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Why are there so many rationalist cults?

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Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#741

Post by creata »

pizzadog wrote: post #445

I have a lot of experience with rationalists. What I will say is: 1) If you have a criticism about them or their stupid name or how "'all I know is that I know nothing' how smug of them to say they're truly wise," rest assured they have been self flagellating over these criticisms 100x longer than you've been aware of their group. That doesn't mean they succeeded at addressing the criticisms, of course, but I can tel…

> You probably haven't heard about the ones that are succeeding at doing cool stuff because people don't gossip about charitable successes.

People do gossip about charitable successes.

Anyway, aren't capital-R Rationalists typically very online about what they do? If there are any amazing success stories you want to bring up (and I'm not saying they do or don't exist) surely you can just link to some of them?

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#742

Post by BlueTemplar »

solid_fuel wrote: post #696
Terr_ wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often like to point out that Earth was already consumed by Grey Goo, and today we are hive-minds in titanic mobile megastructure-swarms of trillions of the most complex nanobots in existence (that we know of), inheritors of tactics and capabilities from a zillion years of physical and algorithmic warfare. As we imagine the ascension of AI/robots, it may seem like we're being humble about ourselves... But I think it…

To take it a little further - if you stretch the conventional definition of intelligence a bit - we already assemble ourselves into a kind of collective intelligence. Nations, corporations, clubs, communes -- any functional group of humans is capable of observing, manipulating, and understanding our environment in ways no individual human is capable of. When we dream of hive minds and super-intelligent AI it almost f…

We can probably thank our individualist mindset for that. (Not that it's all negative.)

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#743

Post by woooooo »

whilenot-dev wrote: post #716
toasterlovin wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think we disagree. I’m not taking issue with scientists having jargon, which I agree is good and necessary (though I think the less analytical academic disciplines, not being rooted in fact, have come to bear many similarities to state-backed religions; and I think they use jargon accordingly). I’m pointing out that I specifically intended to exclude professionals by scoping my statement to “social groups”. P…

> I’m pointing out that I specifically intended to exclude professionals by scoping my statement to “social groups”. I think your argumentation is a generalization that's close to a rationalist fallacy we're discussing: > a social group with a lot of invented lingo is a red flag that you can see before you get isolated from your loved ones. Groups of artists do this all the time for the sake of agency over their inte…

I think there's a distinction between inventing new terms for utilitarian purposes vs ideological and in-group signalling purposes.

If you have groups talking about "expected value" or "dot products", that's different from groups who talk a lot about "privilege" or "the deep state". Even though the latter would claim they're just using jargon between experts, just like the scientists.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#744

Post by Ma8ee »

xg15 wrote: post #290
MajimasEyepatch wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel this way about some of the more extreme effective altruists. There is no room for uncertainty or recognition of the way that errors compound. - "We should focus our charitable endeavors on the problems that are most impactful, like eradicating preventable diseases in poor countries." Cool, I'm on board. - "I should do the job that makes the absolute most amount of money possible, like starting a crypto exchang…

The "longtermism" idea never made sense to me: So we should sacrifice the present to save the future. Alright. But then those future descendants would also have to sacrifice their present to save their future, etc. So by that logic, there could never be a time that was not full of misery. So then why do all of that stuff?

A bit of longtermism wouldn’t be so bad. We could sacrifice the convenience of burning fossil fuels today for our descendants to have an inhabitable planet.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#745

Post by chatmasta »

lmm wrote: post #566
freejazz wrote: post #435

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. But rationalism is?

Well, maybe. It seems at least adjacent to the stuff that's been making a lot of people rich lately.

