predictions more narrow than shrugging.

>> It has never happened before

> Same is true about anything you're trying to forecast, by definition of it being in the future

There might be some flaws in this line of reasoning...

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#480
post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Very rational of you, but that's the problem with the whole system.

If you want to avoid thinking you're right all the time, it doesn't help to be clever and say the logical opposite. "Rationally" it should work, but it's bad because you're still thinking about it! It's like the thinking of a pink elephant thing.

Other approaches I recommend:

* try and fail to invest in stocks

* read Meaningness's https://metarationality.com

* print out this meme and put it on your wall https://imgflip.com/i/82h43h

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