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Guess I'm a rationalist now

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Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#671

Post by zahlman »

Aurornis wrote: post #566
mananaysiempre wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That book, IMO, reads very much like a smear attempt, and not one done with a good understanding of the target. The premise, with an attempt to tie capital-R Rationalists to the neoreactionaries though a sort of guilt by association, is frankly weird: Scott Alexander is well-known among the former to be essentially the only prominent figure that takes the latter seriously—seriously enough, that is, to write a large a…

I always find it interesting that when the topic of rationalists' fixation on neoreactionary topics comes into question, the primary defenses are that it's important to look at controversial ideas and that we shouldn't dismiss novel ideas because we don't like the group sharing them. Yet as soon as the topic turns to criticisms of the rationalist community, we're supposed to ignore those ideas and instead fixate on t…

> when the topic of rationalists' fixation on neoreactionary topics comes into question, the primary defenses are that it's important to look at controversial ideas and that we shouldn't dismiss novel ideas because we don't like the group sharing them.

No. Rationalists do say that it's important to do those things, because that's true. But it is not a defense of a "fixation on neoreactionary topics", because there is no such fixation. It only comes across as a fixation to people who are unwilling to even understand what they are denigrating.

You will note that Scott Alexander is heavily critical of neoreaction.

> Yet as soon as the topic turns to criticisms of the rationalist community, we're supposed to ignore those ideas and instead fixate on the messenger, ignore their arguments, and focus on ad-hominem attacks that reduce their credibility.

No. Nobody said that those criticism should be ignored. What was said is that those criticism are invalid, because they are. It is not ad-hominem against Sandifer to point out that Sandifer is trying to insinuate untrue things about Alexander. It is simply observing reality. Sandifer attempts to describe Alexander, Yudkowsky et. al. as supportive of neoreactionary thought. In reality, Alexander, Yudkowsky et. al. are strongly-critical-at-best of neoreactionary thought.

> The leaked e-mails showed he believed there to be "gold" in some of their ideas

This is clutching at straws. Alexander wrote https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-f... , in 2013.

You are engaging in the same kind of semantic games that Sandifer does. Please stop.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#672

Post by zahlman »

Aurornis wrote: post #563
PoignardAzur wrote: post #546

As someone who likes both the Rationalist community and the Rust community, it's fascinating to see the parallels in how the Hacker News crowd treats both. The contempt, the general lack of curiosity and the violence of the bold sweeping statements people will make here are mind-boggling.

> the general lack of curiosity Honestly, I find the Hacker News comments in recent years to be most enlightening because so many comments come from people who spent years immersed in rationalist communities. For years one of my friend groups was deep into LessWrong and SSC. I've read countless blog posts and other content out of those groups. Yet every time I write about it, I'm dismissed as an uninformed outsider.…

> Yet every time I write about it, I'm dismissed as an uninformed outsider.

No; you're being dismissed as someone who is entirely too credulous about arguments that don't hold up to scrutiny.

Edit: and as someone who doesn't understand basics about what rationalists are trying to accomplish in certain contexts (like the concept of a calibration curve re the example you brought up of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/grading-my-2021-predictions). You come across (charitably) as having missed the point, because you have.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#673

Post by zahlman »

Aurornis wrote: post #474
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…

> 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. The rationalist community is most definitely not exclusive. You can join it by declaring yourself to be a rationalist, posting blogs with "epistemic status" taglines, and calling yourself a rationalist. The criticisms are not because it's a cool club that won't let people in. > They have unusual opinio…

> A few years ago a rationalist blogger wrote a long series postulating that trace lithium in water was causing obesity. It even got an Astral Codex Ten monetary grant. For years it got shared through the rationalist community as proof of something

As proof of what, exactly? And where is your evidence that such a thing happened?

> while ignoring contradictory evidence and they do this very frequently.

The evidence available to me suggests that the rationalist community was not at all "lockstep" as regards the evaluation of SMTM's hypothesis.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#674

Post by j_timberlake »

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…

This is a perfect example of a Hacker News hot-take, you complain about their attitude while making zero reference to their actual accomplishments or failures. No one will downvote you for posting something factually incorrect, because you didn't post any facts at all.

For anyone else reading, a good example of what EAs do can be seen with the GiveWell charity: https://www.givewell.org/top-charities-fund

Lots of anti-malaria and vitamin stuff (as a cheap way to save lots of lives). There are also tons of EA animal charities too, such as Humane League: https://thehumaneleague.org/our-impact

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#675

Post by Veedrac »

achierius wrote: post #576
Veedrac wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 releva…

I appreciate the good these organizations do, but I don't think that's the right measure of it. A person wouldn't in expectation serve global health better by becoming Catholic than by joining EA. That Catholicism is large isn't the same as them being effective at solving malaria. EA is tiny relative to the Church but still manages to support within an order of magnitude the funding you mentioned here, with exact numbers depending on how you count.

