Does that mean he read the Harry Potter fanfic?
The HP fanfic is what decisively drove me away from this shitshow years ago. I'm so glad I read that first rather than getting sucked in through another more palatable route.
Guess I'm a rationalist now
571–580 of 1001 posts
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#572Earlier quoted context omitted.
The other weird direction it leads is space travel. 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.
I don't see how bringing new souls (whatever those are) into existence should naturally qualify as a good thing? Perhaps you're arguing as an illustration of the way this group of people think, in which case I understand your point.
You can make arguments for it starting with "killing billions of people would definitely be bad" or "some fraction of those people will likely share my genes, which I have a biological drive to pass on".
It encodes a slight bias towards human existence being a positive thing for us humans, but I don't think it's the shakiest part of that reasoning.
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#573Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is a valid point. But to some degree both can be true. I often felt when reading some of these type of texts: Wait a second, there is a wealth of thinking on these topics out there; You are not at all situating all your elaborate thinking in a broader context. And there absolutely is willingness to be challenged, and (maybe less so) a willingness to be wrong. But there also is an arrogance that "we are t…
> But there also is an arrogance that "we are the ones thinking about this rationally, and we will figure this out". As if people hadn't been thinking and discussing and (verbally and literally) fighting over all sorts of adjacent and similar topics in philosophy and sociology and anthropology and ... clubs and seminars forever This is a feature, not a bug, for writers who hold an opinion on something and want to rat…
I don't read HN or LW all that often, but FWIW I actually learned about SlimeMoldTimeMold's "A Chemical Hunger" series from HN and then read its most famous takedown from LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-proba... (I don't remember any detailed takedowns of SlimeMoldTimeMold coming before that article, but maybe there are).
I think that SlimeMoldTimeMold's rise and fall was actually a pretty big point in favor of the "rationalist community".
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#574Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people are trying to be rational (to be sure, with varying degrees of success), and people who aren't even trying aren't really worth having abstract intellectual discussions with. I'm reminded of CS Lewis's quip in a different context that "you might just as well expect to be congratulated because, whenever you do a sum, you try to get it quite right."
Being rational and rationalist are not the same thing. Funnily this sort of false equivalence that relies on being "technically correct" is at the core of what makes them...difficult.
There's more to the group identity than just applying logic and rationality, yes. But surely 'rationalists' of all people wouldn't want to take the position that some of their key ideas don't result primarily from applying rational thought processes. Any part of their worldview that doesn't follow immediately from foundational principles of logic and reason is presumably subject to revision based on evidence and argument.
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#575Earlier quoted context omitted.
Technically "long-termism" should lead them straight to nihilism. Because, eventually, everything will end. One way or another. The odds are just 1. At some point, there are no more future humans. The number of humans are zero. Also, due to the nature of the infinite, any finite thing is essentially a rounding error and not worth concerning oneself with. I get the feeling these people often want to seem smarter than…
> Technically "long-termism" should lead them straight to nihilism. Because, eventually, everything will end. One way or another. The odds are just 1. At some point, there are no more future humans. The number of humans are zero. Also, due to the nature of the infinite, any finite thing is essentially a rounding error and not worth concerning oneself with. The current sums invested and donated in altruist causes are…
I think it's essentially a grift. An excuse to do nothing while looking like you care and reaping rewards.
If they wanted to help, they should be focused on the now. Global poverty, climate change, despotic world leaders. They should be aligning themselves against such things.
But instead what we see is essentially not that. Effective altruism is a lot like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, a bit of a misnomer.
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#576Earlier quoted context omitted.
As Adam Becker shows in his book, EAs started out being reasonable "give to charity as much as you can, and research which charities do the most good" but have gotten into absurdities like "it is more important to fund rockets than help starving people or prevent malaria because maybe an asteroid will hit the Earth, killing everyone, starving or not".
It seems very odd to criticize the group that most reliably and effectively funds global health and malaria prevention for this. What is your alternative? What's your framework that makes you contribute to malaria prevention more or more effectively than EAs do? Or is the claim instead that people should shut down conversation within EA that strays from the EA mode?
I think the group that most reliably and effectively funds global health -- at least in terms of total $ -- would be the United Nations, or perhaps the Catholic Church, or otherwise one national government or another.
If you exclude "nations" then it does look to be the Church: "The Church operates more than 140,000 schools, 10,000 orphanages, 5,000 hospitals and some 16,000 other health clinics". Caritas, the relevant charitable umbrella organization, gives $2-4b per year on its own, and that's not including the many, many operations run by religious orders not under that umbrella, or by the hundreds of thousands of parishes around the world (most of which operate charitable operations of their own).
And yet, rationalists are totally happy criticizing the Catholic Church -- not that I'm complaining, but it seems a bit hypocritical.
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#577Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 be…
If you examine history, from the Bible you get Judaism. And from Judaism, Christianity as Christ said "Do not think that I am come to break the Law or the Prophets. I am not come to break: but to fulfill." [Matth. v. 17]
The Catholic Church follows the Melchisedec order (Heb v. ; vi. ; vii). The term Catholic (καθολικη) was used as early as the first century; it is an adjective which describes Christianity.
