531–540 of 947 posts
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…
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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?
To me it is disguised way of saying the ends justify the means. Sure, we murder a few people today but think of the utopian paradise we are building for the future.
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Not sure why you got down voted for this. The opening paragraph of the article reads as suspicious to the observant outsider: >The rationalist community was drawn together by AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky’s blog post series The Sequences, a set of essays about how to think more rationally. Anyone who had just read a lot about Scientology would read that and have alarm bells ringing.
Asterisk magazine is basically the unofficial magazine for the rationalist community and the author, Ozy Brennan, is a prominent rationalist blogger. Of course the piece is pro-rationalism. It's investigating why rationalism seems to spawn these small cultish offshoots, not trying to criticize rationalism.
It grew out of many different threads: different websites, communities, etc all around the same time. I noticed it contemporaneously in the philosophy world where Nick Bostrom’s Simulation argument was boosted more than it deserved (like everyone was just accepting it at the lay-level). Looking back I see it also developed from less wrong and other sites, but I was wondering what was going on with simulations taking…
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…
Sometimes history really does rhyme.
> Enfantin and Amand Bazard were proclaimed Pères Suprêmes ("Supreme Fathers") – a union which was, however, only nominal, as a divergence was already manifest. Bazard, who concentrated on organizing the group, had devoted himself to political reform, while Enfantin, who favoured teaching and preaching, dedicated his time to social and moral change. The antagonism was widened by Enfantin's announcement of his theory of the relation of man and woman, which would substitute for the "tyranny of marriage" a system of "free love".[1]
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> 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.
Are you so sure the 9/11 hijackers rejected reason? Why Are So Many Terrorists Engineers? https://archive.is/XA4zb Self-described rationalists can and often do rationalize acts and beliefs that seem baldly irrational to others.
People confuse "rational" with "moral". Those aren't the same thing. You can perfectly rationally do something that is immoral with a bad goal.
For example, if you value your life above all others, then it would be perfectly rational to slaughter an orphanage if a more powerful entity made that your only choice for survival. Morally bad, rationally correct.
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> I don’t think it’s just (or even particularly) bad axioms IME most people aren't very good at building axioms. I hear a lot of people say "from first principles" and it is a pretty good indication that they will not be. First principles require a lot of effort to create. They require iteration. They require a lot of nuance, care, and precision. And of course they do! They are the foundation of everything else that…
IME most people aren't very good at building axioms. It seems you implying that some people are good building good axiom systems for the real world. I disagree. There are a few situations in the world where you have generalities so close to complete that you can use simple logic on them. But for the messy parts of the real world, there simply is not set of logical claims which can provide anything like certainty no m…
> you implying that some people are good building good axiom systems
Now, there are some pretty good axiom systems. ZF and ZFC seems to be working pretty well. There's others too and they are used to for pretty complex stuff. They all work at least for "simple logic."
But then again, you probably weren't thinking of things like ZFC. But hey, that was kinda my entire point.
> there simply is not set of logical claims which can provide anything like certainty no matter how "good" someone is at "axiom creation".
[0] Most people don't even know how to write a program. Well... maybe everyone can write a Perl program but let's not get into semantics.
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.
Why would they need formal training? Can't they just read Plato, Socrates, etc, and classical lit like Dostoevsky, Camus, Kafka etc? That would be far better than whatever they're doing now.
You realise that it's very hard to do well and it's intellectual quicksand.
Reading philosophers and great writers as you suggest is better than joining a cult.
It's just that you also want to write about what you're thinking in response to reading such people and ideally have what you write critiqued by smart people. Perhaps an AI could do some of that these days.
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…
It's very tempting to try to reason things through from first principles. I do it myself, a lot. It's one of the draws of libertarianism, which I've been drawn to for a long time. But the world is way more complex than the models we used to derive those "first principles".
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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…
Can’t you improve thing if you can calibrate with a known good vampire? You’d think NIST or the CDC would have one locked in a basement somewhere.
> Many of them also expect that, without heroic effort, AGI development will lead to human extinction. Odd to me. Not biological warfare? Global warming? All-out nuclear war? I guess The Terminator was a formative experience for them. (For me perhaps it was The Andromeda Strain .)
That's what was so strange with EA and rationalist movements. A highly theoretical model that AGI could wipe us all out vs the very real issue of global warming and pretty much all emphasis was on AGI.