771–780 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, Guru Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote an essay about how people asking "This isn’t a cult , is it?" bugs him, so it's fine actually. https://www.readthesequences.com/Cultish-Countercultishness
Hank Hill: Are y'all with the cult? Cult member: It's not a cult! It's an organization that promotes love and.. Hank Hill: This is it.
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. Do you have examples of that? I have a different perception, mo…
The confluence of Bay Area rationalism and academic philosophy means a lot of other EA space is given to discussing hypotheticals in longwinded forum posts, blogs and papers. Some of those are well-trod utilitarian debates, others take it towards uniquely EA arguments like asserting that given that there could be as many as 10^31 future humans, essentially anything which claims to reduce existential risk - no matter…
EAs gave $1,886,513,058 through GiveWell[1], and there is 0 AI stuff in there (you can search in the linked Airtable spreadsheet).
There is also a whole movement for doing a lifetime commitment to give 10% of your earnings to charity. 9,880 people took the pledge so far[2].
[1] https://airtable.com/appGuFtOIb1eodoBu/shr1EzngorAlEzziP/tbl...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The ‘rationalist’ group being discussed here aren't Cartesian rationalists, who dismissed empiricism; rather, they're Bayesian empiricists. Bayesian probability turns out to be precisely the unique extension of Boolean logic to continuous real probability that Aristotle (nominally an empiricist!) was lacking. (I think they call themselves “rationalists” because of the ideal of a “rational Bayesian agent” in economics…
They can call themselves empiricists all they like, it only takes a few exposures to their number to come away with a firm conviction (or, let's say, updated prior?) that they are not . First-principles reasoning and the selection of convenient priors are consistently preferenced over the slow, grinding work of iterative empiricism and the humility to commit to observation before making overly broad theoretical claim…
I read the NYT and rat blogs all the time. And the NYT is not the one that's far more likely to deeply engage with the research and studies on the topic.
> “You’re [X]?! The quantum physicist who’s always getting into arguments on the Internet, and who’s essentially always right, but who sustains an unreasonable amount of psychic damage in the process?” > “Yes,” I replied, not bothering to correct the “physicist” part. Didn't read much beyond that part. He'll fit right in with the rationalist crowd...
No actual person talks like that —- and if they really did, they’ve taken on the role of a fictional character. Which says a lot about the clientele either way. I skimmed a bit here and there after that but this comes off as plain grandiosity. Even the title is a line you can imagine a hollywood character speaking out loud as they look into the camera, before giving a smug smirk.
0.o
> No actual person talks like that
I think it is plausible that there are people (readers) that find other people (bloggers) basically always right, and that would be the first think they would say to them if they met them. n=1, but there are some bloggers that I think are basically always right, and I am socially bad, so there is no telling what would I blurt out if I met them.
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…
Curious to read these. Got a source?
I've always been very skeptical of Scott "Alexander" after he and his supporters tricked half of reddit into harassing some journalists for "doxxing" him when his identity was public knowledge seemingly because he just really didn't like the takes presented by the journalists. The way he refers to them like it was a hit piece targeting him reeked of conspiratorial and paranoid thinking.
edit:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-cod...
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…
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…
I quickly lost interest in Roko's Basilisk, but that is what brought me in the door and started me looking around the discussions. At first, it was quite seductive. There was a strange fearlessness there, a willingness to say and admit some things about humanity, our limitations and how we tend to think that other great thinkers maybe danced around in the past. After awhile it became clear that while there were a select few individuals who had found some balance between purely rational thinking and how reality actually works, most of the rest had their heads so far up their asses that they'd fart and call it a cool breeze. Reminded me of my brief obsession with Game Theory and realizing that even it's creators knew it's utility was not quite as advertised to the layman (as in it would not really help you predict or plan for anything at all, just model how decisions might be made).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Scientific thinking is not the same as mathematical thinking and it becomes quite wishy washy grey if you zoom in too far!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are there other philosophy- or history-grounded sources that are comparable? If so, I’d love some recommendations. Yudkowsky and others have their problems, but their texts have an interesting points, are relatively easy to read and understand, and you can clearly see which real issues they’re addressing. From my experience, alternatives tend to fall into two categories: 1. Genuine classical philosophy, which is usua…
It's not a nice response but I would say: don't be so lazy. Struggle through the hard stuff. I say this as someone who had the opposite experience: I had a decent humanities education, but an abysmal mathematics education, and now I am tackling abstract mathematics myself. It's hard. I need to read sections of works multiple times. I need to sit down and try to work out the material for myself on paper. Any impressio…
When "struggling through" a philosophy book, that doesn't happen in my experience. In fact, if you look up what others thought that passage means, you'll find no agreement among a bunch of people who "specialize" in authors who themselves "specialized" in the author you're reading. So reading that stuff I feel I have to accept that I will never understand what's written there and the whole exercise is just about "thinking about it for the sake of thinking". This might be "good for me" but it's really hard to keep up the motivation. Much harder than a math book.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Along these lines I am sort of skimming articles/blogs/websites about Lightcone, LessWrong, etc, and I am still struggling with the question...what do they DO?
Twenty years or so ago, Eliezer Yudkowsky, a former proto-accelerationalist, realized that superintelligence was probably coming, was deeply unsafe, and that we should do something about that. Because he had a very hard time convincing people of this to him obvious fact, he first wrote a very good blog about human reason, philosophy and AI, in order to fix whatever was going wrong in people's heads that caused them t…
A lot of it seems rooted in Asimov-inspired, stimulant-fueled philosophizing than any kind of empirical or grounded observations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm hyperfixated on the idea that they're angry at Metz for "outing" Scott Alexander, who published some of his best-known posts under his own name.
Your persistent refusal to acknowledge that Scott did not want to go from a world where his patients Googling his real name did _not_ immediately lead to his blog, to a world where it _did_ immediately lead to his blog, and that was his primary (and valid) objection to having his real first and last name put into print, is baffling.
More people should read the article, if anything because it provides interesting insight into Sam Altman's shady behavior.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-cod...