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My falling-out with the rationalist community

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Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#61

Post by zahlman »

cogman10 wrote: post #44
zahlman wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> gatherings where they all proclaim that their beliefs are true even if they don't seriously believe them? What on Earth are you referring to? What gatherings? What beliefs? What proclamations? What evidence of insincerity?

> What gatherings? Rationalist have groups meetup and conferences. For example [1] > What beliefs? It's pretty diverse and not uniformly held. Some of the more strange ones that seem to have pretty wide appeal are around AI safety. For example, Roko's basilisk. > What proclamations? What evidence of insincerity? I was responding to the comment above me that suggested that 95% don't actually hold rationalist beliefs a…

Okay, but those pieces don't establish your claim. You would need a Roko's basilisk-like concept that only 5% of the community agree with, and a "group meetup" or "conference" where "they all" (i.e.: also the 95%) "proclaim that their beliefs (i.e.: including the basilisk thing) are true".

If I observed such a gathering knowing that 5% of the people there have sincerely come to a particular conclusion based on the available evidence and the other 95% think the evidence doesn't support that conclusion, I would be extremely surprised to see everyone going around "larping belief". And I don't think you can actually show such a thing occurring.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#62

Post by gwd »

novia wrote: post #6

This post felt like it ended too soon? Seemed like the author never got around to explaining why he (she?) fell out with the rationalists

They did. The entire section starting with "Of course, despite the emphasis on reason — and the subtle implication that the out-group is more wrong — the rationalist community is susceptible to the same biases as anyone else" talks about the failure of the rationalist community to be any better than any other group.

Then this describes the actual break:

> By that time, my relationship with the skeptic community was already strained; in an earlier message to the same mailing list, I said that for all the claims of being enlightened, it’s the only place where stonings are still in fashion. Even so, when I saw the Damore email, I had a brief urge to respond. I wanted to accuse him of “motivated reasoning” — a purported fallacy of constructing an argument to advance a specific conclusion, in contrast to the divine, unmotivated reasoning of real rationalists. I bit my tongue, thought to myself “wow, what a stupid game to play”, and deleted the draft.

In other words, they had been dissatisfied with the whole rationalist way of arguing for a while; and this was the point where they finally felt like "This is actually just a game of words; and it's a dumb one I don't want to play any more." The implication being that after this they no longer considered themselves a rationalist, nor engaged in its form of arguing.

ETA: FWIW, I mean... hard things are hard? It's the normal state of the world that people think they've done the hard thing but are actually just finding excuses to do what they want. People like J.D. Vance decide to be a Catholic, but turns out Jesus' actual teachings are so counter-intuitive that he still doesn't understand them and does them badly. Actually being rational is a difficult, mostly solo activity.

Quitting rationalism (or Christianity, or ...) because most of the people around you are just cosplaying is like quitting chess because most of the people around you are just playing around and never get past 1200 ELO. Or like quitting weightlifting because most people around you talk about reps and whatever but never actually push themselves enough to get past their current plateau. Like, OK, that's their problem, but what's that got to do with you?

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#63

Post by lux-lux-lux »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #56
lux-lux-lux wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well-educated young middle class white men, and with politics that generally flow entirely predictably from those demographics. The only real outlier is the openness to HBD/scientific racism stuff.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#64

Post by jml7c5 »

zahlman wrote: post #29
nradov wrote: post #8

Rationalism is just a secular religion, complete with all the usual arguments and schisms over minor points of dogma. These are not people worth taking seriously.

There isn't actually such a thing as "rationalism". This is a label applied from outside to those who are trying to apply the concepts of rationality, or those who try to get into rationality but don't actually understand it. Yes, there are schisms. No, there is not dogma. There are arguments people don't want to rehash, and there are fundamental axioms of reasoning . The entire point of the exercise is to establish…

>This is a label applied from outside

I don't think this is accurate. Most rationalists seem to self-describe as rationalists, and talk about rationalism as a "thing".

There is some dogma, sort of, in the form of The Sequences. (An extraordinarily goofy name that belies some of the mysticism-adjacent LARP that sought to treat the ideas as revolutionary. I suspect a 20 year old was behind it.) I say "sort of" dogma because people are aware that the studies referenced in there turned out not to replicate and have generally abandoned them. But you still see some references to them and vague reverence of them.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#65

Post by zahlman »

novia wrote: post #6

This post felt like it ended too soon? Seemed like the author never got around to explaining why he (she?) fell out with the rationalists

It comes across to me that there's a lot of culture warring in it that's irrelevant to the task of actually figuring out what's true. Bringing up Damore and "sealioning" within a few paragraphs is more than enough to establish for me that this is not about trying to have any kind of constructive discussion.

Aside from that, it's curious how I've been interested in these ideas (and following SSC) for like a decade and this is the first I've heard of the castle. But I do hear about the Against Malaria Foundation constantly from that direction, and I'm pretty sure they've received more than 15 million from self-styled "aspiring rationalists" and "effective altruists" (although these really aren't meant as identity labels and you're doing it wrong if you think of yourself that way; pg's "Keep your identity small" represents solid rationalist thinking).

