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Guess I'm a rationalist now

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Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#561

Post by cosmojg »

PoignardAzur wrote: post #546

As someone who likes both the Rationalist community and the Rust community, it's fascinating to see the parallels in how the Hacker News crowd treats both. The contempt, the general lack of curiosity and the violence of the bold sweeping statements people will make here are mind-boggling.

Both the Rationalist community and the Rust community are very active in pursuing their goals, and unfortunately, it's far easier to criticize others for doing things than it is to actually do things yourself. Worse yet, if you are not yourself actively doing things, you are far more likely to experience fear when other people are actively doing things as there is always some nonzero chance that they will do things counter to your own goals, forcing you to actively do something lest you fall behind. Alas, people often respond to fear with hatred, especially given the benefit of physical isolation and dissociation from humanity offered by the Internet, and I think that's what you're seeing here on Hacker News.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#562

Post by Aurornis »

gjm11 wrote: post #502
Aurornis wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 opinio…

Lockstep like this? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-proba... (a post on Less Wrong, karma score currently +442, versus +102 and +230 for the two posts it cites as earlier favourable LW coverage of the lithium claim -- the comments on both of which, by the way, don't look to me any more positive than "skeptical but interested") The followup post from the same author https://www.lesswrong.com/pos…

> Lockstep like this? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-proba... (a post on Less Wrong, karma score currently +442, versus +102 and +230 for the two posts it cites as earlier favourable LW coverage of the lithium claim -- the comments on both of which, by the way, don't look to me any more positive than "skeptical but interested")

That post came out a year later, in response to the absurdity of the situation. The very introduction of that post has multiple links showing how much the SMTM post was spreading through the rationalist community with little question.

One of the links is a Eliezer Yudkowsky blog praising the work, which now includes an edited-in disclaimer at the top about how he was mistaken: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kjmpq33kHg7YpeRYW/briefly-ra...

Pretending that this theory didn't grip the rationalist community all the way to top bloggers like Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander is revisionist history.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#563

Post by Aurornis »

PoignardAzur wrote: post #546

As someone who likes both the Rationalist community and the Rust community, it's fascinating to see the parallels in how the Hacker News crowd treats both. The contempt, the general lack of curiosity and the violence of the bold sweeping statements people will make here are mind-boggling.

> the general lack of curiosity

Honestly, I find the Hacker News comments in recent years to be most enlightening because so many comments come from people who spent years immersed in rationalist communities.

For years one of my friend groups was deep into LessWrong and SSC. I've read countless blog posts and other content out of those groups.

Yet every time I write about it, I'm dismissed as an uninformed outsider. It's an interesting group of people who like to criticize and dissect other groups, but they don't take kindly to anyone questioning their own circles.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#564

Post by mettamage »

Retric wrote: post #531
mettamage wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always liken this to that we’re all asteroids floating in space. There’s no free will and everything is determined. We just see the whole thing unfold from one conscious perspective. 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…

> no free will That always seemed like a meaningless argument to me. To an outside observer free will is indistinguishable from a random process over some range of possibilities. You aren’t going to randomly go to sleep with your hand in a fire, there’s some hard coded biology preventing that choice but that only means human behavior isn’t completely random, hardly a groundbreaking discovery. At the other end we have…

> That always seemed like a meaningless argument to me.

Same as that is not the lived experience. I notice that I care about free choice.

The idea that there's no free will may be a pessimistic outlook to some but to me it's a strictly neutral one. It used to be a bit negative, until I looked more closely that there's a difference between looking at a situation objectively and having a lived experience. When it comes to my inclinations and how I want to live life, lived experience takes precedence.

