Guess I'm a rationalist now • Hacker News Board

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#651

Post by creatonez » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 2:13 AM UTC

lukas099 wrote: post #381

This is vibe-based, but I think the Rationalists get more vitriol than they deserve. Upon reflecting, my hypothesis for this is threefold: 1. 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. People tend not to like being in other peoples' out-groups. 2. They have unusual opinions and are open about them. People tend not to like people who express opin…

Nope. Has nothing to do with them being nerds. They are actively dangerous, their views almost always lead to extremely reactionary politics. EA and RA are deeply anti-human. In some cases that manifests as a desire to subjugate humanity with an iron fist technocratic rule, in other cases it manifests as a desire to kill off humanity.

Either way, as an ideology it must be stopped. It should not be treated with kids gloves, it is an ideology that is actively influencing the ruling elites right now (JD Vance, Musk, Thiel are part of this cult, and also simultaneously believe in German-style Nazism, which is broadly compatible with RA). The only silver lining is that some of their ideas about power-seeking tactics are so ineffective they will never work -- in other words, humanity will prevail over these ghouls, because they came in with so many bad assumptions that they've lost touch with reality.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#652

Post by roxolotl » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 2:14 AM UTC

ajkjk wrote: post #355

cassepipe wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the whole tree of responses under this comment and I could only convince myself that when people have no arguments they try to make you look bad. Most of criticisms are just "But they think they are better than us !" and the rest is "But sometimes they are wrong !" I don't know about the community and couldn't care less but their writings have brought me some almost life saving fresh air in how to think about…

Here's a theory of what's happening, both with you here in this comment section and with the rationalists in general. Humans are generally better at perceiving threats than they are at putting those threats into words. When something seems "dangerous" abstractly, they will come up with words for why---but those words don't necessarily reflect the actual threat, because the threat might be hard to describe. Neverthele…

This is a remarkably well started comment.

One thing I'd like to add though is that I do think there is an additional piece being discarded irrationally. They tend to highly undervalue everything you're describing. Humans aren't Vulcans. By being so obsessed with the risks of paperclip-maximizing-robots they devalue the risks of humans being the irrational animals they are.

This is why many on the left criticize them for being right wing. Not because they are, well some might be, but because they are incredibly easy to distract from what is being communicated by focusing too much on what is being said. That might be a bad phrasing but what I mean is that when you look at this piece from last year about prison sentence length and crime rates by Scott Alexander[0] nothing he says is genuinely unreasonable. He's generally evaluating the data fairly and rationally. Some might disagree there but that's not my point. My point is that he's talking to a nonexistant group. The right largely believes that punishment is the point of prison. They might _say_ the goal is to reduce crime, but they are communicating based on a set of beliefs that strongly favors punitive measures for their own sake. This causes a piece like that to miss the forest through the trees and can be seen by those on the left as functionally right wing propaganda.

Most people are not rational. Maybe some day they will be but until then it is dangerous to assume and act as if they are. This makes me see the rationalists as actually rather irrational.

0: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prison-and-crime-much-more-...

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#653

Post by creata » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 2:26 AM UTC

JKCalhoun wrote: post #530

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…

> lack of acknowledgment that maybe we don't have a full grasp of the implications of AI And why single out AI anyway? Because it's sexy maybe? Because if I had to place bets on the collapse of humanity it would look more like the British series "The Survivors" (1975–1977) than "Terminator".

For what it's worth (not much), they were obsessed with AI safety way before it was "sexy".

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#654

Post by Aurornis » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 2:29 AM UTC

dwohnitmok wrote: post #573

Aurornis wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> I think that SlimeMoldTimeMold's rise and fall was actually a pretty big point in favor of the "rationalist community".

That feels like revisionist history to me. It rose to fame in LessWrong and SlateStarCodex, was promoted by Yudkowski, and proliferated for about a year and half before the takedowns finally got traction.

While it was the topic du jour in the rationalist spaces it was very difficult to argue against. I vividly remember how hard it was to convince anyone that SMTM wasn't a good source at the time, because so many people saw Yudkowski endorse it, saw Scott Alexander give it a shout out, and so on.

Now Yudkowski has gone back and edited his old endorsement, it has disappeared from the discourse, and many want to pretend the whole episode never happened.

> (I don't remember any detailed takedowns of SlimeMoldTimeMold coming before that article, but maybe there are).

Exactly my point. It was criticized widely outside of the rationalist community, but the takedowns were all dismissed because they weren't properly rationalist-coded. It finally took someone writing it up in the form of rationalist rhetoric and seeding it into LessWrong to break the spell.

