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My falling-out with the rationalist community

lcamtuf.substack.com

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Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#81

Post by anon-3988 »

> Another source of bias is that rationalists are necessarily selective in the arguments they want to have. In everyday life, they rely on intuition and anecdotes the same as anyone else; but if they want to debate your life choices, they will do so forcibly and under the guise of seeking scientific truth. The behavior is pervasive enough to have its own name: sealioning.

So they are not rationalist then? I would have assume a rationalist would be...well..rational. And that would mean to include emotions into discussion about human and people. This is my problem with the classical Consequentialism or Utilitarianism, they always discount emotions. I'm sorry, does emotion exists or not? Is it real? Then it should be brought into discussion.

If I am in a math conference to discuss the Riemann Hypothesis with my cunt ex-wife in the room, I would get effected. It does not really matter how rational I am, I have to consider that my brain will not be fair towards her ideas.

If my brain is wired to be racist and that I truly have whispers of racism in my head, that should be part of the discussion whether or not I am qualified for this position. You claim to NOT have any such inclination, AT ALL? Okay, how likely is that given the human nature, what percentage should I give that you are lying? That should included in the discussion.

All of this is too much to think about? That is also part of the calculation, perhaps we should utilize some shortcut.

I don't understand why people exclude things from the universe of things to consider.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#82

Post by tcfhgj »

pdonis wrote: post #49
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…

> The entire point of the exercise is to establish that certain things are true And any domain where you can do that is not the real world. The real world is messy and you can't prove things the way you can in nice, tidy, theoretical domains like math. And the kind of logic where you have fundamental axioms of reasoning and you can prove theorems is just a subset of math. In the real world, things don't exactly satis…

Trying to ignore reality doesn't sound rational.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#83

Post by mrandish »

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.

I agree with you about the tech-adjacent rationalist/EA community in the bay area (especially since around 2010). While that community originally coalesced around reason and evidence-based skepticism, those are uncontroversial ideas that've been around since the enlightenment.

Where the bay area rationalists went off the rails was in extrapolating far beyond those ideas to other things and then applying their new orthodoxy in rigidly dogmatic ways, eventually becoming 'a movement' with schisms, in-group/out-group policing, deference to influential members and ostracism for heterodox views.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#84

Post by cogman10 »

zahlman wrote: post #73
cogman10 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bel…

> Which claim exactly did I make which you are refuting? Please actually quote it. When you said: > How about the 95% stop having gatherings where they all proclaim that their beliefs are true even if they don't seriously believe them? you implicitly claimed that "the 95%" indeed have such gatherings. As far as I can tell, the gatherings that they have are not of that nature. > My point was that It's impossible to di…

> you implicitly claimed that "the 95%" indeed have such gatherings.

> As far as I can tell, the gatherings that they have are not of that nature.

I literally cited you an example of such a gathering. Do you refute it or just deny that it exists?

> And my claim is that it's actually trivial to tell who's a true believer and who isn't, because the concept of "true believer" does not pertain to "rationality" (by construction!)

That's your mistake. The rationalists are irrational. Roko's basilisk, which I cited earlier, is an example of the sorts of ideas and beliefs they get up to which are irrational.

Your claim "This group is rational because they call themselves such" is unfounded. Trivially so. Just like the Christian Scientists aren't scientists just because it's part of their name.

> For example, you won't catch Scott Alexander demanding "donate to MIRI or the basilisk might reach back in time and torture you".

I never claimed universality. In fact, in response to you I explicitly said that the beliefs are diverse. Being able to cherry pick someone that's more rational than others and a part of the group doesn't prove that there aren't very influential members of the group who are generating a lot of fringe ideas. Specifically Eliezer Yudkowsky, the founder of LessWrong which is a core part of the rationality movement.

> And you have done nothing to establish this, and I believe you're incorrect.

I've established the meetups exist. I've established that a particularly nasty group came from these meetups, the Zizians. Specifically the founder got their start from the LessWrong forums and the "Center for Applied Rationality" [1] workshops (meetups).