The oldest record that we have to this day is the Epistle of Ignatius to the Smyrnaeans Chapter 8 where St. Ignatius writes "ωσπερ οπου αν η Χριστος Ιησους, εκει η καθολικη εκκλησια". (just as where Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.):
https://greekdoc.com/DOCUMENTS/early/i-smyrnaeans.html
The protestors in the 16th c. called themselves Protestants, so that's what everyone calls them. English heretic-schismatics didn't want to share the opprobrium so they called themselves English, hence Anglican. In USA they weren't governed congregationally like the Congregationalists, or by presbyters like the Presbyterians, but by bishops, so they called themselves Bishop-ruled, or Episcopalians. (In fact, Katharine Jefferts-Schori changed the name of the denomination from The Protestant Episcopal Church to The Episcopal Church recently.)
The orthodox catholics called themselves Orthodox to distance themselves from the unorthodox of which there were plenty, spawning themselves off in the wake of practically every ecumenical council.
Lutherans in the USA name themselves after Father Martin Luther, some Augustinian priest from Saxony who protested against the Church's hypocritical corruption at the time, and the controversy eventually got out of hand and precipitated a schism/heretical revolution, back in the 1500s, but Lutherans back in Germany and Scandinavia call themselves Gospel churches, hence Evangelical. Some USA denominations that go back to Germany and who came over to USA brought that name with them.
Pentecostals name themselves after the incident in Acts where the Holy Spirit set fire to the world (cf. Acts 2) on the occasion of the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, q.v., which in Greek was called Fiftieth Day After Passover, hence Pentecosti. What distinguishes Pentecostals is their emphasis on what they call "speaking in tongues", which in my opin...be charitable, kempff...which they see as a continuance of the Holy Spirit's work in the world and in the lives of believers.
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#578> “You’re Scott Aaronson?! The quantum physicist who’s always getting into arguments on the Internet, and who’s essentially always right, but who sustains an unreasonable amount of psychic damage in the process?” Give me strength. So much hubris with these guys (and they’re almost always guys). I would have assumed that a rationalist would look for truth and not correctness. Oh wait, it’s all just a smokescreen for k…
Pretty sure that's meant to be taken light-heartedly. You know, as a joke.
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#579I would love a link to anything that could convince me the Rationalist community isn't just a bunch of hoo-haw.
I read the first third of HPMOR. I stopped because I found the writing poor, but more importantly, it didn't "open my mind" to any higher-order way of rationalist thinking. My takeaway was "Yup, the original HP story was full of inconsistencies and stupidities, and you get a different story if the characters were actually smart."
I've read a bunch of EY essays and a lot of lesswrong posts, trying to figure out what is the mind-shattering idea.
* The map is not the territory --> of course it isn't.
* Update your beliefs based on evidence --> who disagrees with this? (with exception on religion)
* People are biased and we need to overcome that --> another obvious statement
* Make decisions based on evidence and towards your desired outcomes --> thanks for the tip?
Seems to me this whole philosophy can be captured in about half page of notes, which most people would nod and say "yup, makes sense."
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#580Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> That post came out a year later [...] multiple links showing how much the SMTM post was spreading through the rationalist community with little question.
The SMTM series started in July 2021 and finished in November 2021; there was also a paper, similar enough that I assume it's by the same people, from July 2021. The first of those "multiple links" is from July 2021, but the second is from January 2022 and the third from May 2022. The critical post is from June 2022. I agree it's a year later than something but I'm not seeing that the SMTM theory was "spreading ... with little question" a year before it.
The "multiple links" you mention -- the actual number is three -- are the two I mentioned before and a third that (my apologies!) I had somehow not noticed. That third one is at +74 karma, again much lower than the later critical post, and it doesn't endorse the lithium theory.
The one written by E.Y. is the second. Quite aside from the later disclaimer, it's hardly an uncritical endorsement: "you are still probably saying "Wait, lithium?" This is still mostly my own reaction, honestly." and "low-probability massive-high-value gamble".
What about the first post? That one's pretty positive, but to me it reads as "here's an interesting theory; it sounds plausible to me but I am not an expert" rather than "here's a theory that is probably right", still less "here's a theory that is definitely right".
The comments, likewise, don't look to me like lockstep uncritical acceptance. I see "here are some interesting experiments one could do to check this" and "something like this seems plausible but I bet the actual culprit is vegetable oils" and "something like this seems plausible but I bet the actual culprit is rising CO2 levels" and "I bet it's corn somehow" and "quite convincing but didn't really rule out the obvious rival hypothesis" and so forth; I don't think a single one of the comments is straightforwardly agreeing with the theory.
If you've found something Scott Alexander wrote about this then I'd be interested to see it. All I found was that (contrary to what you claimed above) it looks like ACX Grants declined to fund exploration of the lithium theory but included that proposal in a list of "interesting things we didn't fund".
So I'm just not seeing this lockstep thing you claim. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places. The specific things you've cited don't seem like they support it: you said there was an ACX grant but there wasn't; you say the links in the intro to that critical post show the theory spreading with little question, but what they actually show is one person saying "here's an interesting theory but I'm not an expert", E.Y. saying "here's a theory that's probably wrong but worth looking into" (and later changing his mind), and another person saying "I put together some data that might be relevant"; in every case the comments are full of people not agreeing with the lithium theory.