I somehow was expecting talk about Descartes and Spinoza.
Guess I'm a rationalist now
781–790 of 1001 posts
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#782Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, that they're not "rational". If you take a look at the biodiversity survey here https://reflectivealtruism.com/2024/12/27/human-biodiversity... 1/3 of the users at acx actually support flawed scientific theories that would explain iq on a scientific basis. The Lynn study on iq is also quite flawed https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations If you want to read about human biodiversity, https://e…
A lot of "rationalists" of this kind are very poorly informed about statistical methodology, a condition they inherit from reading papers written in these pseudoscientific fields about people likewise very poorly informed. This is a pathology that has not really been addressed in the large, anywhere, really. Very few in the applied sciences who understand statistical methodology, "leave their areas" -- and many areas…
I don’t know where you get this idea, at least about Scott. He has written extensively about flaws in science and misuse of statistics. My favorite is the one where he cries at the end “ Science! YOU WERE THE CHOSEN ONE! It was said that you would destroy reliance on biased experts, not join them!”
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-o...
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#783Earlier quoted context omitted.
What makes it really bad is that you can't add different people's utility functions, or for that matter, multiply the utility function of some imagined galactic citizen by some astronomical amount. The question of "what distribution of wealth maximizes welfare" [1] is unanswerable in that framework and we're left with the Randian maxim that any transaction freely entered into is "fair" because nobody would enter into…
Comic sophism ain't gonna make hypernormies reconsider lol (Aside from the semi-tragic one to consider additive dilogarithms..) One actionable (utility agnostic) suggestion: study the measureable consequences of (quantifiable) policy on carbon pricing, because this is already quite close to the uncontroversial bits
E.g. precisely how inflationary can we make carbon credits?
E: by "uncontroversial", I meant amongst the Orthodox econs, so not Graeber & sympathetic heterodox.
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#784Earlier 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…
*Yudkowsky.
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#785Earlier 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…
This tracks based on my limited contact with LessWrong during the whole Roko's Basilisk thing. 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 thi…
Peardon the "it's" autocorrect, I can't seem to edit on mobile (Harmonic)
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#786"I have come out as a smart good thinking person, who knew" >liberal zionist hmmmm
As others have pointed out about the movement, it's for people who think they are smart and doing good things. It's just fitting that he is a Zionist who think he is a good person.
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#787Earlier 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!"
Pet shelters is just the pretty facade. The same ideology would have you step over homeless elderly ladies and buy mosquito nets instead, because the elderly lady cannot have children so mosquito nets maximize the number of future humans more efficiently.
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#788The 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…
I've always seen the breathless Singularitarian worrying about AI Alignment as a smokescreen to distract people from thinking clearly about the more pedestrian hazards of AI that isn't self-improving or superhuman, from algorithmic bias, to policy-washing, to energy costs and acceleration of wealth concentration. It also leads to so-called longtermism - discounting the benefits of solving current real problems and fo…
From my experience people who worry about existential AI risk tend to worry more about the more mundane problems than the wider population. In particular they have been very vocal about scamming, cube security and also wealth (& power!) concentration.
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#789Earlier quoted context omitted.
EA always rubbed me the wrong way. (1) The kind of Gatesian solutions they like to fund like mosquito nets are part of the problem, not part of the solution as I see it. If things are going to get better in Africa, it will be because Africans grow their economy and pay taxes and their governments can provide the services that they want. Expecting NGOs to do everything for them is the same kind of neoliberal thinking…
> When it comes to the nuclear waste issue, for instance ... Nuclear waste issues are 99.9% present-day political/ideological. Huge portions of the Earth are uninhabitable due to climate and/or geology. Lead, mercury, arsenic, and other naturally-occurring poisons contaminate large areas. Volcanoes spew CO2 and toxic gasses by the megaton. Vs. when is the last time you heard someone get excited over toxic waste left…
I agree with your lead (the issue is 99% political) but man does that last bit demand a rebuttal. Waste left behind by the roman empire isn't even remotely comparable to long term radioactive material. I suggest having a look through the wikipedia list of orphan source incidents to get an idea of what happens when people unknowingly come across radioactive material. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incident...
Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now
#790https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalist_community "In particular, several women in the community have made allegations of sexual misconduct, including abuse and harassment, which they describe as pervasive and condoned." There's weird sex stuff, logically, it's a cult.
Most weird sex stuff takes place outside of cults, so that doesn't follow.
There's weird sex stuff, logically, it's likely not a cult.