Guess I'm a rationalist now • Hacker News Board

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#841

Post by red75prime » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 2:54 PM 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…

> Just shows a real lack of humility and lack of acknowledgment that 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

We can also apply the principle of epistemic humility to, say, climate change: we don't have a full grasp of Earth biosphere, maybe some unexpected negative feedback loop will kick in and climate change will revert itself.

It doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to prevent it. We will waste resources in hypothetical worlds where climate change self-reverts, but we might prevent civilization collapse in hypothetical worlds where climate change goes as expected or more severely.

Rationalism is about acting in a state of uncertainty. So

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

goes as an unspoken default. And some posts on lesswrong explicitly state "Epistemic status: not sure about it, but here's my thoughts" (though I find it a bit superfluous).

Nevertheless. The incredible danger of an unaligned superhuman AI doesn't allow to ignore even small chances of them being right about it.

Though I, myself, think that their probability estimates of some of their worries is influenced by the magnitude of negative consequences (humans aren't perfect Bayesians after all (and that includes me and validity of this statement)).

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#842

Post by epiccoleman » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 3:04 PM UTC

joenot443 wrote: post #105

junon wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got to that part, thought it was a joke, and then... it wasn't. Stopped reading thereafter. Nobody speaking like this will have anything I want to hear.

Scott's done a lot of really excellent blogging in the past. Truthfully, I think you risk depriving yourself of great writing if you're willing to write off an author because you didn't like one sentence. GRRM famously written some pretty awkward sentences but it'd be a shame if someone turned down his work for that alone.

Since I had not engaged with the ASOIAF community for quite some time, I had forgotten that, apparently, the phrase "fat pink mast" is stored somewhere in my long term memory. I sometimes struggle to remember my own wedding anniversary, but "fat pink mast" pops right to the surface.

I'd like to thank my useless brain for deciding to write that one down.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#843

Post by TheAncientGeek » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 3:06 PM UTC

camgunz wrote: post #76

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…

Yeah I don't know or really care about Rationalism or whatever. But I took Aaronson's advice and read Zvi Mowshowitz' Childhood and Education #9: School is Hell [0], and while I share many of the criticisms (and cards on the table I also had pretty bad school experiences), I would have a hard time jumping onto this bus. One point is that when Mowshowitz is dispelling the argument that abuse rates are much higher for…

It's not just Moshowitz a lot of them have the same syndome.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#844

Post by bell-cot » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 3:09 PM UTC

fc417fc802 wrote: post #789

bell-cot wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That's an interesting list - but the injury & death rates are several orders of magnitude below even lightning strikes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_injury#Epidemiology

Also, PaulHoule's original comment said "in 20,000 years". Cobalt 60 (for example) has a half-life of 5 1/4 years - so there really won't be any of it left by then.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#845

Post by epiccoleman » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 3:09 PM UTC

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #798

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 effect…

I don't know much about Thiel, but Vance does not seem like an "adherent" of rationalism in any way I recognize. I have trouble imagining Vance talking about "The Sequences" or "AI x-risk."

Mentioning Thiel and Vance together brings to mind a different thread of weird netizen philosophizing - one I don't really know much about but which I guess I'd sum up as the "Moldbug / Curtis Yarvin fandom." "Neoreactionaries" might be the right term?

I definitely recognize that the Venn diagram between those two "intellectual movements" (big scare quotes there) overlaps quite a bit, but it seems like a bit of stretch to lump what Vance, Thiel, and other right-wing tech bro types are up to under the rationalism banner.

Update: Having read through some of the other links in the thread, I have "updated" (as the rationalists say) my mental model of that Venn diagram to be slightly more overlapping. I still think they're distinct, but there's more cross-pollination between the Moldbugs and the ACX crowd than I initially realized.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#846

Post by yamazakiwi » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 3:25 PM UTC

aspenmayer wrote: post #603

yamazakiwi wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wisdom tends to resemble shallow aphorisms despite being framed as universal. Rather than interrogating wisdom's relevance or depth, many people simply repeat it uncritically as a shortcut to insight. This reflects more about how people use wisdom than the content itself, but I believe that behavior contributes to our perception of the importance of wisdom. It frequently reduces complex problems into comfortable over…

I have enjoyed learning the context and original meaning behind many of these aphorisms and words of wisdom, and that is the true utility of learning them, so that you can subvert them and invert them. Cultural touchstones have value because of shared context. The specific utility and applicability of wisdom varies because conversation is context specific and outcome dependent based on the adversarial vs collaborativ…

Rarely is it collaborative and the onus is on the learner to understand the benefit with no context into the importance or relevance of the information. My point is that the value is lost frequently because of human behavior.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#847

Post by TheAncientGeek » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 3:28 PM UTC

FeepingCreature wrote: post #313

greener_grass wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is an arbitrage going on where STEM types who lack background in philosophy, literature, history are super impressed by basic ideas from those subjects being presented to them by stealth. Not saying this is you, but these topics have been discussed for thousands of years, so it should at least be surprising that Yudkowsky is breaking new ground.

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…

>actually, this is obviously correct

Nobody know what's actually correct, because you have to solve epistemology first, and you have to solve epistemology to solve epistemology...etc.etc.

>And it turns out if you do this, you can discard 90% of philosophy as historical detritus

Nope. For instance , many of the issues Kant raised are still live.

>The massive advantage of the Sequences is they have justified and well-defended confidence

Nope. That would entail answering objections , which EY doesn't stoop to.

>Compatibilism is really obviously correct

Nope. It depends on a semantic issue , what free will means.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#848

Post by TheAncientGeek » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 3:30 PM UTC

FeepingCreature wrote: post #701

margalabargala wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There isn't a single philosophical meaning. You are probably thinking of libertarian free will..furthering Obviously false because determinism isn't obviously true.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#849

Post by GuinansEyebrows » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 3:30 PM UTC

bena wrote: post #496

troyastorino wrote: post #276

Earlier 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…

Technically "long-termism" should lead them straight to nihilism. Because, eventually, everything will end. One way or another. The odds are just 1. At some point, there are no more future humans. The number of humans are zero. Also, due to the nature of the infinite, any finite thing is essentially a rounding error and not worth concerning oneself with. I get the feeling these people often want to seem smarter than…

> But they treat those issues as if they'll work out in the wash.

there's something pathologically, virally sick about wealth accumulation's primary function being the further accumulation of wealth. for a movement rooted in "rationalism," EA seems pretty irrationally focused on excusing antisocial behavior.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#850

Post by TheAncientGeek » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 3:32 PM UTC

HDThoreaun wrote: post #209

greener_grass wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is an arbitrage going on where STEM types who lack background in philosophy, literature, history are super impressed by basic ideas from those subjects being presented to them by stealth. Not saying this is you, but these topics have been discussed for thousands of years, so it should at least be surprising that Yudkowsky is breaking new ground.

Rationalism largely rejects continental philosophy in favor of a more analytic approach. Yes these ideas are not new, but they’re not really the mainstream stuff you’d see in philosophy, literature, or history studies. You’d have to seek out these classes specifically to find them.

Analytical philosophy is rationalism done right.