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Guess I'm a rationalist now

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Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#921

Post by Viliam1234 »

at_a_remove wrote: post #792
FeepingCreature wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am not aware of Less Wrong having a Wikipedia admin. Are you perhaps thinking about David Gerard, admin of RationalWiki and Wikipedia, who once got in trouble for his decade-long internet crusade against Scott Alexander?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no...

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#922

Post by Viliam1234 »

Aurornis wrote: post #487
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…

Ironically, bringing this topic up always turns the conversation to ad-hominem attacks about the messenger while completely ignoring the subject matter. That's exactly the type of argument rationalists claim to despise, but it gets brought up whenever inconvenient arguments appear about their own communities. All of the comments dismissing the content because of the author or refusing to acknowledge the arguments bec…

> my blog gets about 5x more hits and new followers when I write about Reaction

Notice that most of that writing is negative, such as "anti-Reactionary manifesto" or more recently "Moldbug sold out".

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#923

Post by Viliam1234 »

throwaway314155 wrote: post #775
Aurornis wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The leaked e-mails 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 conspirato…

> when his identity was public knowledge

The details are important here. His identity was "public knowledge" in the sense that regular readers of his blog could sometimes find links to his previous blog, and somewhere on that previous blog he mentioned his name. So many of his long-term readers knew.

But in the opposite direction -- if all you knew was Scott's full name, and you did a Google search -- there was no connection to the blog. You could find his professional web pages, and that was it.

What the NYT journalists threatened was to make a #1 search result for his full name that would expose his private life and his pseudonymous blog to all potential patients trying to find out some information about their doctor. Which would practically cost him his job.

And, ultimately, Scott did lose his job. The fact that writing on Substack turned out to be more profitable than his former job was a lucky coincidence.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#925

Post by Viliam1234 »

DrNosferatu wrote: post #825

I cannot falsify the thesis that so-called "Rationalism" and "Effective Altruism" is - in practice - just folklore so that top-percenters don't pay taxes and feel good about themselves. As the least worse solution to maximize Social Utility has long been invented: Democracy and political action.

I have some doubts about the rationality of trying to avoid paying taxes by sending half of their salary to anti-malaria charities, but maybe those people just suck at math which is why they get paid so much.

Or maybe you are wrong.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#926

Post by mensetmanusman »

lisper wrote: post #854
Rastonbury wrote: post #824

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couple of point to that, mainly why should one have to follow darwinian evolution just because we are a product of that. It's similar to the natural law argument against homosexuality, that unnatural sex is wrong. The argument against that is natural biology does not inform what is good or what we should do. I'm sure you would be able to predict what a rationalise will say when you ask them what future they prefer: o…

> why should one have to follow darwinian evolution That depends on what you mean by "follow". You have to "follow" Darwinian evolution for the same reason you have to "follow", say, the law of gravity. That doesn't mean you can't build airplanes and spacecraft, but you still have to acknowledge and "follow" the law of gravity. You can't just glue feathers to your arms, jump off a cliff, and hope for the best. (Actua…

Pointing to other species can be futile since they also eat their young and are horrible partners :)

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#927

Post by ConspiracyFact »

ajkjk wrote: post #513
janeerie wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One mistake you making is thinking that rationalists care more about people far away than people in their community. The reality is that they set the value of life the same for all. If children around you are doing of an easily preventable disease, then yes, help them first! If they just need more arts programs, then you help the children dying in another country first.

That's not a mistake I'm making. Assuming you're talking about bog-standard effective altruists---by (claiming to) value the suffering of people far away as the same as those nearby, they're discounting the people around them heavily compared to other people. Compare to anyone else who values their friends and family and community far more than those far away. Perhaps they're not discounting them to less-than-parity-…

Perhaps part of it is that local action can often be an order of magnitude more impactful than the “equivalent” action at a distance. If you volunteer in your local community, you not only have fine-grained control over the benefit you bestow, you also know for a fact that you’re doing good. Giving to a charity that addresses an issue on the other side of the world doesn’t afford this level of control, nor this level of certainty. For all you know most of the donation is being embezzled.

