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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

#161

Post by FeepingCreature »

joegibbs wrote: post #78
FeepingCreature wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider a community filled with 100 people; 95 of them who don't take their eccentric beliefs as gospel truths and 5 who do. Those 5 will inevitably become the public face of the community when they make the news. However there is very little that the 95 could have done to stop them.

Doesn't it say something if 5% of a group are wacko lunatics if, for instance, a random sample of the rest of the population has only 0.5% wackos?

I would never disagree that the rationality community contains a higher than normal share of lunatics. Whether it produces or attracts them is an open question.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#162

Post by [deleted] »

cogman10 wrote: post #30
FeepingCreature wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider a community filled with 100 people; 95 of them who don't take their eccentric beliefs as gospel truths and 5 who do. Those 5 will inevitably become the public face of the community when they make the news. However there is very little that the 95 could have done to stop them.

> However there is very little that the 95 could have done to stop them. How about the 95% stop having gatherings where they all proclaim that their beliefs are true even if they don't seriously believe them? How is the 5% supposed to know that the 95% is actually larping belief? And how is an outsider who observes the 95% espousing their whacky beliefs supposed to know who is a member of the 95% and who is a member…

[deleted]

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#163

Post by zahlman »

stackghost wrote: post #146
zahlman wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Go back and reread yourself in this thread. I know perfectly well what I said in this thread and don't need to re-read it. It wasn't long. > You say "nuh-uh because Bayes' theorem is true"??? No, that isn't at all what I said. First off, it makes no sense for the other party to characterize my "defense of rationalism" in any manner, because I was not offering such a thing. When I say that something doesn't exist, t…

>I know perfectly well what I said in this thread and don't need to re-read it. It wasn't long. Then you should realize your replies have been obnoxious, and that's why you're getting the responses you're getting. Have a fantastic day.

To realize that, it would have to be true. But it isn't, so I can't.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#164

Post by s1artibartfast »

pdonis wrote: post #156
s1artibartfast wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im genuinely curious how you are differentiating "using your brain". What does that look like for the real world?

> Im genuinely curious how you are differentiating "using your brain". I just mean that your brain can do lots of other things besides Bayesian reasoning, and most of them can't be reduced to Bayesian reasoning.

Your response is dead for some reason and my vouch isnt enough to fix it.

Why cant the model be updated to include information about the concert? This is how basically every human works anyways.

It seems that yes, a bad model is not recoverable if you refuse to consider concerts or other data.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#165

Post by perching_aix »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #164
pdonis wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Im genuinely curious how you are differentiating "using your brain". I just mean that your brain can do lots of other things besides Bayesian reasoning, and most of them can't be reduced to Bayesian reasoning.

Your response is dead for some reason and my vouch isnt enough to fix it. Why cant the model be updated to include information about the concert? This is how basically every human works anyways. It seems that yes, a bad model is not recoverable if you refuse to consider concerts or other data.

It's not that the model can't be fixed, but that it won't create and fix itself, unlike how people iterate on their own mental models.

You can build a more elaborate model that can, but then that's still structurally constrained in terms of how it can adapt.

You can build a maximally general model that automatically captures arbitrary patterns, and estimates using them, but:

- that's not what people do and mean when using Bayesian inference in argumentation; they're the ones capturing and maintaining the patterns instead, manually and arbitrarily

- it kind of renders the whole thing meaningless; you basically get a machine learning model out of that, and introspectibility is not really their thing + it becomes quite literally arbitrarily adapting (and thus arbitrarily inferring)

One may also recognize that to be resembling a human, with whom you get the same issues. Kind of how one gets to arguing about empiricals and logic in the first place. This is what I describe in my other comment that I linked to, that debates using these instruments are basically just long winded coordination processes between people in the best of times, not some sort of divination tools.

I'm not the guy from above btw, but I am the guy who had their comment turn dead. I don't know why it did though, I doubt this subthread sees that much traffic, and I did not see it being flagged since I posted it. I'd assume it was automatically or manually moderated out.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#166

Post by vovavili »

g-b-r wrote: post #149
vovavili wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What would be his motive A libertarian socialist podcaster tries to discuss an online culture that is adjacent to Silicon Valley tech scene. He then proceeds to take movement’s worst manifestations as its essence. One would have to be naive to miss the source of his bias.