This is the trend with rationalist-centric contrarianism: You have to code your articles with the correct prose, structure, and signs to get uptake in the rationalist community. Once you see it, it's hard to miss.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#655

Post by Terr_ » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 2:33 AM UTC

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-…

> no special responsibility to the people around you

Musing on the different failure-directions: Pretty much any terrible present thing against people can be rationalized by arguing that one gadzillion distant/future people are more important. That includes religious versions, where the stakes of the holy war may presented as all of future humanity being doomed to infinite torment. There are even some cults that pitch it retroactively: Offer to the priesthood to save all your ancestors who are in hell because of original sin.

The opposite would be to prioritize the near and immediate, culminating in a despotic god-king. This is somewhat more-familiar, we may have more cultural experience and moral tools for detection and prevention.

A check on either process would be that the denigrated real/nearby humans revolt. :p

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#656

Post by Aurornis » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 2:36 AM UTC

sanderjd wrote: post #598

Aurornis wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bein…

Thanks for sharing. You summed it up well: The community feels like a hidden gem when you first discover it. It feels like there's an energy of intelligence buzzing about interesting topics and sharing new findings.

Then you start encountering the weirder parts. For me, it was the group think and hero worship. I just wanted to read interesting takes on new topics, but if you deviated from the popular narrative associated with the heroes (Scott Alexander, Yudkowski, Cowen, Aaronson, etc.) it felt like the community's immune system identified you as an intruder and started attacking.

I think a lot of people get drawn into the idea of it being a community where they finally belong. Especially on Twitter (where the latest iteration is "TPOT") it's extraordinarily clique-ish and defensive. It feels like high school level social dynamics at play, except the players are equipped with deep reserves of rhetoric and seemingly endless free time to dunk on people and send their followers after people who disagree. It's a very weird contrast to the ideals claimed by the community.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#657

Post by fc417fc802 » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 2:37 AM UTC

lisper wrote: post #558

stuartjohnson12 wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> it overlooks the fact that what triumphs in the long run is simply reproductive fitness.

Why can't that observation be taken into account? Isn't the entire point of the approach accounting for all inputs to the extent possible?

I think you are making invalid assumptions about the motivations or goals or internal state or etc of the actors which you are then conflating with the approach itself. That there are certain conditions under which the approach is not an optimal strategy does not imply that it is never competitive under any.

The observation is then that rationalism requires certain prerequisites before it can reliably out compete other approaches. That seems reasonable enough when you consider that a fruit fly is unlikely to be able to successfully employ higher level reasoning as a survival strategy.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#658

Post by jhanschoo » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 2:42 AM UTC

mathattack wrote: post #182

Logic is an awesome tool that took us from Greek philosophers to the gates on our computers. The challenge with pure rationalism is checking the first principles that the thinking comes from. Logic can lead you astray if the principles are wrong, or you miss the complexity along the way. On the missing first principles, look at Aristotle. One of the history's greatest logicians came to many false conclusions. On miss…

I'm just going to defend Aristotle a bit. His incomplete logic and metaphysics nevertheless provided a powerful foundation to inquire into many aspects of the world that his predecessors did not do, nor do systematically. His community did not shy away from empirical research in biology. They all came to wrong conclusions in some things, but we should rather fault their successors for not challenging them.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#659

Post by creata » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 2:46 AM UTC

johnfn wrote: post #461

lukas099 wrote: post #381

This is vibe-based, but I think the Rationalists get more vitriol than they deserve. Upon reflecting, my hypothesis for this is threefold: 1. 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. People tend not to like being in other peoples' out-groups. 2. They have unusual opinions and are open about them. People tend not to like people who express opin…

HN judges rationality quite severely. I mean, look at this thread about Mr. Beast[1], who it's safe to say is a controversial figure, and notice how all the top comments are all pretty charitable. It's pretty funny to take the conversation there and then compare the comments to this article. Scott Aaronson - in theory someone HN should be a huge fan of, from all reports a super nice and extremely intelligent guy who…

The people commenting under the Mr. Beast post are probably different to the people commenting under this post.

Anyway, Mr. Beast doesn't really pretend to be more than what he is afaik. In contrast, the Rationalist tendency to use mathematics (especially Bayes's theorem) as window dressing is really, really annoying.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#660

Post by DowsingSpoon » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 2:46 AM UTC

ineptech wrote: post #610

troyastorino wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!"

It might be the parts that lead a person to commit large scale fraud with the idea that the good they can do with the stolen money outweighs all the negatives. Or, at least, that’s the popular idea of what happened to Sam Bankman-Fried. I have no idea what was actually going through that man’s mind.

In any case, EA smells strongly of “the ends justify the means” which most popular moral philosophies reject with strong arguments. One which resonates with me is that there are no “ends.” The path itself is the goal.