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Guess I'm a rationalist now

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Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#731

Post by EnPissant »

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…

Where is the evidence that Yudkowsky edited an old post?

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#732

Post by energy123 »

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…

> maybe we don't have a full grasp of the implications of AI. Maybe it's actually going to be rather benign and more boring than expected

Part of the concern is there's no one "AI". There is frontier that keeps advancing. So "it" (the AI frontier in the year 2036) probably will be benign, but that "it" will advance and change. Then the law of large numbers is working against you, as you keep rolling the dice and hoping it's not a 1 each time. The dice rolls aren't i.i.d., of course, but they're probably not as correlated as we would like, and that's a problem as we keep rolling the dice. The analogy would be nuclear weapons. They won't get used in the next 10 years most likely, but on a 200 year time-frame it's a big deal as far as species-level risks go, which is what they're talking about here.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#733

Post by DangitBobby »

mock-possum wrote: post #262
exoverito wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human ethnic groups are measurably different in genetic terms, as based on single nucleotide polymorphisms and allelic frequency. There are multiple PCA plots of the 1000 Genomes dataset which show clear cluster separation based on ancestry: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Example-Ancestry-PCA-plo... We know ethnic groups vary in terms of height, hair color, eye color, melanin, bone density, sprinting ability, la…

…but that just sounds like scientific racism. Rather than judging an individual on their actual intelligence, these kinds of statistical trends allow you to justify judging an individual based on their race, because you feel you can credibly claim that race is an acceptable proxy for their genome, is an acceptable proxy for their intelligence. Or for their trustworthiness, or creativity, or sexuality, or dutifulness,…

I don't know what you're trying to say. That there is no race IQ difference? That we should not determine if there is one? How does one act on the feelings you've expressed?

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#734

Post by com2kid »

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-…

> they're discounting the people around them heavily compared to other people

This statement of yours makes no sense.

EAs by definition are attempting to remove the innate bias that discounts people far away by instead saying all lives are of equal worth.

>turning them into a math problem that assigns no special responsibility to the people around you

All lives are equal isn't a math problem. "Fuck it blow up the foreigners to keep oil prices low" is a math problem, it is a calculus that the US government has spent decades performing. (One that assigns zero value to lives outside the US.)

If $100 can save 1 life 10 blocks away from me or 5 lives in the next town over, what kind as asshole chooses to let 5 people die vs 1?

And since air travel is a thing, what the hell does "close to us" mean?

For that matter, from a purely selfish POV, helping lift other nations up to become fully advanced economies is hugely beneficial to me, and everyone on earth, in the long run. I'm damn thankful for all the aid my country gave to South Korea, the number of scientific advances that have come out of SK damn well paid for any tax dollars my grandparents paid on many orders of magnitude times over.

> It can be hard to say exactly why in words, but that doesn't make it less true.

This is the part where I shout racism.

Because history has shown it isn't about people being far or close in distance, but rather in how those people look.

Americans have shot down multiple social benefit programs because, and these are what people who voted against those programs directly said was their reasons "white people don't want black people getting the same help white people get."

Whites in America have voted, repeatedly, to keep themselves poor rather than lift themselves and black families out of poverty at the same time.

Of course Americans think helping people in Africa is "weird".

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#735

Post by comp_throw7 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #719
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!"

It's not all bad, some conclusions are ok. But it also has ideas like "don't donate to charity, it's better to invest that money in, like, an oil fund, and grow it 1000x, and then you can donate so much more! Bill Gates has done much more for humanity than some Red Cross doctor!". Which is basically just a way to make yourself feel good about becoming richer, much like "prosperity gospel" would for the religious.

