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Guess I'm a rationalist now

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Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#741

Post by Propelloni »

LargeWu wrote: post #619
ChadNauseam wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99% of effective altruists and rationalists agree that you shouldn't hurt people as part of some complicated scheme to do good. For example, here is eliezer yudkowsky in 2008 saying exactly that, and explaining why it's true: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K9ZaZXDnL3SEmYZqB/ends-don-t...

I believe they believe that, on its face. I also believe that idealistic people will go to great lengths to convince themselves that their desired outcome is, in fact, the moral one. It starts by saying things like, "Well, what is harm, actually..." and then constructing a definition that supports the conclusions they've already arrived at. I'm quite sure Sam Bankman-Fried did not believe he was harming anybody when…

Like an very old dude once said: "No one is willfully evil."

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#742

Post by wagwang »

im3w1l wrote: post #390
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…

I think most everyone can agree with this: Being 100% rigorous and rational, reasoning from first principles and completely discarding received wisdom is a great trait in a philosopher but a terrible trait in a policymaker. Because for the former, exploring ideas for the benefit of future generations is more important than whether they ultimately reach the right conclusion or not.

The big problem is that human values are similar to neural network weights that can't be clearly defined into true/false axioms like "human life is inherently valuable" and "murder is wrong". The easiest axiom to break is something like "every human life is equally valuable", or even "every human life is born equal".

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#743

Post by camgunz »

genewitch wrote: post #451
camgunz wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah OK I can see that. Mostly you inspired me to do a little napkin math based on the report I linked, which says ~3.1m kids got CPS investigations (etc) in 2023, which is ~8,500 a day. But, the main author in a subsequent paper shows that only ~13% of kids have confirmed maltreatment [0]. That's still far lower than the 38% for homeschooled kids. [0]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5087599/

I wonder if the CPS on homeschooled children rate is from people who had their children in school and then "pulled them out" vs people who never had their children in school at all. As some comedian said "you're on the grid [...], they have your footprint"; i know it used to be "known" that school districts go after the former because it literally loses them money to lose a student, whereas with the latter, the kid i…

> i know it used to be "known" that school districts go after the former

Maybe, but this sounds like some ideologically opposed groups slandering each other to get the moral high ground to me. The papers linked show a pretty typical racialized pattern of CPS calls (Blacks high, Asians low, Whites and Latinos somewhere between) that maybe contraindicates this, for example.

> also i wasn't considering "confirmed maltreatment" - just the fact that 4k/day isn't "impossible"

Yup I think you're right here. I think there's something fuzzy happening with conflating "CPS investigation" with "abuse", but I'm not sure where the homeschool abuse rate comes from.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#744

Post by comp_throw7 »

creatonez wrote: post #665
therealdrag0 wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Global Health & Development is like 40% of EA funding today. Please stop making things up.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#745

Post by vidarh »

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…

People get emotional about free will because if you come to believe there is no free will it makes you question a lot of things that are emotionally difficult.

E.g. punishment for the sake of retribution is near impossible to morally justify if you don't believe in free will because it means you're punishing someone for something the had no agency over.

Similarly, wealth disparities can't be excused by someone choosing to work harder, because they had no agency in the "decision".

You can still justify some degree of punishment and reward, but a lack of free will changes which justifications are reasonable very substantially.

E.g. punishment might still be justified from the point of view of reducing offending and reoffending rates, but if that is the goal then it is only justified to the extent that it actually achieves those goals, and that has emotionally difficult consequences. For example, for non-premeditated murders carried out out of passion rather than e.g. gang crimes, the odds of someone carrying out another is extremely low and the odds that the fear of a long prison sentence is an actual deterrence is generally low, and and so long prison terms are hard to justify once vengeance is off the table.

And so holding on to a belief in free will is easier to a lot of people than the alternative.

My experience is that there are few issues where people so easily get angry than if you suggest we don't have free will once they start thinking through the consequences (and some imagined ones...).

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#746

Post by comp_throw7 »

Aurornis wrote: post #563
PoignardAzur wrote: post #546

As someone who likes both the Rationalist community and the Rust community, it's fascinating to see the parallels in how the Hacker News crowd treats both. The contempt, the general lack of curiosity and the violence of the bold sweeping statements people will make here are mind-boggling.

> the general lack of curiosity Honestly, I find the Hacker News comments in recent years to be most enlightening because so many comments come from people who spent years immersed in rationalist communities. For years one of my friend groups was deep into LessWrong and SSC. I've read countless blog posts and other content out of those groups. Yet every time I write about it, I'm dismissed as an uninformed outsider.…

You keep saying things that are proven to be trivially false with 5 seconds of examination, so I think the dismissal is justified.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#747

Post by comp_throw7 »

tptacek wrote: post #629
Aurornis wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I especially liked the existential threat of Cade Metz. I am perpetually fascinated by the way rationalists love to dismiss critics by pointing out that they met some people in person and they seemed nice. It's such a bizarre meme. Curtis Yarvin went to one of the "Vibecamp" rationalist gatherings, was nice to some prominent Twitter rationalists, and now they are ardent defenders of him on Twitter. Their entire arg…

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.

Your persistent refusal to acknowledge that Scott did not want to go from a world where his patients Googling his real name did _not_ immediately lead to his blog, to a world where it _did_ immediately lead to his blog, and that was his primary (and valid) objection to having his real first and last name put into print, is baffling.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#749

Post by imtringued »

lisper wrote: post #499
dasil003 wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intelligence and rational thought is useful, but like any strategy it has its tradeoffs and limitations. No amount of intelligence can overcome the chaos of long time horizons, especially when we're talking about human civilization. IMHO it's reasonable to pick a long-term problem/risk and focus on solving it. But it's pure hubris to think rationality will give you anything approaching high confidence of what the big…

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…

You got Darwinism exactly backwards. Darwinism and nature do not select like an algorithm. There is no cost function in reality and no population selection and reproduction algorithm. What you're seeing is the illusion of selection due to selection bias.

If gender equality and intellectual achievement don't produce children, then that isn't "darwinism selecting rationality out". You can't expect the continued existence of finite lifespan organisms if there are no replacement organisms. Raising children is hard work. The people who believe in gender equality and intellectual achievement made the decision to not want more of themselves, particularly when their belief in gender equality entails not wanting male offspring. The alternative is essentially freeloading and expecting others, who do not share the beliefs, to produce children for you and also to teach them the "enlightened" belief of forcing "enlightened" beliefs onto others (note the circularity, the initial conditions are usually irrelevant and often just a fig leaf to perpetuate the status quo).

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#750

Post by Nursie »

nathcd wrote: post #294

Some of the comments here remind me of online commentary about some place called "the orange site". Always wondered who they were talking about...

Honestly, as a daily reader and oftentimes commenter on the dreaded orange site, I've seen a lot of criticism of its denizens, very often along the lines of -

"Computer people who think that because they're smart in one area they have useful opinions on anything else, holding forth with great certainty about stuff they have zero undertanding or insight into"

And you know what, I think they're right. The rest of you are always doing that sort of thing!

(/s, if it's necessary...)

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