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My falling-out with the rationalist community

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Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#91

Post by zahlman »

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…

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

You did nothing to attempt to establish that the gathering was of the nature you ascribe to it, and I see nothing in the Reddit post to support the claim.

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

You have done nothing to establish the commonality of such belief, nor have you clearly defined its boundaries. You commit the noncentral fallacy (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncen...) here and demonstrate outgroup homogeneity bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity).

> Your claim "This group is rational because they call themselves such"

No; my claim is based on reading their work and talking to them.

> I never claimed universality.

For your argument to work, you require evidence of a specific belief that is commonly asserted in the community despite a recognition that it is fringe and likely untrue.

> I've established that a particularly nasty group came from these meetups, the Zizians.

You did not in fact previously establish that the Zizians "came from those meetups". You merely mentioned them upthread. But even taking for granted that they "came from" the meetups (I haven't checked your current evidence but I'm sure it's adequate), this does nothing to establish that the meetups are "gatherings where they all proclaim that their beliefs are true even if they don't seriously believe them".

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#92

Post by pdonis »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #88
pdonis wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

We can use real-world data to see if there are correlations. We can sometimes run controlled studies to get a better understanding of causal mechanisms. But we can't prove by logical argument based on "fundamental axioms of reasoning" that these things are "true".

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#93

Post by zahlman »

perching_aix wrote: post #76
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…

We probably understand this word very differently, because as far as I'm concerned, rationality (rational behavior) is essentially an exercise in behaving optimally, one that is thus strictly relative to some particular context. It is not just "facts and logic", and it is most certainly not universal, since universal optimality doesn't exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_theorem > The entire point of t…

> We probably understand this word very differently, because as far as I'm concerned, rationality (rational behavior) is essentially an exercise in behaving optimally, one that is thus strictly relative to some particular context.

No, that's completely consistent with my understanding.

Adopting identity labels doesn't follow from that, however.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#94

Post by stickfigure »

twic wrote: post #4

> Timecube was an incoherent stream-of-consciousness website filled with bizarre cosmological claims. Was? Timecube.net will outlive any and all faddy Silicon Valley cults.

OP's take seems to be unfairly critical. I wasn't at the MIT or Georgia Tech lectures (Gene Ray spoke once at each) but it sounds like the audience was pretty respectful, all things considered. He was given uninterrupted time to explain his ideas, then question and answer. No shouting.

Ray didn't convince anyone. No surprise. But he apparently wrote to someone "They treated me like Einstein" so it can't have been too unpleasant.

A quote from the Georgia Tech student paper, from a participant: "I’m glad we live in a society where people like Gene Ray are not locked up and beaten, but instead respected in their own way."

Honestly it sounds like the best possible case for someone with seriously nutty ideas (and possibly some mental illness). Bit of a modern day Emperor Norton. The rationalists did ok here.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#95

Post by g-b-r »

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…

Rationalists should really watch this video

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#96

Post by nialv7 »

ggm wrote: post #5

This kind of furore happens more than you would think amongst nominatively deterministic rationalist groups. Randi broke with people and re-formed, Dawkins has unbelievably heated arguments over frankly nothing . Maybe some of it is informed by the overlap with academia. Science has the aphorism "physics advances one funeral at a time" and certainly being on the outer has affected careers. Fred Hoyle was too argument…

> Dawkins has unbelievably heated arguments over frankly nothing.

and that's without talking about all the problematic views held by him...

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#97

Post by g-b-r »

justonepost2 wrote: post #80
zahlman wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not the bias the problem, it's the conviction of being better and "less wrong" than the rest of us. There is not any such conviction. This is just your interpretation of a domain name, which is not intended that way. > That, along with constantly calling yourself rational This is explicitly not what you are supposed to do, and the point is explicitly not to create an identity around it.

https://xcancel.com/tenobrus/status/2023473440364392850#m

Oh, they're working to instate a dictatorship, they're not that bad...

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#98

Post by s1artibartfast »

cogman10 wrote: post #11
vovavili wrote: post #2

This seems like an awfully uncharitable and cherry-picked treatment of a community of well-intentioned and occasionally eccentric disagreeable online nerds. You're effectively just noticing that a community that actively aims to overcome bias is not free from bias itself, but no one within that community would ever deny that.

I think the issue with the community is they take their eccentric beliefs as being gospel truths which can lead to truly unhinged and irrational beliefs and actions (see: the Zizians). That's what can make the rationalist movement feel more like a religious cult and less like a bunch of eccentrics. As an outsider looking in, it seems like the entire movement is filled with just accepting priors with very little evide…

>the issue with the community is they take their eccentric beliefs as being gospel truths

I am genuinely curious where you get that impression. The central element to the whole thing is that people should be willing to question their own beliefs and change their mind based on the data.

If there is anything that turns rationalists into eccentrics, I it is being overly open to new ideas or beliefs.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#99

Post by nialv7 »

anon-3988 wrote: post #81

> 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 hav…

> So they are not rationalist then?

one doesn't simply become rational just by calling oneself rationalists.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#100

Post by nialv7 »

vovavili wrote: post #2

This seems like an awfully uncharitable and cherry-picked treatment of a community of well-intentioned and occasionally eccentric disagreeable online nerds. You're effectively just noticing that a community that actively aims to overcome bias is not free from bias itself, but no one within that community would ever deny that.

> online nerds

you are heavily downplaying the power and influence some of these people have. Sam Bankman-Fried is one of these people, for example

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