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Why are there so many rationalist cults?

asteriskmag.com

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Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#341

Post by Muromec »

tbrake wrote: post #337
Muromec wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know?

having known dozens of friends, family, roommates, coworkers etc both before and after they started them. The two biggest telltale signs - 1. tendency to produce - out of no necessity whatsoever, mind - walls of text. walls of speech will happen too but not everyone rambles. 2. Obnoxiously confident that they're fundamentally correct about whatever position they happen to be holding during a conversation with you. No…

I mean, I know the effects of adderall/ritalin and it's plausible, what I'm asking is whether if gp knows that for a fact or deduces from what is known.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#342

Post by Muromec »

psunavy03 wrote: post #335

A problem with this whole mindset is that humans, all of us, are only quasi-rational beings. We all use System 1 ("The Elephant") and System 2 ("The Rider") thinking instinctively. So if you end up in deep denial about your own capacity for irrationality, I guess it stands to reason you could end up getting led down some deep dark rabbit holes.

Wasn't the "fast&slow" thingy debunked as another piece of popscience?

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#343

Post by PaulHoule »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #205
adrianN wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your own state of mind is one of the easiest things to be fairly certain about.

The fact that this is false is one of the oldest findings of research psychology

Marvin Minsky wrote forcefully [1] about this in The Society of Mind and went so far to say that trying to observe yourself (e.g. meditation) might be harmful.

Freud of course discovered a certain world of the unconscious but untrained [2] you would certainly struggle to explain how you know sentence S is grammatical and S' is not, or what it is you do when you walk.

If you did meditation or psychoanalysis or some other practice to understand yourself better it would take years.

[1] whether or not it is true.

[2] the "scientific" explanation you'd have if you're trained may or may not be true since it can't be used to program a computer to do it

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#344

Post by vehemenz »

I get the impression that these people desperately want to study philosophy but for some reason can't be bothered to get formal training because it would be too humbling for them. I call it "small fishbowl syndrome," but maybe there's a better term for it.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#345

Post by ufmace »

ar-nelson wrote: post #200
JohnMakin wrote: post #85

One of a few issues I have with groups like these, is that they often confidently and aggressively spew a set of beliefs that on their face logically follow from one another, until you realize they are built on a set of axioms that are either entirely untested or outright nonsense. This is common everywhere, but I feel especially pronounced in communities like this. It also involves quite a bit of navel gazing that m…

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…

I agree. There's also the point of hardware dependance.

From all we've seen, the practical ability of AI/LLMs seems to be strongly dependent on how much hardware you throw at it. Seems pretty reasonable to me - I'm skeptical that there's that much out there in gains from more clever code, algorithms, etc on the same amount of physical hardware. Maybe you can get 10% or 50% better or so, but I don't think you're going to get runaway exponential improvement on a static collection of hardware.

Maybe they could design better hardware themselves? Maybe, but then the process of improvement is still gated behind how fast we can physically build next-generation hardware, perfect the tools and techniques needed to make it, deploy with power and cooling and datalinks and all of that other tedious physical stuff.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#346

Post by teiferer »

quantummagic wrote: post #38
j_m_b wrote: post #26

> One way that thinking for yourself goes wrong is that you realize your society is wrong about something, don’t realize that you can’t outperform it, and wind up even wronger. many such cases

It's almost the defining characteristic of our time.

Tell-tale slogan: "Let's derive from first principles"

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#347

Post by godelski »

sdwr wrote: post #292
dcminter wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the term "conman" the confidence in question is that of the mark, not the perpetrator.

Isn't confidence referring to the alternate definition of trust, as in "taking you into his confidence"?

I think if you used that definition you could equally say "it is the mark that is taking the conman into [the mark's] confidence"

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#348

Post by biophysboy »

saalweachter wrote: post #253
biophysboy wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I was too vague. My argument is that cults need a secret. The secret of the rationalist community is "nobody is rational except for us". Then the rituals would be endless probability/math/logic arguments about sci-fi futures.

I think the promise of secret knowledge is important, but I think cults also need a second thing: "That thing you fear? You're right to fear it, and only we can protect you from it. If you don't do what we say, it's going to be so much worse than it is now, but if you do, everything will be good and perfect." In the rationalist cults, you typically have the fear of death and non-existence, coupled with the promise of…

I guess I'd say protection promises like this are a form of "secret knowledge". At the same time, so many cults have this protection racket so you might be on to something

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#349

Post by caycep »

Granted, admitted from what little I've read on the outside, the "rational" part just seems to be mostly the writing style - this sort of dispassionate, eloquently worded prose that makes weird ideas seem more "rational" and logical than they really are.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#350

Post by SilverElfin »

optimalsolver wrote: post #3

Pertinent Twitter comment: "Rationalism is such an insane name for a school of thought. Like calling your ideology correctism or winsargumentism" https://x.com/growing_daniel/status/1893554844725616666

What do you make of the word “science” then?
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