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Why are there so many rationalist cults?

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Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#781

Post by azangru »

rsynnott wrote: post #760
azangru wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rationalists came to correct views about the COVID-19 pandemic while many others were saying masks didn’t work I wonder what views about covid-19 are correct. On masks, I remember the mainstream messaging went through the stages that were masks don't work, some masks work, all masks work, double masking works, to finally masks don't work (or some masks work; I can't remember where we ended up).

> to finally masks don't work (or some masks work; I can't remember where we ended up). Most masks 'work', for some value of 'work', but efficacy differs (which, to be clear, was ~always known; there was a very short period when some authorities insisted that covid was primarily transmitted by touch, but you're talking weeks at most). In particular I think what confused people was that the standard blue surgical mask…

> In particular I think what confused people was that the standard blue surgical masks are somewhat effective at stopping an infected person from passing on covid (and various other things), but not hugely effective at preventing the wearer from contracting covid

Yes, exactly.

If we look at guidelines about influenza, we will see them say that "surgical masks are not considered adequate respiratory protection for airborne transmission of pandemic influenza". And as far as I understand, it was finally agreed that in terms of transmission, Sars CoV-2 behaves similarly to the influenza virus.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#782

Post by lupusreal »

taberiand wrote: post #647
lupusreal wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A set of beliefs which causes somebody to waste their life in misery, because they think doom is imminent and everything is therefore pointless, is never a reasonable set of beliefs to hold. Whatever the weight of the empirical evidence behind the belief, it would be plainly unreasonable to accept that belief if accepting it condemns you to a wasted life.

Why would it cause someone to waste their life in misery? On a personal level, for everyone, doom is imminent and everything is pointless - 100 years is nothing, we all will die sooner or later. On larger time scales, doom is imminent and everything is pointless - even if everything was perfect, humans aren't going to last forever. Do people waste their lives in misery in the face of that reality? Why would believing…

It's the premise from the article we're discussing, where believe in imminent doom makes life feel pointless and preempts anything good somebody could be doing with their life.

> These beliefs can make it difficult to care about much of anything else: what good is it to be a nurse or a notary or a novelist, if humanity is about to go extinct?

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#783

Post by NoGravitas »

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?

It goes along with the "taking ideas seriously" part of [R]ationalism. They committed to the idea of maximizing expected quantifiable utility, and imagined scenarios with big enough numbers (of future population) that the probability of the big-number-future coming to pass didn't matter anymore. Normal people stop taking an idea seriously once it's clearly a fantasy, but [R]ationalists can't do that if the fantasy is both technically possible and involves big enough imagined numbers to overwhelm its probability, because of their commitment to "shut up and calculate"'

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#784

Post by NoGravitas »

Ma8ee wrote: post #744
xg15 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But that's the great thing about Longtermism. As long as a catastrophe is not going to lead to human extinction or otherwise specifically prevent the Singularity, it's not an X-Risk that you need to be concerned about. So AI alignment is an X-Risk we need to work on, but global warming isn't, so we can keep burning as much fossil fuel as we want. In fact, we need to burn more of them in order to produce the Singularity. The misery of a few billion present/near-future people doesn't matter compared to the happiness of sextillions of future post-humans.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#785

Post by isleyaardvark »

godelski wrote: post #360
dan_quixote wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a former mechanical engineer, I visualize this phenomenon like a "tolerance stackup". Effectively meaning that for each part you add to the chain, you accumulate error. If you're not damn careful, your assembly of parts (or conclusions) will fail to measure up to expectations.

I like this approach. Also having dipped my toes in the engineering world (professionally) I think it naturally follows that you should be constantly rechecking your designs. Those tolerances were fine to begin with, but are they now that things have changed? It also makes you think about failure modes. What can make this all come down and if it does what way will it fail? Which is really useful because you can then…

The example I heard was to picture the Challenger shuttle, and the O-rings used worked 99% of the time. Well, what happens to the failure rate when you have 6 O-rings in a booster rocket, and you only need one to fail for disaster? Now you only have a 94% success rate.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#786

Post by gwbas1c »

clueless wrote: post #471
gwbas1c wrote: post #455

One thing I'm having trouble with: The article assumes the reader knows some history about the rationalists. I listened to a podcast that covered some of these topics, so I'm not lost; but I think someone who's new to this topic will be very, very, confused.

I'm curious, what was the podcast episode?

Stuff you should Know, Who are the Zizians.

I can't find a direct link, but if you search for "Who are the Zizians?", you'll find it at https://stuffyoushouldknow.com/episodes/

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#787

Post by ratelimitsteve »

ratelimitsteve wrote: post #382
JohnMakin wrote: post #85

One of a few issues I have with groups like these, is that they often confidently and aggressively spew a set of beliefs that on their face logically follow from one another, until you realize they are built on a set of axioms that are either entirely untested or outright nonsense. This is common everywhere, but I feel especially pronounced in communities like this. It also involves quite a bit of navel gazing that m…

Are you familiar with ship of theseus as an arugmentation fallacy? Innuendo Studios did a great video on it and I think that a lot of what you're talking about breaks down to this. Tldr - it's a fallacy of substitution, small details of an argument get replaced by things that are (or feel like) logical equivalents until you end up saying something entirely different but are arguing as though you said the original thi…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui-ArJRqEvU

Meant to drop a link for the above, my bad

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#788

Post by NoGravitas »

PaulHoule wrote: post #338
ar-nelson wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find Yudowsky-style rationalists morbidly fascinating in the same way as Scientologists and other cults. Probably because they seem to genuinely believe they're living in a sci-fi story. I read a lot of their stuff, probably too much, even though I find it mostly ridiculous. The biggest nonsense axiom I see in the AI-cult rationalist world is recursive self-improvement. It's the classic reason superintelligence tak…

Yeah, to compare Yudkowsky to Hubbard I've read accounts of people who read Dianetics or Science of Survival and thought "this is genius!" and I'm scratching my head and it's like they never read Freud or Horney or Beck or Berne or Burns or Rogers or Kohut, really any clinical psychology at all, even anything in the better 70% of pop psychology. Like Hubbard, Yudkowsky is unreadable, rambling [1] and inarticulate --…

> like Dianetics, Sequences wouldn't be appealing if you were at all well read.

That would require an education in the humanities, which is low status.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#789

Post by ItsMattyG »

pavlov wrote: post #398

A very interesting read. My idea of these self-proclaimed rationalists was fifteen years out of date. I thought they’re people who write wordy fan fiction, but turns out they’ve reached the point of having subgroups that kill people and exorcise demons. This must be how people who had read one Hubbard pulp novel in the 1950s felt decades later when they find out he’s running a full-blown religion now. The article see…

FWIW, my rationalist friends were warning about Covid before I had heard about it from others, and talking about AI before it was on others radar.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#790

Post by NoGravitas »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #390
JohnMakin wrote: post #85

One of a few issues I have with groups like these, is that they often confidently and aggressively spew a set of beliefs that on their face logically follow from one another, until you realize they are built on a set of axioms that are either entirely untested or outright nonsense. This is common everywhere, but I feel especially pronounced in communities like this. It also involves quite a bit of navel gazing that m…

Epistemological skepticism sure is a belief. A strong belief on your side? I am profoundly sure, I am certain I exist and that a reality outside myself exists. Worse, I strongly believe knowing this external reality is possible, desirable and accurate. How suspicious does that make me?

It means you haven't read Hume, or, in general, taken philosophy seriously. An academic philosopher might still come to the same conclusions as you (there is an academic philosopher for every possible position), but they'd never claim the certainty you do.
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