631–640 of 1001 posts
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Interesting conclusion, since I didn't make a claim either way. Still, for the record, other independent observers have documented the practices and explained why they don't meet the definition of genocide, John Spencer and Natasha Hausdorff to name two examples. It seems by no means clear that it's valid to make a claim of genocide. I certainly wouldn't unless I was really, really certain of my claim, because to get…
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To the Stem-enlightened mind, the classical understanding and pedagogy of such ideas is underwhelming, vague, and riddled with language-game problems, compared to the precision a mathematically-rooted idea has. They're rederiving all this stuff not out of obstinacy, but because they prefer it. I don't really identify with rationalism per se, but I'm with them on this--the humanities are over-cooked and a humanity edu…
I have kids in high school. We sometimes talk about the difference between the black and white of math or science, and the wishy washy grey of the humanities. You can be right or wrong in math. You have can an opinion in English.
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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…
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Who is "they" exactly, and how can they estimate the probability of a future event based on zero priors and a total lack of scientific evidence?
> Who is "they" exactly Rationalists, mostly self-identified. > how can they estimate the probability of a future event based on zero priors and a total lack of scientific evidence? As best as they can, because at the end of the day you still need to make decisions (You can of course choose to do nothing and ignore the risk, but that's not a safe, neutral option). Which means either you treat it as if it had a partic…
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That's a fairly reductive take of my point. In my experience with the Rationalist movement (who I have the misfortune of being 1-2 people away from), the millenarian threat of AGI remains the primary threat. Whenever I try to get an answer of HOW (as in the attack path), I keep getting a deus ex machina. Reverting to a deus ex machina in a self purported Rationalist movement is inherently irrational. And that's where…
My understanding of the Yudkowskian argument for AI x-risk is that a key step is along the lines of "an AI much smarter than us will find ways to get what it wants even if we want something else -- even though we can't predict now what those ways will be, just as chimpanzees could not have predicted how humans would outcompete them and just as you could not predict exactly how Magnus Carlsen will crush you if you pla…
Agree to disagree.
> So far as I can tell this is completely untrue
I was under the impression EY attended Yeshivat Sha'alvim (the USC of Yeshivas - rigorous and well regarded, but a "warmer" student body), but that was his brother. That said, EY is absolutely from a Daatim or Chabad household given that his brother attended Yeshivat Sha'alvim - and they are not mainstream in the Orthodox Jewish community.
And the feel and zeitgeist around the rationalist community with it's veneration of a couple core people like EY or Scott Alexander does feel similar to the veneration a subset of people would do for Baba Sali or Alter Rebbe in those communities.
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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…
What's the seductive-but-wrong part of EA? As far as I can tell, the vast majority of the opposition to it boils down to "Maybe you shouldn't donate money to pet shelters when people are dying of preventable diseases" vs "But donating money to pet shelters feels better!"
Of course it sounds ridiculous when you spell it out this way.
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To the contrary, here's a series of essays on the subject of evolutionary game theory, the incentives created by competition, and its consequences for human wellbeing: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/kNANcHLNtJt5qeuSS "Moloch hasn't won" is a lengthy critique of the argument you are making here.
That doesn't seem to be on point to me. I'm not talking about being "caught in bad equilibria". My assertion is that rationalism itself is not stable , that the (apparent) triumph of rationalism since the Enlightenment was a transient, not an equilibrium. And one of the reasons it was a transient is that self-styled rationalists believed (and apparently still believe) that rationalism will inevitably triumph because…
The fact that you can write this sentence, consider it to be true, and yet still hold in your head the idea that the future might be bad but it's still important to have children suggests that "contact with reality" is not a curse.
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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…
EA always rubbed me the wrong way. (1) The kind of Gatesian solutions they like to fund like mosquito nets are part of the problem, not part of the solution as I see it. If things are going to get better in Africa, it will be because Africans grow their economy and pay taxes and their governments can provide the services that they want. Expecting NGOs to do everything for them is the same kind of neoliberal thinking…
The difficulty is in deriving any useful utility function from prices (even via preferences :), and as you know, econs can't rid themselves of that particular intrusive thought
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/sites/default/files/inline-files/So...
E: know any econs taking Habermas seriously ? Not a rhetorical q:
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…