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Why are there so many rationalist cults?

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Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#301

Post by twic »

xg15 wrote: post #290
MajimasEyepatch wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel this way about some of the more extreme effective altruists. There is no room for uncertainty or recognition of the way that errors compound. - "We should focus our charitable endeavors on the problems that are most impactful, like eradicating preventable diseases in poor countries." Cool, I'm on board. - "I should do the job that makes the absolute most amount of money possible, like starting a crypto exchang…

The "longtermism" idea never made sense to me: So we should sacrifice the present to save the future. Alright. But then those future descendants would also have to sacrifice their present to save their future, etc. So by that logic, there could never be a time that was not full of misery. So then why do all of that stuff?

At some point in the future, there won't be more people who will live in the future than live in the present, at which point you are allowed to improve conditions today. Of course, by that point the human race is nearly finished, but hey.

That said, if they really thought hard about this problem, they would have come to a different conclusion:

https://theconversation.com/solve-suffering-by-blowing-up-th...

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#302

Post by linohh »

Nihilartikel wrote: post #86
mlinhares wrote: post #4

> One is Black Lotus, a Burning Man camp led by alleged rapist Brent Dill, which developed a metaphysical system based on the tabletop roleplaying game Mage the Ascension. What the actual f. This is such an insane thing to read and understand what it means that i might need to go and sit in silence for the rest of the day. How did we get to this place with people going completely nuts like this?

I'm entertaining sending my kiddo to a Waldorf School, because it genuinely seems pretty good. But looking into the underlying Western Esoteric Spirit Science, 'Anthroposophy' (because Theosophy wouldn't let him get weird enough) by Rudolph Steiner, has been quite a ride. The point being that.. humans have a pretty endless capacity to go ALL IN on REALLY WEIRD shit, as long as it promises to fix their lives if they d…

Don't do it. It's a place that enables child abuse with its culture. These people are serious wackos and you should not give your kid into their hands. A lot of people come out of that Steiner Shitbox traumatized for decades if not for life. They should not be allowed to run schools to begin with. Checking a lot of boxes from antivax to whatever the fuck their lore has to offer starting with a z.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#303

Post by vharuck »

xg15 wrote: post #290
MajimasEyepatch wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel this way about some of the more extreme effective altruists. There is no room for uncertainty or recognition of the way that errors compound. - "We should focus our charitable endeavors on the problems that are most impactful, like eradicating preventable diseases in poor countries." Cool, I'm on board. - "I should do the job that makes the absolute most amount of money possible, like starting a crypto exchang…

The "longtermism" idea never made sense to me: So we should sacrifice the present to save the future. Alright. But then those future descendants would also have to sacrifice their present to save their future, etc. So by that logic, there could never be a time that was not full of misery. So then why do all of that stuff?

Zeno's poverty

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#305

Post by twic »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #238
ar-nelson wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find Yudowsky-style rationalists morbidly fascinating in the same way as Scientologists and other cults. Probably because they seem to genuinely believe they're living in a sci-fi story. I read a lot of their stuff, probably too much, even though I find it mostly ridiculous. The biggest nonsense axiom I see in the AI-cult rationalist world is recursive self-improvement. It's the classic reason superintelligence tak…

An interesting point you make there — one would assume that if recursive self-improvement were a thing, Nature would have already lead humans into that "hall of mirrors".

There's a variant of this that argues that humans are already as intelligent as it's possible to be. Because if it's possible to be more intelligent, why aren't we? And a slightly more reasonable variant that argues that we're already as intelligent as it's useful to be.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#306

Post by morleytj »

abtinf wrote: post #297
jl6 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s just (or even particularly) bad axioms, I think it’s that people tend to build up “logical” conclusions where they think each step is a watertight necessity that follows inevitably from its antecedents, but actually each step is a little bit leaky, leading to runaway growth in false confidence. Not that non-rationalists are any better at reasoning, but non-rationalists do at least benefit from some…

> non-rationalists do at least benefit from some intellectual humility The Islamists who took out the World Trade Center don’t strike me as particularly intellectually humble. If you reject reason, you are only left with force.

I now feel the need to comment that this thread does illustrate an issue I have with the naming of the philosophical/internet community of rationalism.

One can very clearly be a rational individual or an individual who practices reason and not associate with the internet community of rationalism. The median member of the group defined as "not being part of the internet-organized movement of rationalism and not reading lesswrong posts" is not "religious extremist striking the world trade center and committing an atrocious act of terrorism", it's "random person on the street."

And to preempt a specific response some may make to this, yes, the thread here is talking about rationalism as discussed in the blog post above as organized around Yudowsky or slate star codex, and not the rationalist movement of like, Spinoza and company. Very different things philosophically.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#307

Post by mm263 »

skrebbel wrote: post #246

This article is beautifully written, and it's full of proper original research. I'm sad that most comments so far are knee-jerk "lol rationalists" type responses. I haven't seen any comment yet that isn't already addressed in much more colour and nuance in the article itself.

[flagged]

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#308

Post by derefr »

marcosdumay wrote: post #277
JKCalhoun wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interesting point you make there — one would assume that if recursive self-improvement were a thing, Nature would have already lead humans into that "hall of mirrors".

Well, arguably that's exactly where we are, but machines can evolve faster. And that's an entire new angle that the cultists are ignoring... because superintelligence may just not be very valuable. And we don't need superintelligence for smart machines to be a problem anyway. We don't need even AGI. IMO, there's no reason to focus on that.

> Well, arguably that's exactly where we are

Yep; from the perspective of evolution (and more specifically, those animal species that only gain capability generationally by evolutionary adaptation of instinct), humans are the recursively self-(fitness-)improving accident.

Our species-aggregate capacity to compete for resources within the biosphere went superlinear in the middle of the previous century; and we've had to actively hit the brakes on how much of everything we take since then, handicapping . (With things like epidemic obesity and global climate change being the result of us not hitting those brakes quite hard enough.)

Insofar as a "singularity" can be defined on a per-agent basis, as the moment when something begins to change too rapidly for the given agent to ever hope to catch up with / react to new conditions — and so the agent goes from being a "player at the table" to a passive observer of what's now unfolding around them... then, from the rest of our biosphere's perspective, they've 100% already witnessed the "human singularity."

No living thing on Earth besides humans now has any comprehension of how the world has been or will be reshaped by human activity; nor can ever hope to do anything to push back against such reshaping. Every living thing on Earth other than humans, will only survive into the human future, if we humans either decide that it should survive, and act to preserve it; or if we humans just ignore the thing, and then just-so-happen to never accidentally do anything to wipe it from existence without even noticing.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#309

Post by kiitos »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #178
mlinhares wrote: post #4

> One is Black Lotus, a Burning Man camp led by alleged rapist Brent Dill, which developed a metaphysical system based on the tabletop roleplaying game Mage the Ascension. What the actual f. This is such an insane thing to read and understand what it means that i might need to go and sit in silence for the rest of the day. How did we get to this place with people going completely nuts like this?

Who the fuck bases a Black Lotus cult on Mage: the Ascension rather than Magic: the Gathering? Is this just a mistake by the journalist?

i regret that i have but one upvote to give

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#310

Post by gwbas1c »

Many years ago I met Eliezer Yudkowsky. He handed me a pamphlet extolling the virtues of rationality. The whole thing came across as a joke, as a parody of evangelizing. We both laughed.

I glanced at it once or twice and shoved it into a bookshelf. I wish I kept it, because I never thought so much would happen around him.

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