I don't have my thoughts sharp on it, but I don't think the concept even exists philosophically, but I think that's also what you're getting at. It's a conceptual remnant from the past.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#565

Post by jay_kyburz »

wat10000 wrote: post #549
jay_kyburz wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't read these rationalist essays either, but you don't need to be a deep thinker to understand why any rational person would be afraid of AI and the singularity. The AI will do what its programmed to do, but its programmers morality may not match my own. What more scary is that it may be developed with the morality of a corporation rather than a person. (That is to say, no morals at all.) I think its perfectly j…

Those corporations are already superhuman entities with morals that don’t match ours. They do cause a lot of problems. Maybe it’s better to figure out how to fix that real, current problem rather than hypothetical future ones.

Yeah, the AI will be a tool of a corp. So in effect we are talking about limiting corporate power.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#566

Post by Aurornis »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #245
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…

That book, IMO, reads very much like a smear attempt, and not one done with a good understanding of the target. The premise, with an attempt to tie capital-R Rationalists to the neoreactionaries though a sort of guilt by association, is frankly weird: Scott Alexander is well-known among the former to be essentially the only prominent figure that takes the latter seriously—seriously enough, that is, to write a large a…

I always find it interesting that when the topic of rationalists' fixation on neoreactionary topics comes into question, the primary defenses are that it's important to look at controversial ideas and that we shouldn't dismiss novel ideas because we don't like the group sharing them.

Yet as soon as the topic turns to criticisms of the rationalist community, we're supposed to ignore those ideas and instead fixate on the messenger, ignore their arguments, and focus on ad-hominem attacks that reduce their credibility.

It's no secret that Scott Alexander had a bit of a fixation on neoreactionary content for years. The leaked e-mails showed he believed there to be "gold" in some of their ideas and he enjoyed the extra traffic it brought to his blog. I know the rationalist community has been working hard to distance themselves from that era publicly, but dismissing that chapter of the history because it feels too much like a "smear" or because we're not supposed to like the author feels extremely hypocritical given the context.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#567

Post by mettamage »

lisper wrote: post #560
mettamage wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always liken this to that we’re all asteroids floating in space. There’s no free will and everything is determined. We just see the whole thing unfold from one conscious perspective. 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…

If you get down to the quantum level there is no such thing as objective reality. Our perception that the world is made of classical objects that actually exist at particular places at particular times and have continuity of identity is an illusion. But it's a really compelling illusion, and you won't go far wrong treating it as if it were the truth in 99% of real-world situations. Likewise, free will is an illusion,…

> If you get down to the quantum level there is no such thing as objective reality.

What do you mean by that? It still exists doesn't it? Albeit in a probabilistic sense that becomes non-probabilistic at larger scales.

I don't know much about quantum other than the high level conceptual stuff.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#568

Post by protocolture »

jandrese wrote: post #237
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 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

I have read Effective Altruists like that. But I also remember seeing a lot of money donated to a bunch of really decent sounding causes because someone spent 5 minutes asking themselves what they wanted their donation to maximise, decided on "Lives saved" and figured out who is doing the best at that.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#569

Post by Aurornis »

tptacek wrote: post #323

Well that was a whole thing. I especially liked the existential threat of Cade Metz. But ultimately, I think the great oracle of Chicago got this whole thing right when he said: -Ism's in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon, "I don't believe in Beatles, I just believe in me." Good point there. After all, he was the walrus. I could be the w…

> I especially liked the existential threat of Cade Metz.

I am perpetually fascinated by the way rationalists love to dismiss critics by pointing out that they met some people in person and they seemed nice.

It's such a bizarre meme.

Curtis Yarvin went to one of the "Vibecamp" rationalist gatherings, was nice to some prominent Twitter rationalists, and now they are ardent defenders of him on Twitter. Their entire argument is "I met him and he was nice".

It's mind boggling that the rationalist part of their philosophy goes out the window as soon as the lines are drawn between in-group and out-group.

Bringing up Cade Metz is a perennial favorite signal because of how effectively they turned it into a "you're either with us or against us" battle, completely ignoring any valid arguments Cade Metz may have been brought to the table. Then you look at how they treat Neoreactionaries and how we're supposed to look past our disdain for them and focus on the possible good things in their arguments, and you realize maybe this entire movement isn't really about truth-seeking as much as they think it is.

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