It’s also adjacent to sociopathy, which is more likely the driving factor behind that wealth generation.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#746

Post by BlueTemplar »

solid_fuel wrote: post #700
doubleunplussed wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, I'm baffled to encounter recursive self-improvement being discussed as something not only weird to expect, but as damning evidence of sloppy thinking by those who speculate about it. We have an existence proof for intelligence that can improve AI: humans. If AI ever gets to human-level intelligence, it would be quite strange if it couldn't improve itself. Are people really that sceptical that AI wi…

> We have an existence proof for intelligence that can improve AI: humans. I don't understand what you mean by this. The human brain has not meaningfully changed, biologically, in the past 40,000 years. We, collectively, have built a larger base of knowledge and learned to cooperate effectively enough to make large changes to our environment. But that is not the same thing as recursive self-improvement. No one has be…

Culture is certainly one aspect of recursive self-improvement.

Somewhat akin to 'software' if you will.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#747

Post by username332211 »

staticman2 wrote: post #621
Dylan16807 wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did the Duke philosophy teachers claim they were using philosophy to determine if someone was raped? I don't think that matters very much. If there's a strong enough correlation between being a reactive idiot and the department you're in, it makes a bad case for enrolling in that realm of study for educational motives. It's especially bad when the realm of study is directly focused on knowledge, ethics, and logic.…

One week ago, if I asked you "how do we determine if modern philosophy is useful?" Would you have pondered for a little while, then responded, "Find out how many philosophers commented on the Duke rape case of 2006 and what their opinions were, then we'll know."

Often, after you've figured out who's guilty, you'd need to look for more evidence until you find something that the jury can understand and the defense counsel can't easily argue against.

I've seen people make arguments against the value of modern academic philosophy based on their experience with professors or with whateversampling of writings they've come across. They usually get nowhere.

That's why I wanted to ground this discussion in a specific event.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#748

Post by username332211 »

elliotto wrote: post #671
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…

Couldn't you take this same line of reasoning and apply it to the rationalist group from the article who killed a bunch of people, and conclude that you shouldn't become a rationalist because you probably kill people?

Yep. Though I'd rather generalize that to "The ethical teachings of Rationalists (Shut up and calculate!) can lead you to insane behavior."

And you wouldn't even need to know about the cult to reach that conclusion. One should be able to find crazy stuff by a cursory examination of the "Sequences" and other foundational texts. I think I once encountered something about torture and murder being morally right, if it would prevent mild inconvenience to a large enough group of people.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#749

Post by raxxorraxor »

numbsafari wrote: post #27

Why are so many cults founded on fear or hate? Because empathy is hard.

Empathy is usally a limited resource of those that generously ascribe it to themselves and it is often mixed up with self-serving desires. Perhaps Rationalists have similar difficulties with reasoning.

While I believe Rationalism can be some form of occupational disease in tech circles, it sometimes does pose interesting questions. You just have to be aware that the perspective to analyse circumstances is intentionally constrained and in the end you still have to compare your prognosis to a reality that always choses empiricism.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#750

Post by handoflixue »

nyeah wrote: post #162
handoflixue wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is "you can work to avoid cognitive biases" more ridiculous than "you can work to improve your mental health"?

I'm feeling a little frustrated by the derail. My complaint is about some small group claiming to have a monopoly on a normal human faculty, in this case rationality. The small group might well go on to claim that people outside the group lack rationality. That would be absurd. The mental health profession do not claim to be immune from mental illness themselves, they do not claim that people outside their circle are…

> My complaint is about some small group claiming to have a monopoly on a normal human faculty, in this case rationality.

"Rationalists" don't claim a monopoly any more than Psychiatry does.

> The small group might well go on to claim that people outside the group lack rationality.

Again, something that psychiatry is quite noteworthy about: the entire point of the profession is to tell non-professionals that they're doing Emotionally Healthy wrong.

> The mental health profession do not claim to be immune from mental illness themselves,

Rationalist don't claim to be immune to irrationality, and this is in fact repeatedly emphasized: numerous cornerstone articles are about "wow, I really fucked up at this Rationality thing", including articles by Eliezer.

> they do not claim that people outside their circle are mentally unhealthy

... what?

So if I go to a psychiatrist, you think they're gonna say I'm FINE? No matter what?

Have you ever heard of "involuntary commitment"?

> and they do not claim that their particular treatment is necessary for mental health.

Again, this is about as true as it is for rationalists.

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