Similarly, it's not like government funding is an overlooked part of EA. Working on government and government aid programs is something EA talks about, high leverage areas like policy especially. If there's a more standard government role that an individual can take that has better outcomes than what EAs do, that would be an important update and I'd be interested in hearing it. But the criticism that EA is just not large enough is hard to action on, and more of a work in progress than a moral failing.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#676

Post by leshow »

tptacek wrote: post #323

Well that was a whole thing. I especially liked the existential threat of Cade Metz. But ultimately, I think the great oracle of Chicago got this whole thing right when he said: -Ism's in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon, "I don't believe in Beatles, I just believe in me." Good point there. After all, he was the walrus. I could be the w…

Ideology is at its most powerful when people think it doesn't exist.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#677

Post by wavemode »

PoignardAzur wrote: post #546

As someone who likes both the Rationalist community and the Rust community, it's fascinating to see the parallels in how the Hacker News crowd treats both. The contempt, the general lack of curiosity and the violence of the bold sweeping statements people will make here are mind-boggling.

I mostly see non-Rust languages' communities on the defensive on HackerNews, not the other way around.

If you open any thread related to Zig or Odin or C++ you can usually ctrl-F "Rust" and find someone having an argument about how Rust is better.

EDIT: Didn't have to look very far back for an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44319008

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#678

Post by j_timberlake »

creatonez wrote: post #651
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 g…

If you're going to claim a group is "deeply anti-human ghouls", maybe include an example or 2 of this in your post.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#679

Post by lyu07282 »

freejazz wrote: post #509
salynchnew wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> caring a lot about shrimp welfare (no one else does). Ah. I guess they are working out ecology through first principles, I guess? I feel like a lot of the criticism of EA and rationalism does boil down to some kind of general criticism of naivete and entitlement, which... is probably true when applied to lots of people, regardless of whether they espouse these ideas or not. It's also easier to criticize obviously d…

>I think some criticism of EA or rationalism is also a reaction to a creeping unspoken consensus that "things are only going to get worse" in the future. I think it's that combined with the EA approach to it which is: let's focus on space flight and shrimp welfare. Not sure which side is more in denial about the impending future? I have no belief any particular individual can do anything about shrimp welfare more tha…

> I think it's that combined with the EA approach to it which is: let's focus on space flight and shrimp welfare. Not sure which side is more in denial about the impending future?

I think its a result of its complete denial of and ignorance of politics. Because rationalist and effective altruist movements make a whole lot more sense, if you realize they are talking about deeply social and political issues with all politics removed from it. Its technocrat-ism the poster child of the kind of "there is no alternative" neoliberalism that everyone in the western world was indoctrinated into since the 80s.

Its a fundamental contradiction, we don't need to talk about politics because we already know liberal democracies and free-market capitalism is the best we ever going to achieve, faced with the numerous intractable problems we face that can not possibly be related to liberal democracies and free-market capitalism.

The problem is: How do we talk about any issue the world is facing today without ever challenging or even talking about any of the many assumptions the western liberal democracies are based upon? In other words: the problems we face are structural/systemic, but we are not allowed to talk about the structures/systems. That's how you end up with space flight and shrimp welfare and AGI/ASI catastrophizing taking up 99% of everything these people talk about. It's infantile, impotent liberal escapism more than anything else.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#680

Post by zahlman »

Aurornis wrote: post #562
gjm11 wrote: post #502

Earlier 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…

> The very introduction of that post has multiple links showing how much the SMTM post was spreading through the rationalist community with little question.

By "multiple links" you're referring to the same "two posts". Again, they weren't as popular, nor were they as uncritical as you describe. From Yudkowsky's post, for example:

> If you know about the actual epidemiology of obesity and how ridiculous it makes the gluttony theory look, you are still probably saying "Wait, lithium?" This is still mostly my own reaction, honestly.... If some weird person wants to go investigate, I think money should be thrown at them, both to check the low-probability massive-high-value gamble

Yudkowsky's argument is emphatically not that the lithium claim is true. He was merely advocating for someone to fund a study. He explicitly describes the claim as "low-probability", and advocates on the basis of a (admittedly clearly subjective) expected-value calculation.

> One of the links is a Eliezer Yudkowsky blog praising the work

That does not constitute "praise" of the work. Yudkowsky only praised the fact that someone was bucking the trend of

> almost nobody is investigating it in a way that takes the epidemiological facts seriously and elevates those above moralistic gluttony theories

.

> Pretending that this theory didn't grip the rationalist community all the way to top bloggers like Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander is revisionist history.

Nobody claimed that Yudkowsky ignored the theory.

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