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Guess I'm a rationalist now

scottaaronson.blog

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Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#791

Post by at_a_remove »

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…

I will throw in an additional factor: any group, community, or segmentation of the general population wherein the participants both tend to have a higher than average intelligence (whatever that means) and whose preoccupation revolves around almost any form of cogitation, consideration, products of human thought ... will invariably get hit with some form of snobbery/envy, even if no explicitly stated intelligence threshold or gatekeeping is present.

Bluntly put, you are not allowed to be even a little smart and not all "aww shucks" about it. It has to be in service of something else like medicine or being a CPA. (Fun fact I found in a statistics course: the average CPA has about five points of IQ on the average doctor.) And it is almost justified, because you are in constant peril of falling down into your own butt until you disappear, but at the same time it keeps a lot of people under the thumb (or heel, pick your oppressive body part) of dumbass managers and idiots who blithely plow forward without a trace of doubt.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#792

Post by at_a_remove »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #321
NoGravitas wrote: post #126

Probably the most useful book ever written about topics adjacent to capital-R Rationalism is "Neoreaction, A Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right" [1], by Elizabeth Sandifer. Though the topic of the book is nominally the Alt-Right, a lot more of it is about the capital-R Rationalist communities and individuals that incubated the neoreactionary movement that is currently dominant in US politics. It's probably…

If you want a book on the rationalists that's not a smear dictated by a person who is banned from their Wikipedia page for massive npov violations, I hear Chivers' The AI Does Not Hate You and Rationalist's Guide to the Galaxy are good. (Disclaimer: Chivers kinda likes us, so if you like one book you'll probably dislike the other.)

It might be fair play, however. If I correctly recall, LessWrong had, for a while, a prominent wiki admin who had been punted from Wikipedia for his frothing npov.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#793

Post by tpm »

skinnymuch wrote: post #711
bena wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's essentially a grift. An excuse to do nothing while looking like you care and reaping rewards. If they wanted to help, they should be focused on the now. Global poverty, climate change, despotic world leaders. They should be aligning themselves against such things. But instead what we see is essentially not that. Effective altruism is a lot like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, a bit of a misnom…

Agreed. To be pedantic, DPRK is run via the will of the people to a degree comparable to any country. A bigger misnomer is the west calling liberal “democracy”, just democracy.

Even if I understand what you mean, DPRK is very far away from democratic countries. It's not comparable at all.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#794

Post by mjburgess »

wffurr wrote: post #782
mjburgess wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You're correct to observe that SSC raises many issues with statistical methodology. But the whole field psychometrics, and its "Rationalist" fans, proceed as if they havent read: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-rev...

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#795

Post by gsf_emergency_2 »

benchly wrote: post #785
benchly wrote: post #776

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Just musing out loud. "Utility" is like, for

Physics postgrads: "gauge"

Physics undergrads: "wavefunction"

Grade schoolers: "temperature"

These concepts definitely useful for the hw sets, no understanding needed (or expected!)

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#796

Post by naasking »

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…

> "hey, I've got a thought, maybe I haven't considered all angles to it, maybe I'm wrong - but here it is"

I dunno, that seems like the tone of every article I've read on less wrong.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#797

Post by naasking »

lisper wrote: post #499
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 think one can levy a much more specific critique of rationalism: rationalism is in some sense self-defeating. If you are rational you will necessarily conclude that the fundamental dynamic that drives the (interesting parts of) the universe is Darwinian evolution, which is not rational. It blindly selects for reproductive fitness at the expense of all else. If you are a gene, you can probably produce more offspring…

> If you are a gene, you can probably produce more offspring in an already-industrialized environment by making brains that lean more towards misogyny and sexual promiscuity than gender equality and intellectual achievement.

The fact that humans are intelligent at all and Enlightenment peoples currently dominate the world suggests otherwise.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#798

Post by Ar-Curunir »

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.

There is little ideological overlap between rationalists and Rust folks (and thank god for that). IME unlike the rationalists, Rust has actually done something useful for the world, and HN’s opinion of Rust and its community has drastically improved over the last decade.

The rationalists have not had any such clearly positive effects, and rather their adherents (Thiel, Vance, etc) have had severely deleterious effects on society.

There is no comparison between the two communities.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#799

Post by naasking »

adastra22 wrote: post #726
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!"

That hasn't defined EA for at least 10 years or so. EA started with "you should donate to NGOs distributing mosquito nets instead of the local pet shelter". It then moved into "you should work a soulless investment banking job so you can give more". More recently it was "you should excise all expensive fun things from your life, and give 100% of your disposable income to a weird poly sex cult and/or their fraudulent…

This is what some EAs believe, I don't think there was ever a broad consensus on those latter claims. As such, it doesn't seem like a fair criticism of EA.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#800

Post by UncleMeat »

noname120 wrote: post #770
jhbadger wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The simple answer is you don't need a "framework" -- plain empathy for the less fortunate is good enough. But if the EA's actually want to do something about malaria (although the Gates Foundation does much, much more in that regard than the Centre for Effective Altruism), more power to them. But as Becker notes from his visits to the Centre, things like malaria and malnutrition are not the primary focus of the centr…

EA people gave a total of $817,276,989 to malaria initiatives through GiveWell[1][2]. How much more do they need to give before you will change your mind about whether “EA's actually want to do something about malaria”? [1] https://www.givewell.org/all-grants-fund [2] https://airtable.com/appGuFtOIb1eodoBu/shr1EzngorAlEzziP/tbl...

I've used GiveWell for donations and don't consider myself an Effective Altruist. Does GiveWell get to count for the just the EA community?
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