Guess I'm a rationalist now • Hacker News Board

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#701

Post by FeepingCreature » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 4:52 AM UTC

margalabargala wrote: post #687

FeepingCreature wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In AI finetuning, there's a theory that the model already contains the right ideas and skills, and the finetuning just raises them to prominence. Similarly in philosophic pedagogy, there's huge value in taking ideas that are correct but unintuitive and maybe have 30% buy-in and saying "actually, this is obviously correct, also here's an analysis of why you wouldn't believe it anyway and how you have to think to becom…

Additional note: compatibilism is only obviously correct if you accept that "free will" actually just means "the experienced perception/illusion of free will" as described by Schopenhauer. Using a slightly different definition of free will, suddenly Compatibilism becomes obviously incorrect. And now it's been reduced to quibbling over definitions, thereby reinventing much of the history of philosophy.

I think free will as philosophically used is inherently self-defeating and one of the largest black marks on the entire field, to be fair.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#702

Post by FeepingCreature » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 4:54 AM UTC

margalabargala wrote: post #684

FeepingCreature wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In AI finetuning, there's a theory that the model already contains the right ideas and skills, and the finetuning just raises them to prominence. Similarly in philosophic pedagogy, there's huge value in taking ideas that are correct but unintuitive and maybe have 30% buy-in and saying "actually, this is obviously correct, also here's an analysis of why you wouldn't believe it anyway and how you have to think to becom…

> And it turns out if you do this, you can discard 90% of philosophy as historical detritus This is just the story of the history of philosophy. Going back hundreds of years. See Kant and Hegel for notable examples.

Sure, and I agree that LW is doing philosophy in that sense.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#703

Post by cryptonector » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 4:54 AM UTC

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…

Shades of Objectivism. But clearly Objectivism was worse since Ayn Rand insisted that objective reality is knowable, but since it's only somewhat knowable Objectivism ends up requiring priests of sorts. Still, Rationalism does not seem to have this tremendous flaw[], it's just that rationalists might.

[] Eh, I know little about Rationalism. Please correct me.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#704

Post by int_19h » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 4:55 AM UTC

gjm11 wrote: post #584

swat535 wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

FWIW the Orthodox churches also use the term "catholic" when referring to themselves. Sometimes it is translated (as "universal"), but oftentimes it's kept in the original Greek. In some cases there are deliberate distinctions introduced to keep the two meanings apart: e.g. in Russian Church use, "Catholic" in the sense of Roman Catholic is "katolik" (mapping to Latin), while "catholic" in its original meaning of "universal" is "kafolik" (mapping directly to Greek).

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#705

Post by directevolve » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 4:58 AM UTC

creata wrote: post #659

johnfn wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What HN has for the rationalist movement isn’t just annoyance - it’s deep contempt and hatred.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#706

Post by habinero » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 5:06 AM UTC

j_timberlake wrote: post #674

jandrese wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A weird cult doing helpful community service doesn't cancel out the harm of them being a cult.

If they want to donate to charity, they can just donate. You don't gotta make a religion out of it.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#707

Post by mitthrowaway2 » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 5:13 AM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #656

sanderjd wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 associ…

Well nobody sent me; instead I had the strange experience of waking up this morning, seeing an interesting post about Scott Aaronson identifying as a rationalist, and when I check the discussion it's like half of HN has decided it's a good opportunity to espouse everything they dislike about this group of people.

Since when is that what we do here? If he'd written that he'd decided to become vegetarian, would we all be out here talking about how vegetarians are so annoying and one of them even spat on my hamburger one time?

And then of these uncalled-for takedowns, several -- including yours -- don't even seem to be engaging in good-faith discourse, and seem happy to pile on to attacks even when they're completely at odds with their own arguments.

I'm sorry to say it but the one who decided to use their free time to leer at people un-provoked over the internet seems to be you.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#708

Post by dwohnitmok » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 5:18 AM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #654

dwohnitmok wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 again…

> It was criticized widely outside of the rationalist community, but the takedowns were all dismissed because they weren't properly rationalist-coded.

Do you have any examples of this that predate that LW article? Ideally both the critique and its dismissal but just the critique would be great. The original HN submission had a few comments critiquing it but I didn't see anything in depth (or for that matter as strident).

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#709

Post by skinnymuch » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 5:25 AM UTC

Filligree wrote: post #636

ineptech wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!"

Yes, but they’re smug about it, which means they’re wrong. Of course it sounds ridiculous when you spell it out this way.

Or something like focusing on high paying job and donating money does absolutely nothing to solve any root or structural problems which defeats the supposed purpose of caring about future people or being effective altruist in the first place

Of course the way your comment is written makes criticism sound silly.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#710

Post by skinnymuch » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 5:26 AM UTC

JoshuaDavid wrote: post #334

jdmichal wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not familiar with any of these communities. Is there also a general bias towards one side between "the most important thing gets the * most* resources" and "the most important thing gets * all* the resources"? Or, in other words, the most important thing is the only important thing? IMO it's fine to pick a favorite and devote extra resources to it. But that turns less fine when one also starts working to deprive…

The general idea is that on the margin (in the economics sense), more resources should go to the most effective+neglected thing, and.the amount of resources I control is approximately zero in a global sense, so I personally should direct all of my personal giving to the highest impact thing.

And in their logic the highest impact is to donate money, take high paying jobs regardless of morality, and not focusing on any structural or root issues.