Guess I'm a rationalist now • Hacker News Board

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#711

Post by skinnymuch » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 5:28 AM UTC

bena wrote: post #575

aspenmayer wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Technically "long-termism" should lead them straight to nihilism. Because, eventually, everything will end. One way or another. The odds are just 1. At some point, there are no more future humans. The number of humans are zero. Also, due to the nature of the infinite, any finite thing is essentially a rounding error and not worth concerning oneself with. The current sums invested and donated in altruist causes are…

I think it's essentially a grift. An excuse to do nothing while looking like you care and reaping rewards. If they wanted to help, they should be focused on the now. Global poverty, climate change, despotic world leaders. They should be aligning themselves against such things. But instead what we see is essentially not that. Effective altruism is a lot like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, a bit of a misnom…

Agreed.

To be pedantic, DPRK is run via the will of the people to a degree comparable to any country. A bigger misnomer is the west calling liberal “democracy”, just democracy.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#712

Post by skinnymuch » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 5:34 AM UTC

cassepipe wrote: post #330

jandrese wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They remind me of the "Effective Altruism" crowd who get completely wound up in these hypothetical logical thought exercises and end up coming to insane conclusions that they feel trapped in because they got there using pure logic. Not realizing that their initial conditions were highly artificial so any conclusion they reach is only of academic value. There is a term for this. "Getting stuck up your own butt." It wo…

I read the whole tree of responses under this comment and I could only convince myself that when people have no arguments they try to make you look bad. Most of criticisms are just "But they think they are better than us !" and the rest is "But sometimes they are wrong !" I don't know about the community and couldn't care less but their writings have brought me some almost life saving fresh air in how to think about…

Read other comments then. Not everyone is saying “they think they are better than us”.

The primary issues as others have noted is they focus on people going to the highest paying jobs without much care for morality of the jobs. Ergo they are fine being net negatives in terms of their work and philosophy.

All they do is donate money. Donations don’t fix society. Nothing changes structurally. No root problems are looked at.

They largely ignore capitalism’s faults or when I’ve seen them talk about, it’s done in a way of superficially decrying capitalist issues but then largely going along with them. Which ties into how they focus on high paying jobs regardless of morality (I’m exaggerating here but the overall point is correct).

—

HN is not intelligent when it comes to politics or the world. The avg person here is a western chauvinist with little political knowledge but a defensive ego about it. No need to be sad about this comment page.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#713

Post by tptacek » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 5:35 AM UTC

autarch wrote: post #697

tptacek wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hyperfixated on the idea that they're angry at Metz for "outing" Scott Alexander, who published some of his best-known posts under his own name.

Isn't "Scott Alexander" his first and middle name? Did he actually use his last name on his blog before the NYT published that piece?

Yes.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#714

Post by skinnymuch » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 5:38 AM UTC

ajkjk wrote: post #418

johhnylately535 wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I finally gave in and created an account because of your comment. It's beautifully put. I would only perhaps add that, to me, the neo-rationalist thing looks the most similar to things that don't work yet attract hardcore "true believers". It's a pattern repeated through the ages, perhaps most intimately for me in the seemingly endless parades of computer system redesigns: software, hardware, or both. Randomly one mi…

(Thank you) I agree, although I do think that the rationalists and EAs are way better than most of the other narrowband groups, as you call them, out there, such as the Metaverse or Crypto people. The rationalists are at least mostly legitimately motivated by morality and not just by a "blow it all up and replace it with something we control" philosophy (which I have come to believe is the belief-set that only a pers…

They aren’t motivated by morality. They just are more moral relative to the niches you referred to.

Any group that focuses on their own goals of high paying jobs regardless of the morality of those jobs or how they contribute to the structural issues of society is not that good. Then donating money while otherwise being okay with the status quo —- not touching anything systemic in such an unjust world but supposedly focusing on morality is laughable.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#715

Post by antondd » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 5:44 AM UTC

krapp wrote: post #29

radicalbyte wrote: post #22

* 20 somethings who are clearly on spectrum * Group are "special" * Centered around a charismatic leader * Weird sex stuff Guys we have a cult!

These are the people who came up with Roko's Basilisk, Effective Altruism and spawned the Zizians. I think Robert Evans described them not as a cult but as a cult incubator, or something along those lines.

