511–520 of 1001 posts
Sorry, I haven't followed what is it that these guys call Rationalism?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalist_community Fair warning: when you turn over some of the rocks here you find squirming, slithering things that should not be given access to the light.
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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 meas…
If putting up evidence about how people were wrong in their predictions, I suggest actually pointing at predictions that were wrong, rather than on recent predictions about the future that that you disagree over how they will resolve. If putting up evidence about how people make excuses for failing predictions, I suggest actually showing them do so, rather than projecting that they will do so and blaming them for you…
My point wasn't to nit-pick individual predictions, it was a general explanation of how the game is played.
Since Scott Alexander comes up a lot, a few randomly selected predictions that didn't come true:
- He predicted at least $250 million in damages from Black Lives Matter protests.
- He predicted Andrew Yang would win the 2021 NYC mayoral race with 80% certainty (he came in 4th place)
- He gave a 70% chance to Vitamin D being generally recognized as a good COVID treatment
This is just random samples from the first blog post that popped in Google: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/grading-my-2021-predictions
It's also noteworthy to read that a lot of his predictions are about his personal life, his own blogging actions, or [redacted] things. These all get mixed in with a small number of geopolitical, economic, and medical predictions with the net result of bringing his overall accuracy up.
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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…
One mistake you making is thinking that rationalists care more about people far away than people in their community. The reality is that they set the value of life the same for all. If children around you are doing of an easily preventable disease, then yes, help them first! If they just need more arts programs, then you help the children dying in another country first.
But anyway this whole model follows from a basic set of beliefs about quantifying suffering and about what one's ethical responsibilities are, and it answers those in ways most people would find very bizarre by turning them into a math problem that assigns no special responsibility to the people around you. I think that is much more contentious and gross to most people than EA thinks it is. It can be hard to say exactly why in words, but that doesn't make it less true.
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Intelligence and rational thought is useful, but like any strategy it has its tradeoffs and limitations. No amount of intelligence can overcome the chaos of long time horizons, especially when we're talking about human civilization. IMHO it's reasonable to pick a long-term problem/risk and focus on solving it. But it's pure hubris to think rationality will give you anything approaching high confidence of what the big…
I think one can levy a much more specific critique of rationalism: rationalism is in some sense self-defeating. If you are rational you will necessarily conclude that the fundamental dynamic that drives the (interesting parts of) the universe is Darwinian evolution, which is not rational. It blindly selects for reproductive fitness at the expense of all else. If you are a gene, you can probably produce more offspring…
Emotionally I don’t subscribe to this view. Rationally I do.
My critique for rational people is that they don’t seem to fully take experience into account. It’s assumptions + rationality + experience/data + whatever strong inclinations one has that seems to be the full picture for me.
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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 meas…
Yes, I do think that these hedging statements make them immune from the specific criticism that I quoted. If you want to say their humility is not genuine, fine. I'm not sure I agree with it, but you are entitled to that view. But to simultaneously be attacking the same community for not ever showing a sense of maybe being wrong or uncertain, and also for expressing it so often it's become an in-group signal , is jus…
That's my point: Their rhetorical style is interpreted by the in-group as a sort of weird infallibility. Like they've covered both sides and therefore the work is technically correct in all cases. Once they go through the hedging dance, they can put forth the opinion-based point they're trying to make in a very persuasive way, falling back to the hedging in the future if it turns out to be completely wrong.
The writing style looks different depending on where you stand: Reading it in the forward direction makes it feel like the main point is very likely. Reading it in the backward direction you notice the hedging and decide they were also correct. Yet at the time, the rationalist community attaches themselves to the position being pushed.
> But to simultaneously be attacking the same community for not ever showing a sense of maybe being wrong or uncertain, and also for expressing it so often it's become an in-group signal, is just too much cognitive dissonance.
That's a strawman argument. At no point did I "attack the community for not ever showing a sense of maybe being wrong or uncertain".
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Intelligence and rational thought is useful, but like any strategy it has its tradeoffs and limitations. No amount of intelligence can overcome the chaos of long time horizons, especially when we're talking about human civilization. IMHO it's reasonable to pick a long-term problem/risk and focus on solving it. But it's pure hubris to think rationality will give you anything approaching high confidence of what the big…
I think one can levy a much more specific critique of rationalism: rationalism is in some sense self-defeating. If you are rational you will necessarily conclude that the fundamental dynamic that drives the (interesting parts of) the universe is Darwinian evolution, which is not rational. It blindly selects for reproductive fitness at the expense of all else. If you are a gene, you can probably produce more offspring…
https://www.lesswrong.com/s/kNANcHLNtJt5qeuSS
"Moloch hasn't won" is a lengthy critique of the argument you are making here.
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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…
The overlap between the Effective Altruism community and the Rationalist community is extremely high. They’re largely the same people. Effective Altruism gained a lot of early attention on LessWrong, and the pessimistic focus on AI existential risk largely stems from an EA desire to avoid “temporal-discounting” bias. The reasoning is something like: if you accept that future people count just as much as current peopl…
If you assume we eventually figure out long distance space travel and humanity spreads across the galaxy, there could in the future be quadrillions of people, growing at some kind of exponential rate. So accelerating the space race by even an hour is equivalent to bringing billions of new souls into existence.
Just to confirm, this is about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalist_community and not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalism right?
Absolutely everybody names it wrong. The movement is called rationality or "LessWrong-style rationality", explicitly to differentiate it from rationalism the philosophy; rationality is actually in the empirical tradition. But the words are too close together, so this is about as lost a battle as "hacker".
I don't think it's actually true that rationalists-in-this-sense commonly use "rationality" to refer to the movement, though they do often use it to refer to what the movement is trying to do.
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> 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-...
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Upvote for the play link - that's interesting and I hadn't heard of it before. Worthy of a top-level post IMO.
I heard of the play originally from Chapter 10 of On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder: https://archive.org/details/on-tyranny-twenty-lessons-from-t... Which I did post top-level here on November 7th - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42071791 Unfortunately it didn't a lot of traction and dang told me that there wasn't a way to re-up or "second chance" the post due to the HN policy on posts "correlated with political con…
Still, I'm glad I now know the reference.