My feeling is that he understands your "online culture" much better than you, is very balanced and careful in the video, and you're probably a lot younger, inexperienced with internet groups and impressionable than him. Take his advice to talk with (and listen to!) people outside your cadre, and to consider the possibility that you're entirely in the wrong. And maybe to touch grass. Cheers

>is very balanced and careful in the video

A part of me somewhat wishes I was this easily swayed by YouTube smooth talkers.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#167

Post by perching_aix »

Planktonne wrote: post #9

[flagged]

I struggle to suspend disbelief that this is not just some ill-faith mockery.

The guy really quite explicitly spells out a journey of growing in intellectual humility. The writing is very, very blatantly in the genre of self-growth, which is why you see this structure so often. That he wanted to gravitate towards those whom he found smart (implying he did not consider himself that smart at the start, very directly contradicting what you say), participated, eventually discovered that there's smoke to the fire, then stopped participating, learning lessons along the way and now passing them on to the dear reader that much wiser.

How you walked away from this with the conclusions you did genuinely escapes me, and apparently this is not even your first time either then. Never stopped to reconsider? Is any expression of appreciating reason egotistical to you? Do you maybe instinctively read it as a comparison, as if it was meant to suggest that other people (i.e. you) thus somehow do not appreciate reason? I have a meme for you if so: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/659/979/108...

Or are you at one of these stages yourself, and we can expect a blogpost from you in the future too?

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#168

Post by rsynnott »

gwd wrote: post #157
rsynnott wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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." That would make sense, except for the first paragraph mentioning that the Bankman-Fried thing and the Zizian murder thing didn't prompt them to write it. Both were long _after_…

My interpretation was that the Damore thing was the threshold where the author finally stopped identifying as a "rationalist". After that point, they considered several times writing a post describing that event. The first time they thought about writing it was "in the mid-2010s", which would like up with the Damore incident. Observing people who have given up Christianity, there's almost always a time gap between th…

Yeah, that's fair. The first paragraph really did read to me, though, like there was some new, presumably worse-than-Zizians, thing.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#169

Post by s1artibartfast »

perching_aix wrote: post #165
s1artibartfast wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your response is dead for some reason and my vouch isnt enough to fix it. Why cant the model be updated to include information about the concert? This is how basically every human works anyways. It seems that yes, a bad model is not recoverable if you refuse to consider concerts or other data.

It's not that the model can't be fixed, but that it won't create and fix itself, unlike how people iterate on their own mental models. You can build a more elaborate model that can, but then that's still structurally constrained in terms of how it can adapt. You can build a maximally general model that automatically captures arbitrary patterns, and estimates using them, but: - that's not what people do and mean when…

Thanks for the thoughtful follow up, I will give it some reflection.

Regarding the dead thing - sometimes that happens to me when I make rapid edits to fix typos and such.

Re: My falling-out with the rationalist community

#170

Post by Planktonne »

perching_aix wrote: post #167
Planktonne wrote: post #9

[flagged]

I struggle to suspend disbelief that this is not just some ill-faith mockery. The guy really quite explicitly spells out a journey of growing in intellectual humility. The writing is very, very blatantly in the genre of self-growth, which is why you see this structure so often. That he wanted to gravitate towards those whom he found smart (implying he did not consider himself that smart at the start, very directly co…

> Is any expression of appreciating reason egotistical to you?

I'm going to respond to just this bit of your comment, if you don't mind, because I think this is the core of both your and the author's misconception, with everything else flowing from that.

The author didn't, and still doesn't 'appreciate reason'.

They joined a cult of superiority and in-fighting that labelled itself as appreciating reason. Now they're out of the cult, but they think the issue is not with themselves, but with the others who did appreciating reason wrong. The fundamental flaw that they still haven't examined is that they still view themselves as a truth-seeker who was misled, not someone who made the wrong choices.

I've been wrong a lot, about many things, and there's always the easy temptation of reacting to that by treating it as just bad luck, believing that I did everything right but circumstances conspired against me. It's an easy option, but it's false, and it means you get stuck in the same pattern again.

Humility comes from recognising the ultimate, rather than proximal issue. Not 'I am still smart but the others were wrong and I got muddled' but 'maybe I am not as smart as I thought I was'. The article focuses on the movement as having the same flaws as everything else--it wasn't the superior home they were seeking--but doesn't consider the two most important elements required for growth here:

- Their own flaws and culpability

- The flaws inherent to the movement that aren't shared by society

The take away is 'the rationalist movement is no better than other groups, but I am' rather than 'both I and the rationalist movement have significant flaws that are not shared by everyone'.

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