YCombinator but for cults

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#716

Post by hollerith » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 5:49 AM UTC

krapp wrote: post #29

radicalbyte wrote: post #22

* 20 somethings who are clearly on spectrum * Group are "special" * Centered around a charismatic leader * Weird sex stuff Guys we have a cult!

These are the people who came up with Roko's Basilisk, Effective Altruism and spawned the Zizians. I think Robert Evans described them not as a cult but as a cult incubator, or something along those lines.

Effective altruism wasn't started by the Berkeley rationalists.

They have separate origins, but have come to overlap.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#717

Post by molochai » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 6:00 AM UTC

elt895 wrote: post #119

greener_grass wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is an arbitrage going on where STEM types who lack background in philosophy, literature, history are super impressed by basic ideas from those subjects being presented to them by stealth. Not saying this is you, but these topics have been discussed for thousands of years, so it should at least be surprising that Yudkowsky is breaking new ground.

Are there other philosophy- or history-grounded sources that are comparable? If so, I’d love some recommendations. Yudkowsky and others have their problems, but their texts have an interesting points, are relatively easy to read and understand, and you can clearly see which real issues they’re addressing. From my experience, alternatives tend to fall into two categories: 1. Genuine classical philosophy, which is usua…

At the risk of being roasted for recommending pop-culture things, the podcast Philosophize This is pretty good for a high-level overview. I'm sure there are issues and simplifications, and it's certainly not actual source material. The nice part is it's sort of a start-to-finish, he goes from the start of philosophy to modern day stuff, which helps a ton in building foundational understanding without reading everything ever written.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#718

Post by gblargg » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 6:06 AM UTC

> The closest to right-wing politics that I witnessed at LessOnline was a session, with Kelsey Piper and current and former congressional staffers, about the prospects for moderate Democrats to articulate a moderate, pro-abundance agenda that would resonate with the public and finally defeat MAGA.

I can't say I'm surprised.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#719

Post by tsimionescu » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 6:07 AM UTC

ineptech wrote: post #610

troyastorino wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The overlap between the Effective Altruism community and the Rationalist community is extremely high. They’re largely the same people. Effective Altruism gained a lot of early attention on LessWrong, and the pessimistic focus on AI existential risk largely stems from an EA desire to avoid “temporal-discounting” bias. The reasoning is something like: if you accept that future people count just as much as current peopl…

What's the seductive-but-wrong part of EA? As far as I can tell, the vast majority of the opposition to it boils down to "Maybe you shouldn't donate money to pet shelters when people are dying of preventable diseases" vs "But donating money to pet shelters feels better!"

It's not all bad, some conclusions are ok. But it also has ideas like "don't donate to charity, it's better to invest that money in, like, an oil fund, and grow it 1000x, and then you can donate so much more! Bill Gates has done much more for humanity than some Red Cross doctor!". Which is basically just a way to make yourself feel good about becoming richer, much like "prosperity gospel" would for the religious.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#720

Post by adastra22 » Fri, Jun 20, 2025, 6:09 AM UTC

munksbeer wrote: post #539

lisper wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one can levy a much more specific critique of rationalism: rationalism is in some sense self-defeating. If you are rational you will necessarily conclude that the fundamental dynamic that drives the (interesting parts of) the universe is Darwinian evolution, which is not rational. It blindly selects for reproductive fitness at the expense of all else. If you are a gene, you can probably produce more offspring…

I hesitate to nitpick, but Darwinism (as far as I know) is not really the term to use because Darwin's theory was limited to life on earth. Only later was the concept generalised into "natural selection" or "survival of the fittest". I'm not sure I entirely understand what you're arguing here, but I absolutely do agree that the most powerful force in the universe is natural selection.

The modern understanding of Darwin's theory (even the original theory, not necessarily neo-Darwinian extensions of it) apply to the origins of life and non-biological systems as well. Darwin himself was largely concerned with biology and restricted his published writings to that topic, but even he saw the application to the origin of life, and implications for religion. Even if he hadn't, we generally still use the discoverer's name to a theory even when applied to a domain outside their original area of concern.

The term "survival of the fittest" predates Darwin's Origin of Species, and was adopted by Darwin within his lifetime, btw.