[1] https://rationality.org/

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#85

Post by oh_my_goodness »

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

Yes. It's almost as if the author felt that long, long, long chains of explanations might be somehow undesirable.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#86

Post by lyu07282 »

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).

There is nothing I could possibly say to convince you otherwise, in the same EXACT way I couldn't convince a scientologist that their thetan levels are nonsense. It was never the argument that conditional probability or other mathematics is wrong, nobody is ever arguing that, but that is all you disciples ever argue against. You are all deeply uneducated and unserious people believing to "reason" yourselves to some higher "truth" on all kinds of broad topics using some WILDLY misappropriated and misunderstood mathematical principles.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#87

Post by bigbadfeline »

ip26 wrote: post #43
smitty1e wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not impossible that everything in the universe can be explained within the scope of human reason. Life just seems to exceed that scope, is all.

It's like modeling a living cell in a computer building upon the basic maths of physics. Yes, it is a thing that is "possible". However it is not practicable to capture everything that matters and run that simulation.

> It's like modeling a living cell in a computer building upon the basic maths of physics.

During COVID computer modeling of cell chemistry became an established mode of study, in-silico is now used before in-vitro with great results.

One has to be careful to not fall in the trap presented as an alternative to the rationalist one - it sounds like, "there's no truth" or "the truth is too hard, just give up and accept what you're told to accept".

The lack of truth isn't due to it being hard or unachievable, there's enough of it to solve all major problems, it's not being pursued because of conflicts of interest.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#88

Post by s1artibartfast »

pdonis wrote: post #49
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…

> The entire point of the exercise is to establish that certain things are true And any domain where you can do that is not the real world. The real world is messy and you can't prove things the way you can in nice, tidy, theoretical domains like math. And the kind of logic where you have fundamental axioms of reasoning and you can prove theorems is just a subset of math. In the real world, things don't exactly satis…

Im not sure what your criticism is directed at.

In the real world, we can study and predict things. We can study the weather and predict if it will rain tomorrow. We can asses how accurate our predictions have been in the past.

We can evaluate if it is true that smoking increases lung cancer, or that aspirin increases autism.

Sometimes we dont have good answers or predictions, and that too can be studied.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#89

Post by stickfigure »

cogman10 wrote: post #84
zahlman wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which claim exactly did I make which you are refuting? Please actually quote it. When you said: > How about the 95% stop having gatherings where they all proclaim that their beliefs are true even if they don't seriously believe them? you implicitly claimed that "the 95%" indeed have such gatherings. As far as I can tell, the gatherings that they have are not of that nature. > My point was that It's impossible to di…

> you implicitly claimed that "the 95%" indeed have such gatherings. > As far as I can tell, the gatherings that they have are not of that nature. I literally cited you an example of such a gathering. Do you refute it or just deny that it exists? > And my claim is that it's actually trivial to tell who's a true believer and who isn't, because the concept of "true believer" does not pertain to "rationality" (by constr…

You seem to be banging on a stereotype. Yudkowsky doesn't speak for everyone (not even everyone on lesswrong) and AI safety/paranoia is an incredibly polarizing issue.

There's a loosely structured community of people who self-identify as "rationalist". There are some general themes of belief but no coherent platform, per-se. Some of them are nutjobs. Maybe at an elevated rate from general society, but not dramatically so.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#90

Post by s1artibartfast »

krapp wrote: post #37
twic wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just that they aren't free of bias. They appear to incubate truly wacky stuff - Leverage Research [1], the Zizians, all the AI/x-risk stuff. I am not the only person to have noticed this [2]. There's something about their approach that appears to actually make people more susceptible to nonsense, not less. [1] https://lydialaurenson.substack.com/p/the-inside-story-of-le... [2] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/…

Regarding the Zizians, I recommend the Behind the Bastards series on them and the rationalist community. People involved with the rationalists will want to distance themselves from it of course, but the series makes a decent argument that the Zizians were simply the result of taking the ideology to its rational conclusion, that there is a definite throughline from one to the other in terms of philosophy and ideals. h…

taking what ideology to the conclusions? The zizians throught some truly bizzare things, most of which are in no way representative of the rationilst community.
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