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Guess I'm a rationalist now

scottaaronson.blog

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Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#591

Post by Terr_ »

Barrin92 wrote: post #140

>"frankly, that they gave off some (not all) of the vibes of a cult, with Eliezer as guru. Eliezer writes in parables and koans. He teaches that the fate of life on earth hangs in the balance, that the select few who understand the stakes have the terrible burden of steering the future " One of the funniest and most accurate turns of phrases in my mind is Charles Stross' characterization of rationalists as "duck type…

This also related to that earlier bit:

> I also found them bizarrely, inexplicably obsessed with the question of whether AI would soon become superhumanly powerful and change the basic conditions of life on earth, and with how to make the AI transition go well. Why that, as opposed to all the other sci-fi scenarios one could worry about, not to mention all the nearer-term risks to humanity?

The reason they landed on a not-so-rational risk to humanity is because it fulfilled the psycho-social need to have a "terrible burden" that binds the group together.

It's one of the reasons religious groups will get caught up on The Rapture or whatever, instead of eradicating poverty.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#592

Post by [deleted] »

s1mplicissimus wrote: post #50
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Maybe it's actually going to be rather benign and more boring than expected Maybe, but generally speaking, if I think people are playing around with technology which a lot of smart people think might end humanity as we know it, I would want them to stop until we are really sure it won't. Like, "less than a one in a million chance" sure. Those are big stakes. I would have opposed the Manhattan Project on the same pri…

> I don't hear people dismiss these risks very often as "You've just been reading too many science fiction novels" these days, which would have been the default response back in the 90s or 2000s. I've recently stumbled across the theory that "it's gonna go away, just keep your head down" is the crisis response that has been taught to the generation that lived through the cold war, so that's how they act. That bit was…

[deleted]

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#593

Post by tomhow »

bargainbin wrote: post #96

[flagged]

Please don't comment like this on Hacker News. It breaks several guidelines, most notably these ones:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer...

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#594

Post by sanderjd »

Aurornis wrote: post #515
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> es, I do think that these hedging statements make them immune from the specific criticism that I quoted. 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…

Yeah I think you're getting at what my skepticism stems from: The article with the 55% certain epistemic status and the article with the 95% certain epistemic status are both written with equal persuasive oomph.

In most writing, people write less persuasively on topics they have less conviction in.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#595

Post by scoofy »

Aurornis wrote: post #581
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…

I mean, I don't disagree with you there. Even within academic philosophy circles, you'll get groans when one sect is discussing things with another sect. Lord knows ancient philosophy academics and analytic philosophy academics are going to get headaches just trying to hold a conversation... and we're not even including continental school.

My point is that, yes, while it may be a bit annoying in general (lord knows how many times I rolled my eyes at my old roommate talking about trans-humanism), the idea that this Rationalist™ movement "thinking about things philosophically" is controversial is just weird. That they seem to care about a philosophical approach to thinking about things, and maybe didn't get degrees and maybe don't understand much background while forming their own little school, seems as unremarkable is it is uncontroversial.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#596

Post by old_man_cato »

"I’m still a computer scientist, an academic, a straight-ticket Democratic voter, a liberal Zionist, a Jew, etc. (all identities, incidentally, well-enough represented at LessOnline that I don’t even think I was the unique attendee in the intersection of them all)"

Not incidental!

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#597

Post by ImaCake »

baxtr wrote: post #125
ImaCake wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The problem with trying to reason everything from first principles is that most things didn’t actually came about that way. This is true for science and rationalism itself. Part of the problem is that "being rational" is a social fashion or fad. Science is immensely useful because it produces real results, but we don't really do it for a rational reason - we do it for reasons of cultural and social pressures. We wou…

Yes, and if you read Popper that’s exactly how he defined rationality / the scientific method: to solve problems of life.

>if you read Popper

Thanks, I might actually go do this :) I recently got exposed to a very persuasive form of "rationalism is a social construct" by reading "Alchemy" by Rory Sutherland. But a theme in these comments is that a lot of these ideas are just recycled from philosophers and that the philosophers were less likely to try and induct you into a cult.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#598

Post by sanderjd »

Aurornis wrote: post #512
Veedrac wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's been a while since I've engaged in rationalist debates, so I forgot about the slightly condescending, lecturing tone that comes out when you disagree with rationalist figureheads. :) You could simply ask "Can you provide examples" instead of the "If you ____ then I suggest ____" form. My point wasn't to nit-pick individual predictions, it was a general explanation of how the game is played. Since Scott Alexander…

For what it's worth, your comments in this thread have been very good descriptions of things I became frustrated with after once being quite interested / enthralled with this community / movement!

(I feel like you're probably getting upvotes from people who feel similarly, but sometimes I feel like nobody ever writes "I agree with you" comments, so the impression is that there's only disagreement with some point being made.)

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#599

Post by ImaCake »

lsp wrote: post #181
ImaCake wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The problem with trying to reason everything from first principles is that most things didn’t actually came about that way. This is true for science and rationalism itself. Part of the problem is that "being rational" is a social fashion or fad. Science is immensely useful because it produces real results, but we don't really do it for a rational reason - we do it for reasons of cultural and social pressures. We wou…

A lot of people really need to be reminded of this. I originally came to this critique via Heidegger, who argues that enlightenment thinking essentially forgets / obscures Being itself, a specific mode of which you experience at this very moment as you read this comment, which is really the basis of everything that we know, including science, technology, and rationality. It seems important to recover and deepen this…

Brilliant way to phrase this idea! I think its incredible that we can even manage an imperfect way to escape our "social" brain. It's clearly very powerful - math, and thus all of science, only exist because of how weird predaliction to thinking abstractly enough to (sorta) break our social bounds. At least when thinking in these terms, I am sure you can poke holes in it.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#600

Post by foobar_______ »

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…

I really appreciate this comment. Now in my 30s, I was not even aware of EA or Rationalist groups in my 20s but your description of a person high on the smell of their own farts and putting logic as king was me. The world is so chaotic that it felt good and right that I could lean on something "true" like logic. It took me to the "correct" answers according to logic but very misguided answers as I see them now. Humans are driven by emotions and the world is probabilistic so relying so heavily on logic just seems so misguided now that I'm older.
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