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Guess I'm a rationalist now

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Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#661

Post by z3c0 »

lechatonnoir wrote: post #649
Aurornis wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lockstep like this? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-proba ... (a post on Less Wrong, karma score currently +442, versus +102 and +230 for the two posts it cites as earlier favourable LW coverage of the lithium claim -- the comments on both of which, by the way, don't look to me any more positive than "skeptical but interested") That post came out a year later, in response to the absurdity of…

Aside from the remark given in the other reply to your comment, I wonder what the standard is: how quickly should a community appear to correct its incorrect beliefs for them to not count as sheep?

[dead]

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#662

Post by Uhhrrr »

creatonez wrote: post #651
lukas099 wrote: post #381

This is vibe-based, but I think the Rationalists get more vitriol than they deserve. Upon reflecting, my hypothesis for this is threefold: 1. They are a community —they have an in-group, and if you are not one of them you are by-definition in the out-group. People tend not to like being in other peoples' out-groups. 2. They have unusual opinions and are open about them. People tend not to like people who express opin…

Nope. Has nothing to do with them being nerds. They are actively dangerous, their views almost always lead to extremely reactionary politics. EA and RA are deeply anti-human. In some cases that manifests as a desire to subjugate humanity with an iron fist technocratic rule, in other cases it manifests as a desire to kill off humanity. Either way, as an ideology it must be stopped. It should not be treated with kids g…

In what specific way do you disagree with them?

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#663

Post by twoodfin »

tptacek wrote: post #323

Well that was a whole thing. I especially liked the existential threat of Cade Metz. But ultimately, I think the great oracle of Chicago got this whole thing right when he said: -Ism's in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon, "I don't believe in Beatles, I just believe in me." Good point there. After all, he was the walrus. I could be the w…

I genuinely worry that the Rationalists are actually Fascist Anarchists who don’t own cars.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#664

Post by therealdrag0 »

creatonez wrote: post #651
lukas099 wrote: post #381

This is vibe-based, but I think the Rationalists get more vitriol than they deserve. Upon reflecting, my hypothesis for this is threefold: 1. They are a community —they have an in-group, and if you are not one of them you are by-definition in the out-group. People tend not to like being in other peoples' out-groups. 2. They have unusual opinions and are open about them. People tend not to like people who express opin…

Nope. Has nothing to do with them being nerds. They are actively dangerous, their views almost always lead to extremely reactionary politics. EA and RA are deeply anti-human. In some cases that manifests as a desire to subjugate humanity with an iron fist technocratic rule, in other cases it manifests as a desire to kill off humanity. Either way, as an ideology it must be stopped. It should not be treated with kids g…

Huh? They give millions of dollars to global humanitarian development funds saving at least 50,000 lives per year. Maybe you’re taking a few kooks who have a controversial lecture somewhere as representing everyone else.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#665

Post by creatonez »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #664
creatonez wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Has nothing to do with them being nerds. They are actively dangerous, their views almost always lead to extremely reactionary politics. EA and RA are deeply anti-human. In some cases that manifests as a desire to subjugate humanity with an iron fist technocratic rule, in other cases it manifests as a desire to kill off humanity. Either way, as an ideology it must be stopped. It should not be treated with kids g…

Huh? They give millions of dollars to global humanitarian development funds saving at least 50,000 lives per year. Maybe you’re taking a few kooks who have a controversial lecture somewhere as representing everyone else.

It is true that there were EAs before the conception of "longtermism" that were relatively mundane and actually helping humanity, and not part of a death cult. But those have been shunned from the EA movement for a while now.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#666

Post by creatonez »

Uhhrrr wrote: post #662
creatonez wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Has nothing to do with them being nerds. They are actively dangerous, their views almost always lead to extremely reactionary politics. EA and RA are deeply anti-human. In some cases that manifests as a desire to subjugate humanity with an iron fist technocratic rule, in other cases it manifests as a desire to kill off humanity. Either way, as an ideology it must be stopped. It should not be treated with kids g…

In what specific way do you disagree with them?

The support for eugenics and ethnic cleansing, the absolute obsession with strictly utilitarian ethics and ignorance of other ethics, the "kill a bunch of humans now so that trillions can live in the future" longtermist death cult, and the whole Roko's basilisk worship that usually goes like "one AI system can take over the entirety of humanity and start eating the galaxy, therefore we must forcefully jump in the driver seat of that dangerous AI right now so that our elite ideology is locked in for a trillion years of galactic evolution".

