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Guess I'm a rationalist now

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Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#581

Post by Aurornis »

scoofy wrote: post #365

It's weird that "being interested in philosophy" is like... a movement. My background is in philosophy, but the rationalist vs nonrationalist debate seems like an undergraduate class dispute. My old roommate worked for Open Phil, and was obsessed with AI Safety and really into Bitcoin. I never was. We still had interesting arguments about it all the time. Most of the time we just argued until we got to the axioms we…

> It's weird that "being interested in philosophy" is like... a movement. My background is in philosophy, but the rationalist vs nonrationalist debate seems like an undergraduate class dispute.

Bring up the rationalist community within academic philosophy circles and you'll get a lot of groans.

The fun part about rationalists is that they like to go back to first principles and rediscover basics. The less fun part is that they'll ignore all of the existing work and pretend they're going to figure it all out themselves, often with weird results.

This leaves philosophy people endlessly frustrated as the rationalists write long essays about really basic philosophy concepts as if they're breaking new ground, while ignoring a lot of very interesting work that could have made the topic much more interesting to discuss.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#582

Post by renewiltord »

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…

Jesus, this is why online commentary is impossible to read. It's always full of so many caveats I can't get through to the meat of what someone is saying. "I don't know if what I'm saying is right but I think that it probably is. With that caveat, here's a thought that may or may not reflect reality but is my current model to predict certain things. $THOUGHT. Given that I have said that, I have to confess to not living my life entirely by that maxim. I may not have captured all angles to this."

Thankfully, the rationalists just state their ideas and you're free to use their models properly. It's like people haven't written code at all. Just putting repeated logging all through the codebase with null checks everywhere. Just say the thing. That suffices. Conciseness rules over caveating.

Human LLMs who use idea expansion. Insufferable.

Of course that is only my opinion and I may not have captured all angles to why people are doing that. They may have reasons of their own to do that and I don't mean to say that there can never be any reasons. No animals were harmed in the manufacture of this comment to my knowledge. However, I did eat meat this afternoon which could or could not be the source of the energy required to type this comment and the reader may or may not have calorie attribution systems that do or do not allocate this comment to animal harm.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#583

Post by biomcgary »

ajkjk wrote: post #513
janeerie wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not a mistake I'm making. Assuming you're talking about bog-standard effective altruists---by (claiming to) value the suffering of people far away as the same as those nearby, they're discounting the people around them heavily compared to other people. Compare to anyone else who values their friends and family and community far more than those far away. Perhaps they're not discounting them to less-than-parity-…

To me, the non-local focus of EA/rationalism is, at least partially, a consequence of their historically unusual epistemology.

In college, I became a scale-dependent realist, which is to say, that I'm most confident of theories / knowledge in the 1-meter, 1-day, 1 m/s scales and increasingly skeptical of our understanding of things that are bigger/smaller, have longer/short timeframes, or faster velocities. Maybe there is a technical name for my position? But, it is mostly a skepticism about nearly unlimited extrapolation using brains that evolved under selection for reproduction at a certain scale. My position is not that we can't compute at different scales, but that we can't understand at other scales.

In practice, the rationalists appear to invert their confidence, with more confidence in quarks and light-years than daily experience.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#584

Post by gjm11 »

swat535 wrote: post #577
gjm11 wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 oldes…

The term "catholic", meaning universal, was used very early. It wasn't used to distinguish the entity now often called the Catholic Church from other Christian groups, so far as I know, until much later.

I agree that some Christian groups have not-so-tendentious names, including "Protestant", "Anglican", "Episcopalian" and "Lutheran". (Though to my mind "Anglican" carries a certain implication of being the church for English people, and the Episcopalians aren't the only people with bishops any more than the Baptists are the only people who baptize.)

"Pentecostal" seems to me to be in (though not a central example of) the applause-light-name category. "We are the ones who are really filled with the Holy Spirit like in the Pentecost story in the Book of Acts".

"Gospel" and "Evangelical" are absolutely applause-light names. "Our group, unlike all those others, embodies the Good News" or "Our group, unlike all those others, is faithful to the Gospels". (The terms are kinda ambiguous between those two interpretations but either way these are we-are-the-best-rah-rah-rah names.)

Anyway, I didn't mean to claim that literally every movement's name is like this. Only that many many many movements' names are.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#585

Post by ChadNauseam »

LargeWu wrote: post #438
jhbadger wrote: post #414

Earlier 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's also not a very big leap from "My purpose is to do whatever is the greatest good" to "It doesn't matter if I hurt people as long as the overall net result is good (by some arbitrary standard)"

99% of effective altruists and rationalists agree that you shouldn't hurt people as part of some complicated scheme to do good. For example, here is eliezer yudkowsky in 2008 saying exactly that, and explaining why it's true: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K9ZaZXDnL3SEmYZqB/ends-don-t...

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#586

Post by sanderjd »

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…

Yeah, for a bunch of supposedly super-rational people, they have always seemed to have a pretty irrational belief in their own ability to overcome the human tendency toward irrationality!

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#587

Post by sanderjd »

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…

lol, I love that you identified the exact correct academic term for this phenomenon.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#588

Post by akomtu »

Sounds like they hear only themselves? There is a common type of sophisticated thinkers who have trained their intellectual muscle to a remarkable degree and got stuck there, refusing to see that intellect isn't the capstone of life. Their mind, ears and mouth quickly form a closed loop that makes them hear only what they themselves say. When this loop strengthens, this thinker becomes a dogmatic cult leader with a sophisticated, but dimly lit inner world that can, nevertheless impress smaller minds. Such inner worlds are always like mazes, with lots of rooms and corridors, all dimly lit, without exits and with their impressively developed mind roaming along these corridors like the Minotaur.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#589

Post by sanderjd »

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 read rationalist writing for a very long time, and eventually concluded that this part of it was, not universally but predominantly, performative. After you read enough articles from someone, it is clear what they have conviction in, even when they are putting up disclaimers saying they don't.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#590

Post by kragen »

baxtr wrote: post #526
kragen wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, what epistemological propositions of Popper's do you think they're missing? To the extent that I understand the issues, they're building on Popper's epistemology, but by virtue of having a more rigorous formulation of the issues, they resolve some of the apparent contradictions in his views. Most of Popper's key points are elaborated on at length in blog posts on LessWrong. Perhaps they got something wrong? Or o…

> Popper’s falsificationism – this is the old philosophy that the Bayesian revolution is currently dethroning. https://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes These are the kind of statements I’m referring to. Happy to be falsified btw :) that’s how we learn. Also note that Popper never called his theory falsificationism .

It's just "dethroning" in the sense that QED dethroned Maxwellian classical electrodynamics; it provides additional precision and shows how to correct the more limited theory in the cases where it gives obviously implausible results.
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