721–730 of 952 posts
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what the heck does any of this mean??
They write and talk in their group lingo so outsiders can't understand it without diving deep into their lore, mindset and community. It's a common thing. Seen it numerous times. Don't waste your time.
Rationalism? The term has been used a lot of times since Pythagoras [0], but the combination of Bay Area, Oxford, existential risks, AI safety makes it sound like this particular movement could have formed in the same mold as Effective Altruism and Long-Termism (ie, the "it's objectively better for humanity if you give us money to buy a castle in France than whatever you'd do with it" crowd that SBF sprung from). Can…
(Of course, the actual thing is more closely "Zizian style cultish insanity", which honestly has very very little to do with LessWrong style rationality either.)
[Former member of that world, roommates with one of Ziz's friends for a while, so I feel reasonably qualified to speak on this.] The problem with rationalists/EA as a group has never been the rationality, but the people practicing it and the cultural norms they endorse as a community. As relevant here: 1) While following logical threads to their conclusions is a useful exercise, each logical step often involves some…
Another thing I'll add after having spent a few years in a religious cult: It's all about the axioms. If you tweak the axioms you can use impeccable logic to build a completely incorrect framework that will appeal to otherwise intelligent(and often highly intelligent) people. Also, people are always less rational than they are able to admit. The force of things like social connection can very easily warp the reasonin…
We have certain axioms, (let me chose an arbitrary, and possibly not quite an axiomy-enough example): "human life has value". We hold this to be self-evident and construct our society around it.
We also often don't realize that other people and cultures have different axioms of morality. We talk/theorize at this high level, but don't realize we have different foundations.
[Former member of that world, roommates with one of Ziz's friends for a while, so I feel reasonably qualified to speak on this.] The problem with rationalists/EA as a group has never been the rationality, but the people practicing it and the cultural norms they endorse as a community. As relevant here: 1) While following logical threads to their conclusions is a useful exercise, each logical step often involves some…
As I posted elsewhere on this subject: these people are rationalizing, not rational. They’re writing cliche sci-fi and bizarre secularized imitations of baroque theology and then reasoning from these narratives as if they are reality.
Reason is a tool not a magic superpower enabling one to see beyond the bounds of available information, nor does it magically vaporize all biases.
Logic, like software and for the same reason, is “garbage in, garbage out.” If even one of the inputs (premises, priors) is mistaken the entire conclusion can be wildly wrong. Errors cascade, just like software.
That's why every step needs to be checked with experiment or observation before a next step is taken.
I have followed these people since stuff like Overcoming Bias and LessWrong appeared and I have never been very impressed. Some interesting ideas, but honestly most of them were recycling of ideas I’d already encountered in sci-fi or futurist forums from way back in the 1990s.
The culty vibes were always there and it instantly put me off, as did many of the personalities.
“A bunch of high IQ idiots” has been my take for like a decade or more.
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conservative media has the opposite rule: make every story about a trans person into a narrative about trans ideology. this should be a story about an ideological cult with trans members, but instead it's a story about the cult of trans ideology. it's called "nut picking" - use the worst examples of a group to tarnish the group as a whole. a good example of this is attacks against Muslim Americans after 9/11.
Is it the same for judging all MAGA as Nazis? I ask that in all earnestness. I am not a MAGA or a MAGA apologist.
This story happened in my backyard. The shootout was about 40 minutes from me but Youngblut and Felix Bauckholt were reported by a hotel clerk dressed in tactical gear and sporting firearms in a hotel a few blocks from me. Weird to see a community I followed show up so close to home and negatively like this. I always just read LW and appreciated some of the fundamentals that this group seems to have ignored. Stuff li…
> Weird to see a community I followed show up so close to home and negatively like this. I had some coworkers who were really into LessWrong and rationality. I thought it was fun to read some of the selected writings they would share, but I always felt that online rationalist communities collected a lot of people with reactionary, fascist, misogynistic, and far-right tendencies. There’s a heavily sanitized version of…
Members of these or other similar communities would do well to read anything on them dispassionately and critique anything they read. I’d also say that if they use Yudkowsy’s writings as a basis for understanding the world, that understanding is going to have to the same inadequacies of Yudkowsky and his writings. How many people without PhDs or even relevant formal education are putting out high quality writing on both philosophy and quantum mechanics (and whatever other subjects)?
Every time I hear about anything related to Effective Altruism, it's because people who believe this stuff have done crimes sufficient to make it in to the news. Are there other contexts they show up where they are not doing crimes, or really non-normative things?
But that doesn't get into the news. Saving people is boring. Killing people? That gets the clicks.
Suppose you have 1000 people in the movement. 998 well-adjusted people. 1 is a crook who uses movement as a shield. 1 is insane freak.
Of course, you'll hear about the crook and the freak. Well-adjusted people are not newsworthy.
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Never seen that happen here.
Yeah well I've never seen violence happen in the rationalist community, but I'm sure if I keep looking I'll find instances of Hacker News posters committing murder too.