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#667

Post by Veedrac »

jhbadger wrote: post #497
Veedrac wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems very odd to criticize the group that most reliably and effectively funds global health and malaria prevention for this. What is your alternative? What's your framework that makes you contribute to malaria prevention more or more effectively than EAs do? Or is the claim instead that people should shut down conversation within EA that strays from the EA mode?

The simple answer is you don't need a "framework" -- plain empathy for the less fortunate is good enough. But if the EA's actually want to do something about malaria (although the Gates Foundation does much, much more in that regard than the Centre for Effective Altruism), more power to them. But as Becker notes from his visits to the Centre, things like malaria and malnutrition are not the primary focus of the centr…

I wish it were, but it's clearly not enough. There are plenty of people with healthy emotional empathy in the world, and yet children still die of easily preventable diseases.

I am plenty happy to simp for the Gates foundation, but I think it's important to acknowledge that becoming Bill Gates to support charity is not a strategy the average person can replicate. The question for me is how do I live my life to support the causes I care about, not who lives more impressive lives than me.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#668

Post by Veedrac »

Aurornis wrote: post #512
Veedrac wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If putting up evidence about how people were wrong in their predictions, I suggest actually pointing at predictions that were wrong, rather than on recent predictions about the future that that you disagree over how they will resolve. If putting up evidence about how people make excuses for failing predictions, I suggest actually showing them do so, rather than projecting that they will do so and blaming them for you…

It's been a while since I've engaged in rationalist debates, so I forgot about the slightly condescending, lecturing tone that comes out when you disagree with rationalist figureheads. :) You could simply ask "Can you provide examples" instead of the "If you ____ then I suggest ____" form. My point wasn't to nit-pick individual predictions, it was a general explanation of how the game is played. Since Scott Alexander…

Please be civil.

I genuinely don't understand how you can point to someone's calibration curve where they've broadly done well, and cherry pick the failed predictions they made, and use this not just to claim that they're making bad predictions but that they're slimy about admitting error. What more could you possibly want from someone than a tally of their prediction record graded against the probability they explicitly assigned to it?

One man's modus ponens, as it goes.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#669

Post by paleotrope »

Retric wrote: post #531
mettamage wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always liken this to that we’re all asteroids floating in space. There’s no free will and everything is determined. We just see the whole thing unfold from one conscious perspective. Emotionally I don’t subscribe to this view. Rationally I do. My critique for rational people is that they don’t seem to fully take experience into account. It’s assumptions + rationality + experience/data + whatever strong inclinations…

> no free will That always seemed like a meaningless argument to me. To an outside observer free will is indistinguishable from a random process over some range of possibilities. You aren’t going to randomly go to sleep with your hand in a fire, there’s some hard coded biology preventing that choice but that only means human behavior isn’t completely random, hardly a groundbreaking discovery. At the other end we have…

Divorced from a religious context, it doesn't make any difference.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#670

Post by zahlman »

Aurornis wrote: post #487
NoGravitas wrote: post #126

Probably the most useful book ever written about topics adjacent to capital-R Rationalism is "Neoreaction, A Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right" [1], by Elizabeth Sandifer. Though the topic of the book is nominally the Alt-Right, a lot more of it is about the capital-R Rationalist communities and individuals that incubated the neoreactionary movement that is currently dominant in US politics. It's probably…

Ironically, bringing this topic up always turns the conversation to ad-hominem attacks about the messenger while completely ignoring the subject matter. That's exactly the type of argument rationalists claim to despise, but it gets brought up whenever inconvenient arguments appear about their own communities. All of the comments dismissing the content because of the author or refusing to acknowledge the arguments bec…

> Ironically, bringing this topic up always turns the conversation to ad-hominem attacks about the messenger while completely ignoring the subject matter.

This is not a fair or accurate characterization of the criticism you're referring to.

> All of the comments dismissing the content because of the author or refusing to acknowledge the arguments because it feels like a "smear" are admitting their inability to judge an argument on their own merits.

They are not doing any such thing. The content is being dismissed because it has been repeatedly evaluated before and found baseless. The arguments are acknowledged as specious. Sandifer makes claims that are not supported by the evidence and are in fact directly contradicted by the evidence.

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