Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why are there so many rationalist cults?

asteriskmag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

581–590 of 947 posts

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#581

Post by samdoesnothing »

freejazz wrote: post #435
username332211 wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>The reason why people can't be bothered to get formal training is that modern philosophy doesn't seem that useful. But rationalism is?

I think the argument is that philosophy hasn't advanced much in the last 1000 years, but it''s still 10,000 years ahead of whatever is coming out of the rationalist camp.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#582

Post by kayodelycaon »

sien wrote: post #537
samdoesnothing wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Trying to do a bit of formal philosophy at University is really worth doing. 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…

I took a few philosophy classes. I found it incredibly valuable in identifying assumptions and testing them.

Being Christian, it helped me understand what I believe and why. It made faith a deliberate, reasoned choice.

And, of course, there are many rational reasons for people to have very different opinions when it comes to religion and deities.

Being bipolar might give me an interesting perspective. Everything I’ve read about rationalists misses the grounding required to isolate emotion as a variable.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#583

Post by Dylan16807 »

godelski wrote: post #536
joe_the_user wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't even know what you're arguing. > you implying that some people are good building good axiom systems How do you go from "most people aren't very good" to "this implies some people are really good"? First, that is just a really weird interpretation of how people speak (btw, "you're" not "you" ;) because this is nicer and going to be received better than "making axioms is hard and people are shit at it." Second,…

If you mean nobody is good at something, just say that.

Saying most people aren't good at it DOES imply that some are good at it.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#584

Post by lupusreal »

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.

Yup. It's fundamentally irrational for anybody to believe themselves sufficiently rational to pull off the feats of supposed rational deduction that the so called Rationalists regularly perform. Predicting the future of humanity decades or even centuries away is absurd, but the Rationalists irrationally believe they can.

So to the point of the article, rationalist cults are common because Rationalists are irrational people (like all people) who (unlike most people) are blinded to their own irrationality by their overinflated egos. They can "reason" themselves into all manner of convoluted pretzels and lack the humility to admit they went off the deep end.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#586

Post by lyu07282 »

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.

> I haven't seen any comment yet that isn't already addressed in much more colour and nuance in the article itself.

I once called rationalists infantile, impotent liberal escapism, perhaps that's the novel take you are looking for.

Essentially my view is that the fundamental problem with rationalists and the effective altruist movement is that they are talking about profound social and political issues, with any and all politics completely and totally removed from it. It is liberal depoliticisation[1] driven to its ultimate conclusion. That's just why they are ineffective and wrong about everything, but that's also why they are popular among the tech elites that are giving millions to associated groups like MIRI[2]. They aren't going away, they are politically useful and convenient to very powerful people.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-politics

[2] https://intelligence.org/transparency/

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#587

Post by andrewflnr »

knallfrosch wrote: post #403
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.

I think it's perfectly fine to read these articles, think "definitely a cult" and ignore whether they believe in spaceships, or demons, or AGI. The key takeaway from the article is that if you have a group leader who cuts you off from other people, that's a red flag – not really a novel, or unique, or situational insight.

That's a side point of the article, acknowledged as an old idea. The central points of this article are actually quite a bit more interesting than that. He even summarized his conclusions concisely at the end, so I don't know what your excuse is for trivializing it.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#588

Post by guerrilla »

gwbas1c wrote: post #455

One thing I'm having trouble with: The article assumes the reader knows some history about the rationalists. I listened to a podcast that covered some of these topics, so I'm not lost; but I think someone who's new to this topic will be very, very, confused.

Here you go. It has like 10 chapters, so keep going once you reach the end.

https://aiascendant.substack.com/p/extropias-children-chapte...

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#589

Post by gchamonlive »

homeonthemtn wrote: post #585

This just sounds like any other community based around a niche interest. From kink to rock hounding, there's always people who base their identity on being a broker of status or power because they themselves are a powerless outsider once removed from the community

> base their identity on being a broker of status or power because they themselves are a powerless outsider once removed from the community

Who would ever maintain power when removed from their community? You mean to say they base their identity on the awareness of the power they possess within a certain group?

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#590

Post by duxup »

Great read.

I remember going to college and some graduate student, himself a philosophy major, telling me that nobody is as big a jerk as philosophy majors.

I don't know if it is really true, but it certainly felt true that folks looking for deeper answers about a better way to think about things end up finding what they believe is the "right" way and that tends to lead to branding other options as "wrong".

A search for certainty always seems to be defined or guided by people dealing with their own issues and experiences that they can't explain. It gets tribal and very personal and those kind of things become dark rabbit holes.

----

>Jessica Taylor, an AI researcher who knew both Zizians and participants in Leverage Research, put it bluntly. “There’s this belief [among rationalists],” she said, “that society has these really bad behaviors, like developing self-improving AI, or that mainstream epistemology is really bad–not just religion, but also normal ‘trust-the-experts’ science. That can lead to the idea that we should figure it out ourselves. And what can show up is that some people aren't actually smart enough to form very good conclusions once they start thinking for themselves.”

Reminds me of some members of our government and conspiracy theorists who "research" and encourage people to figure it out themselves ...

Post reply on HN