I think another part of it is a sort of healthy nativism or in-group preference or whatever you want to call it. It rubs people the wrong way when you say that you care about someone in a different country as much as you care about your neighbors. That’s just…antisocial. Taken to its logical conclusion, a “rationalist” should not only donate all of their disposable income to global charities, they should also find a way to steal as much as possible from their neighbors and donate that, too. After all, those. Holden in Africa need the money much more than their pampered western neighbors.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#928

Post by Viliam1234 »

khazhoux wrote: post #579

I would love a link to anything that could convince me the Rationalist community isn't just a bunch of hoo-haw. I read the first third of HPMOR. I stopped because I found the writing poor, but more importantly, it didn't "open my mind" to any higher-order way of rationalist thinking. My takeaway was "Yup, the original HP story was full of inconsistencies and stupidities, and you get a different story if the character…

> Update your beliefs based on evidence --> who disagrees with this?

Like, dozens of comments in this thread?

For example, people expressing strong opinions on what Effective Altruism is actually about, when https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities is just one google search away... but why would anyone bother checking before they post a strong opinion?

The #1 comment says that the rationality community is about "trying to reason about things from first principle", when if fact it is the opposite.

A commenter links a post by Scott Alexander and claims that Scott predicted something and was wrong, when if fact in the linked article Scott says he gives it a probability 30% (which means he gives probability 70% to that thing not happening). Another commenter defends that as a "perfectly reasonable but critical comment".

And hey, compared to most of the internet, HN is the smart place, and the local discussion norms are better than average. But it still doesn't seem like people here actually care about being, uhm, less wrong about things, even ones that are relatively trivial to figure out.

So basically, the mind-shattering idea is to build a community that actually works like that (well, most of the time). Where providing evidence gets upvoted, and unsubstantiated accusations that turn out to be wrong get downvoted, and a few more things like this.

Plus there is the idea of trying to express your beliefs as probabilities, using actual numbers. That's why EY cannot stop talking about the Bayes' Theorem. Yes, people actually do that.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#929

Post by ConspiracyFact »

wat10000 wrote: post #554
sfblah wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do they escape the reality that the Earth will one day be destroyed, and that it's almost certainly impossible to ever colonize another planetary system? Just suicide out?

If you value maximizing the number of human lives that are lived, then even “almost certainly impossible” is enough to justify focusing a huge amount of effort on that. Maybe interstellar colonization is a one in a million shot, but it would multiply the number of human lives by billions or trillions or more.

Is the argument that we should try to do things that will benefit our theoretical and theoretically multitudinous descendants? Or is it that just taking action to make their existence more likely is a moral good? Because the latter is just brain dead.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#930

Post by dv_dt »

lechatonnoir wrote: post #913
dv_dt wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rationalist discussions rarely consider what should be the baseline assumption of what if one or more of the logical assumptions or associations are wrong. They also tend to not systematically plan to validate. And in many domains - what could hold true for one moment can easily shift.

I am really not sure where you get any of these ideas. For each of your critiques, there are not only discussions, but taxonomies of compendiums of discussions about the topics at hand on LessWrong, which can easily be found by Googling any keyword or phrase in your comment. On "considering what should be the baseline assumption": https://www.lesswrong.com/w/epistemology https://www.lesswrong.com/w/priors , particula…

Looking it the first link https://www.lesswrong.com/w/epistemology - it has frankly a comically shallow description of the topic, same with https://www.lesswrong.com/w/priors. In just about every discussion, I may be just the entirely wrong audience, but to me they don't even begin to address the narrow topic of choice, let alone form competent building blocks to form any solid world view.

I support anyone trying to form rational pictures of the universe and humanity. If the LessWrong community approach seems to make sense and is enriching to your understanding of the world then I am happy for you. But, every time I try to take a serious delve into LessWrong, and I have done it multiple times over the years, it sets off my cult/scam alerts.

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