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Why are there so many rationalist cults?

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Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#461

Post by varjag »

jacquesm wrote: post #222
potatolicious wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, a lot of the comments here are really just addressing cults writ large and opposed to why this one was particularly successful. A significant part of this is the intersection of the cult with money and status - this stuff really took off once prominent SV personalities became associated with it, and got turbocharged when it started intersecting with the angel/incubator/VC scene, when there was implicit money in…

Paypal will be traced as the root cause of many of our future troubles.

Wish I could upvote this twice. It's like intersectionality for evil.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#462

Post by throwway120385 »

montefischer wrote: post #352
abtinf wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Islamic fundamentalism and cult rationalism are both involved in a “total commitment”, “all or nothing” type of thinking. The former is totally committed to a particular literal reading of scripture, the latter, to logical deduction from a set of chosen premises. Both modes of thinking have produced violent outcomes in the past. Skepticism, in which no premise or truth claim is regarded as above dispute (or, that it…

The only absolute above questioning is that there are no absolutes.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#463

Post by noqc »

6177c40f wrote: post #225
noqc wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of rationalists in this community. Pointing out that the entire thing is a cult attracts downvotes from people who wish to, for instance, avoid being identified with the offshoots.

No, the downvotes are because rationalism isn't a cult and people take offense to being blatantly insulted. This article is about cults that are rationalism-adjacent, it's not claiming that rationalism is itself a cult.

That's almost word for word what I said...

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#464

Post by BlueTemplar »

to11mtm wrote: post #404
xg15 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well, there's a balance to be had. Do the most good you can while still being able to survive the rat race. However, people are bad at that. I'll give an interesting example. Hybrid Cars. Modern proper HEVs[0] usually benefit to their owners, both by virtue of better fuel economy as well as in most cases being overall more reliable than a normal car. And, they are better on CO2 emissions and lower our oil consumption…

Not that these technologies don't have anything to bring, but any discussion that still presupposes that cars/trucks(/planes) (as we know them) still have a future is (mostly) a waste of time.

P.S.: The article mentions the "normal error-checking processes of society"... but what makes them so sure cults aren't part of them ?

It's not like society is particularly good about it either, immune from groupthink (see the issue above) - and who do you think is more likely to kick-start a strong enough alternative ?

(Or they are just sad about all the failures ? But it's questionable that the "process" can work (with all its vivacity) without the "failures"...)

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#465

Post by fellowniusmonk »

username332211 wrote: post #413
vehemenz wrote: post #344

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.

The reason why people can't be bothered to get formal training is that modern philosophy doesn't seem that useful. It was a while ago, but take the infamous story of the 2006 rape case in Duke University. If you check out coverage of that case, you get the impression every member of faculty that joined in the hysteria was from some humanities department, including philosophy. And quite a few of them refused to change…

Philosophy is interesting in how it informs computer science and vice-versa.

Mereological nihilism and weak emergence is interesting and helps protect against many forms of kind of obsessive levels of type and functional cargo culting.

But then in some areas philosophy is woefully behind, and you have philosophers poo-pooing intuitionism when any software engineer working on sufficiently federated or real world sensor/control system borrows constructivism into their classical language to not kill people (agda is interesting of course). Intermediate logic is clearly empirically true.

It's interesting that people don't understand the non-physicality of the abstract and you have people serving the abstract instead of the abstract being used to serve people. People confusing the map for the terrain is such a deeply insidious issue.

I mean all the lightcone stuff, like, you can't predict ex ante what agents will be keystones in beneficial casual chains so its such waste of energy to spin your wheels on.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#466

Post by lukan »

tshaddox wrote: post #373
lukan wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Because if it's possible to be more intelligent, why aren't we?" Because deep abstract thoughts about the nature of the universe and elaborate deep thinking were maybe not as useful while we were chasing lions and buffaloes with a spear? We just had to be smarter then them. Which included finding out that tools were great. Learning about the habits of the prey and optmize hunting success. Those who were smarter in t…

Is it just dumb luck that we're able to create knowledge about black holes, quarks, and lots of things in between which presumably had zero evolutionary benefit before a handful of generations ago?

Evolution rewarded us for developing general intelligence. But with a very immediate practical focus and not too much specialisation.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#467

Post by p1necone »

godelski wrote: post #450
robocat wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw an article recently that talked about stringing likely inferences together but ending up with an unreliable outcome because enough 0.9 probabilities one after the other lead to an unlikely conclusion. Edit: Couldn't find the article, but AI referenced Baysian "Chain of reasoning fallacy".

I think you have this oversimplified. Stringing together inferences can take us in either direction. It really depends on how things are being done and this isn't always so obvious or simple. But just to show both directions I'll give two simple examples (real world holds many more complexities) It is all about what is being modeled and how the inferences string together. If these are being multiplied, then yes, this…

Worth noting that solution only works if the false positives are totally random, which is probably not true of many real world cases and would be pretty hard to work out.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#468

Post by ImaCake »

sunshowers wrote: post #198
rpcope1 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where Bayes' theorem applies in unconventional ways is not remotely novel for "rationalism" (maybe only in their strange busted hand wavy circle jerk "thought experiments"). This has been the domain of statistical mechanics long before Yudkowski and other cult leaders could even probably mouth "update your priors".

I don't know, most of science still runs on frequentist statistics. Juries convict all the time on evidence that would never withstand a Bayesian analysis. The prosecutor's fallacy is real.

Most science runs on BS with a cursory amount of statistics slapped on top so everyone can feel better about it. Weirdly enough, science still works despite not being rational. Rationalists seem to think science is logical when in reality it works for largely the same reasons the free-market does; throw shit at the wall and maybe support some of the stuff that works.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#469

Post by godelski »

p1necone wrote: post #467
godelski wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have this oversimplified. Stringing together inferences can take us in either direction. It really depends on how things are being done and this isn't always so obvious or simple. But just to show both directions I'll give two simple examples (real world holds many more complexities) It is all about what is being modeled and how the inferences string together. If these are being multiplied, then yes, this…

Worth noting that solution only works if the false positives are totally random, which is probably not true of many real world cases and would be pretty hard to work out.

Definitely. Real world adds lots of complexities and nuances, but I was just trying to make the point that it matters how those inferences compound. That we can't just conclude that compounding inferences decreases likelihood

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#470

Post by trawy081225 »

gen220 wrote: post #378
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…

Strongly recommend this profile in the NYer on Curtis Yarvin (who also uses "rationalism" to justify their beliefs) [0]. The section towards the end that reports on his meeting one of his supposed ideological heroes for an extended period of time is particularly illuminating. I feel like the internet has led to an explosion of these such groups because it abstracts the "ideas" away from the "people". I suspect if mos…

> I feel like the internet has led to an explosion of these such groups because it abstracts the "ideas" away from the "people". I suspect if most people were in a room or spent an extended amount of time around any of these self-professed, hyper-online rationalists, they would immediately disregard any theories they were able to cook up, no matter how clever or persuasively-argued they might be in their written down form.

Likely the opposite. The internet has led to people being able to see the man behind the curtain, and realize how flawed the individuals pushing these ideas are. Whereas many intellectuals from 50 years back were just as bad if not worse, but able to maintain a false aura of intelligence by cutting themselves off from the masses.

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