This is not a commonly-held position in EA.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#736

Post by comp_throw7 »

gopher_space wrote: post #606
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…

Ever had a conversation with someone who literally cannot reexamine their base principles? Like, it's functionally impossible for them? That's everyone's central criticism of rationalists. Being able to do that is pretty much "entry level cognition" for a lot of us. You should be doing that yourself and doing it all the time if you want to play with the big kids. One of the things I really miss about the old nerds-on…

What a deeply confused criticism of rationalists, who are possibly the only meaningful social group in existence to celebrate changing their minds in response to new evidence.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#737

Post by comp_throw7 »

yawnxyz wrote: post #455
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…

Having just moved to the Bay Area, I've met a few AI "safety researchers" who seems to come from this EA / Rationalist camp, and they all behave more like preachers than thinkers / academics / researchers. I don't think any "Rationalists" I ever met would actually consider concepts like scientific method...

> I don't think any "Rationalists" I ever met would actually consider concepts like scientific method...

In that case I don't think you've met any of the people under discussion.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#738

Post by notahacker »

Filligree wrote: post #645
notahacker wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wytham Abbey was bought mainly to host internal workshops and "retreats", as outlined by the people who bought it https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xof7iFB3uh8Kc53bG/... https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yggjKEeehsnmMYnZd/... As far as I know it's never hosted an impress-the-oligarch fundraiser, which as you say would at least have a logic behind it[1] even if it might seem distasteful. For a philosop…

> If you drew a Venn diagram of the people that objected, people who sneered at the objections[2] and people who identified as rationalists you might only need two circles though...) I’m a bit confused by this one. Are you saying that no-one who identifies as rationalist sneered at the objections? Because I don’t think that’s true.

Nope, I'm implying the people sneering at the objections were the self proclaimed rationalists. Other, less contrarian thinkers were more inclined to spot that a $15m heritage building might not be the epitome of cost-effective venues...

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#739

Post by eesmith »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #729
dasil003 wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intelligence and rational thought is useful, but like any strategy it has its tradeoffs and limitations. No amount of intelligence can overcome the chaos of long time horizons, especially when we're talking about human civilization. IMHO it's reasonable to pick a long-term problem/risk and focus on solving it. But it's pure hubris to think rationality will give you anything approaching high confidence of what the big…

I used to think that massive, very long term droughts might cause serious instability, but I have since changed my mind. In highly developed nations, the amount of irrigation infrastructure built in the last 100 years is simple stunning. Plus, national agriculture research programmes are always researching how to use less water and grow the same amount of product. About drinking water: Rich places just build desalina…

'America Is Using Up Its Groundwater Like There’s No Tomorrow' (https://waterwatch.org/america-is-using-up-its-groundwater-l...) to support that stunning irrigation infrastructure.

You should not interpret that historical success to imply future success as it depended on non-sustainable groundwater extraction.

Eg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer

> Many farmers in the Texas High Plains, which rely particularly on groundwater, are now turning away from irrigated agriculture as pumping costs have risen and as they have become aware of the hazards of overpumping.

> Sixty years of intensive farming using huge center-pivot irrigators has emptied parts of the High Plains Aquifer.

> as the water consumption efficiency of the center-pivot irrigator improved over the years, farmers chose to plant more intensively, irrigate more land, and grow thirstier crops rather than reduce water consumption--an example of the Jevons Paradox in practice

How will the Great Plains farmers get water once the remaining groundwater is too expensive to extract?

Salt Lake City cannot simply build desalination plants to fix its water problem.

I expect the bad experiences of Okies during the internal migration of the Dust Bowl will be replicated once the temporary (albeit century-long) relief of using fossil water is exhausted.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#740

Post by ramon156 »

samuel wrote: post #67

I'm currently reading Yudkowsky's "Rationality: from AI to zombies". Not my first try, since the book is just a collection of blog posts and I found it a bit hard to swallow due its repetitiveness, so I gave up after the first 50 "chapters" the first time I tried. Now I'm enjoying it way more, probably because I'm more interested in the topic now. For those who haven't delved(ha!) into his work or have been pushed ba…

Sounds close to Yuval's book nexus which talks about the history of information gathering
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