Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Guess I'm a rationalist now

scottaaronson.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

891–900 of 1001 posts

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#891

Post by sanderjd »

comp_throw7 wrote: post #736
gopher_space wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's truly fascinating how this thread is full of demonstrations of the exact phenomenon being discussed!

Accused of being unable to reexamine your base principles, you respond:

> rationalists, who are possibly the only meaningful social group in existence to celebrate changing their minds in response to new evidence

Which is exactly the kind of base principle that could use some reexamination.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#892

Post by pinerd3 »

Hercuros wrote: post #887
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fair point. Speaking only for myself, I think I fail to understand why it's important to situate philosophical discussions in the context of all the previous philosophers who have expressed related ideas, rather than simply discussing the ideas in isolation. I remember as a child coming to the same "if reality is a deception, at least I must exist to be deceived" conclusion that Descartes did, well before I…

How could you say that your views are aligned with those of Descartes and Kant if you have not seriously engaged with their works and what others have written about them? All serious works in philosophy (Kant especially) are subject to interpretation. Whole research programmes exist around the works of major philosophers, interpreting and building on their works. One cannot really do justice to e.g. the Critique of P…

I think they basically agree with your point here -- they mention Descartes and Kant to say roughly "I hold basically these ideas, but I don't mention the philosophers' names when I talk about them because 1) I came to them independently, and 2) the people I'm talking to are not familiar with the context so situating our conversation there isn't helpful." Their argument is that you can have philosophical conversations without relying on the context of the canon, and that in a first-level discussion they wouldn't bring up Descartes or Kant.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#893

Post by sanderjd »

ajkjk wrote: post #355
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…

Here's a theory of what's happening, both with you here in this comment section and with the rationalists in general. Humans are generally better at perceiving threats than they are at putting those threats into words. When something seems "dangerous" abstractly, they will come up with words for why---but those words don't necessarily reflect the actual threat, because the threat might be hard to describe. Neverthele…

Found the person who doesn't have this skill issue! :) Very well put.

I never quite realized the connection between this creepy feeling and the Bleak House criticism of far-flung philanthropy, until this comment.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#894

Post by Viliam1234 »

maybelsyrup wrote: post #683
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…

> They remind me of the "Effective Altruism" crowd Honestly thought they were the same people

Not all rationalists are EAs, and not all EAs are rationalists, but there are many people who are both. The very idea of using evidence and numbers to choose the optimal charity has a rationalist vibe. But of course, one can donate to an effective charity without being interested in LessWrong-style rationality.

https://www.lesswrong.com/ and https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/ run on the same software, and some people have an account at both of them, but they are generally separate web communities.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#895

Post by leggy77 »

I read Scott Aaronson's blog and his papers and enjoy both. That said, he's a perfect example of a person who is a genius in one area, thinks this translates to expertise or intuition in other areas, and is often very, very wrong.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#896

Post by lo_zamoyski »

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…

A good question to ask: what differentiates X from everything else?

So, how is "rationalism" different from everything else? What warrants this distinction? It can't be the use of reason or some refuge for rational discussion. I don't think I have to explain why that would be a ridiculous position to take.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#897

Post by Viliam1234 »

foobar_______ wrote: post #600
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…

I really appreciate this comment. Now in my 30s, I was not even aware of EA or Rationalist groups in my 20s but your description of a person high on the smell of their own farts and putting logic as king was me. The world is so chaotic that it felt good and right that I could lean on something "true" like logic. It took me to the "correct" answers according to logic but very misguided answers as I see them now. Human…

By the way, "the world is probabilistic" is one of the key lessons of the rationality community. (Infinite certainty would require infinite amount of evidence, according to the Bayes' Theorem.) When you find someone on internet trying to assign probabilities to their beliefs, chances are you have met a rationalist.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#898

Post by Viliam1234 »

noosphr wrote: post #550
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…

Incidentally a good book on logic is the best antidote to that type of thinking. Once you learn the difference between a valid and a sound argument and then realize just how ambiguous every English sentence is the idea that just because you have a logical argument you have something useful in everyday life becomes laughable rather quickly. I also think the ambiguity of meaning in natural language is why statistical l…

> Once you learn the difference between a valid and a sound argument and then realize just how ambiguous every English sentence is the idea that just because you have a logical argument you have something useful in everyday life becomes laughable rather quickly.

Ironically, that reminds me of "37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong", written by Eliezer Yudkowsky in 2008...

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#899

Post by throwaway314155 »

AntiDyatlov wrote: post #812
throwaway314155 wrote: post #771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this quote make more sense in context? I don't watch the show.

It makes perfect sense as a comment, seeing the clip from the show doesn't add anything.

I think i'm seeing it now. "This is it" implies Hank is actually looking for the cult in question, something that I guess seems odd to me without knowing the plot of the episode.

Thanks for clarifying though! Oh wait, you didn't.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#900

Post by Viliam1234 »

EnPissant wrote: post #731
Aurornis wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Is this "evidence" one of those silly things that rationalists so much love to talk about?

Don't worry, HN commenters can figure out the truth about Yudkowsky's articles from the first principles. They have already figured out that EAs no longer care about curing malaria, despite https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities only being a Google search away.

At the end, they will give you a lecture about how everyone hates people who are smug and talk about things they have no clue about. The lecture will then get a lot of upvotes.

Post reply on HN