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#66

Post by zahlman »

jml7c5 wrote: post #64
zahlman wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't actually such a thing as "rationalism". This is a label applied from outside to those who are trying to apply the concepts of rationality, or those who try to get into rationality but don't actually understand it. Yes, there are schisms. No, there is not dogma. There are arguments people don't want to rehash, and there are fundamental axioms of reasoning . The entire point of the exercise is to establish…

>This is a label applied from outside I don't think this is accurate. Most rationalists seem to self-describe as rationalists, and talk about rationalism as a "thing". There is some dogma, sort of, in the form of The Sequences. (An extraordinarily goofy name that belies some of the mysticism-adjacent LARP that sought to treat the ideas as revolutionary. I suspect a 20 year old was behind it.) I say "sort of" dogma be…

> I suspect a 20 year old was behind it.

Yudkowsky wrote them from 2006-2009, so he would have been in his late 20s.

> because people are aware that the studies referenced in there turned out not to replicate

The Sequences are about pure reasoning, not about results from "studies". They are very much about how to analyze studies and about the fact that you should care whether they replicate.

In fact, I can't even recall any such "studies referenced".

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#67

Post by bigbadfeline »

zahlman wrote: post #58
lyu07282 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize you sound exactly like a cult member right? Like that's precisely how a scientologist would explain auditing to people outside the cult. Like this is "not dogma" just "fundamental axioms" that "is not because of faith, and that disbelieving them cannot make them false".

> You do realize you sound exactly like a cult member right? If you say so. That doesn't change the fact that P(A|B) = P(B|A)P(A)/P(B).

> That doesn't change the fact that P(A|B) = P(B|A)P(A)/P(B).

It didn't take long before a strawman got pulled out of nowhere. That's so typical, if one disagrees with the wild conjectures of the rationalists, which they call "axioms", they blame you for rejecting the Pythagorean Theorem or some such. Dishonesty is the defining feature of that "movement"

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#68

Post by cogman10 »

zahlman wrote: post #61
cogman10 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What gatherings? Rationalist have groups meetup and conferences. For example [1] > What beliefs? It's pretty diverse and not uniformly held. Some of the more strange ones that seem to have pretty wide appeal are around AI safety. For example, Roko's basilisk. > What proclamations? What evidence of insincerity? I was responding to the comment above me that suggested that 95% don't actually hold rationalist beliefs a…

Okay, but those pieces don't establish your claim. You would need a Roko's basilisk-like concept that only 5% of the community agree with, and a "group meetup" or "conference" where "they all" (i.e.: also the 95% ) "proclaim that their beliefs (i.e.: including the basilisk thing ) are true". If I observed such a gathering knowing that 5% of the people there have sincerely come to a particular conclusion based on the…

Which claim exactly did I make which you are refuting? Please actually quote it.

> I would be extremely surprised to see everyone going around "larping belief". And I don't think you can actually show such a thing occurring.

I never claimed I could or that I observed such a thing. The 95/5% didn't come from me, it came from the person I responded to.

My point was that

- It's impossible to distinguish who's a true believer and who isn't.

- That the meetups of the rationalists re-enforce beliefs, particularly in true believers. Also that these beliefs of the rationalists can be pretty whacky and based on a jenga tower of priors.

- That there isn't "nothing" a rational person could do to dissuade someone from a whacky belief.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#69

Post by zahlman »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #41
sxp wrote: post #35

> For one, their analyses almost always amounted to post hoc justifications of the things they liked. "Almost always" is carrying a lot of weight here. Rationalists are ideologically diverse [1] when it comes to things like monogamy vs polyamory, left vs right, pro-AI vs anti-AI, nature vs nurture, racism vs anti-racism. The distribution is different from the general population, but many people have changed their min…

That graph looks incredibly un-diverse. Assuming it's accurate, it's mostly childless white male Americans, who skew heavily towards being students.

And?

The entire point is that true statements are true, and false statements are false, regardless of who does or doesn't utter them.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#70

Post by zahlman »

xhevahir wrote: post #57
sxp wrote: post #35

> For one, their analyses almost always amounted to post hoc justifications of the things they liked. "Almost always" is carrying a lot of weight here. Rationalists are ideologically diverse [1] when it comes to things like monogamy vs polyamory, left vs right, pro-AI vs anti-AI, nature vs nurture, racism vs anti-racism. The distribution is different from the general population, but many people have changed their min…

> One of Damore's mistakes was opting for a high-decoupling route on a politically charged topic instead of a low decoupling route. Why does the formation of correct beliefs, a topic people have been discussing for millennia, require such exotic jargon? It's things like this that give off cult vibes.

Because, as the incident with Damore amply demonstrated, trying to use common language to describe these concepts leads to enormous misunderstandings at best. (And sometimes people go out of their way to misinterpret you anyway.)
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