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Guess I'm a rationalist now

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Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#801

Post by naasking »

com2kid wrote: post #727
DowsingSpoon wrote: post #660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be the parts that lead a person to commit large scale fraud with the idea that the good they can do with the stolen money outweighs all the negatives. Or, at least, that’s the popular idea of what happened to Sam Bankman-Fried. I have no idea what was actually going through that man’s mind. In any case, EA smells strongly of “the ends justify the means” which most popular moral philosophies reject with stron…

> the ends justify the means” which most popular moral philosophies reject with strong arguments. This is a false statement. Our entire modern world is built on the basis of the ends justify the means. Every time money is spent on long term infrastructure vs giving poor kids food right now, every time a war is fought, every time a doctor triages injuries at a disaster.

I don't think it's useful to conflate "the ends justify the means" with "cost-benefit analysis". You sometimes use the latter to justify certain means, but you don't have to, that's why they're different. When you believe that the ends justify the means, you can also just give no consideration at all to the ethics of the means. No doctor triaging patients would ever shoot a patient in the head so he could move onto one they thought was more important. Yes they might let patients die, but that's different than actively killing them.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#802

Post by baxtr »

ImaCake wrote: post #597
baxtr wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and if you read Popper that’s exactly how he defined rationality / the scientific method: to solve problems of life.

>if you read Popper Thanks, I might actually go do this :) I recently got exposed to a very persuasive form of "rationalism is a social construct" by reading "Alchemy" by Rory Sutherland. But a theme in these comments is that a lot of these ideas are just recycled from philosophers and that the philosophers were less likely to try and induct you into a cult.

I read the book too! I really enjoyed it and I think they Popper and Sutherland would go along quite well.

Both advocate the principle of putting out a bold conjecture, test, learn, adapt.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#803

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #527
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that has the potential to ruin economies, then the economic rot is so much more profound than anyone (me included) ever realized.

I think when the GP says "our assumptions about individuals' economic value." they mean half the workforce becoming unemployed because the auto corrector can do it cheaper. That's going to be a swift kick to your economy, no matter how strong.

If the "autocorrector" can do anything that used to be a paid wage/salary "cheaper", this isn't the case of another job being automated away. Either something is grossly wrong in that some are willing to have a stupid machine do that poorly (writing Sports Illustrated articles), or something was always grossly wrong in that we were paying someone to do something that never did matter (paying someone to write SEO spam). This isn't a swift kick in the economy, this is a "your economy was so weak a soft breeze knocked it over".

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#804

Post by [deleted] »

adastra22 wrote: post #726
ineptech wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!"

That hasn't defined EA for at least 10 years or so. EA started with "you should donate to NGOs distributing mosquito nets instead of the local pet shelter". It then moved into "you should work a soulless investment banking job so you can give more". More recently it was "you should excise all expensive fun things from your life, and give 100% of your disposable income to a weird poly sex cult and/or their fraudulent…

[deleted]

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#805

Post by j7ake »

contrarian1234 wrote: post #9

The article made me think deeper about what rubs me the wrong way about the whole movement I think there is some inherent tension btwn being "rational" about things and trying to reason about things from first principle.. And the general absolutist tone of the community. The people involved all seem very... Full of themselves ? They don't really ever show a sense of "hey, I've got a thought, maybe I haven't considere…

The core is that hyper rationalists mistaken their model of the world with the world itself. They then lecture with confidence their opinions in the real world, ignoring the hairy details and unknown unknowns in the real world.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#806

Post by JoshuaDavid »

skinnymuch wrote: post #710
JoshuaDavid wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The general idea is that on the margin (in the economics sense), more resources should go to the most effective+neglected thing, and.the amount of resources I control is approximately zero in a global sense, so I personally should direct all of my personal giving to the highest impact thing.

And in their logic the highest impact is to donate money, take high paying jobs regardless of morality, and not focusing on any structural or root issues.

Yeah, the logic is basically "sure there are lots of structural or root issues, but I'm not confident I can make a substantial positive impact on those with the resources I have whereas I am confident that spending money to prevent people (mostly kids who would otherwise have survived to adulthood) from dying of malaria is a substantial positive impact at ~$5000 / life saved". I find that argument compelling, though I know many don't. Those many are free to focus on structural or root issues, or to try to make the case that addressing those issues is not just good, but better than reducing the impact of malaria.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#807

Post by margalabargala »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #702
margalabargala wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And it turns out if you do this, you can discard 90% of philosophy as historical detritus This is just the story of the history of philosophy. Going back hundreds of years. See Kant and Hegel for notable examples.

Sure, and I agree that LW is doing philosophy in that sense.

Sure, I just object to the characterisation of "actually correct", as though each of those ideas has not gone back and forth on philosophers thinking that particular idea is "actually correct" for centuries. LW does not appear to have much if any novel insight; just much better marketing.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#808

Post by mynameajeff »

Aurornis wrote: post #581
scoofy wrote: post #365

It's weird that "being interested in philosophy" is like... a movement. My background is in philosophy, but the rationalist vs nonrationalist debate seems like an undergraduate class dispute. My old roommate worked for Open Phil, and was obsessed with AI Safety and really into Bitcoin. I never was. We still had interesting arguments about it all the time. Most of the time we just argued until we got to the axioms we…

> It's weird that "being interested in philosophy" is like... a movement. My background is in philosophy, but the rationalist vs nonrationalist debate seems like an undergraduate class dispute. Bring up the rationalist community within academic philosophy circles and you'll get a lot of groans. The fun part about rationalists is that they like to go back to first principles and rediscover basics. The less fun part is…

It's a lot like how every "interesting"/pop scientific field (think quantum) has a niche community of Free Thinkers that the "establishment" just won't listen to. If you hear from the actual core scientific community you'll find out that they just already went over this 40-400 years ago and nothing being argued as groundbreaking is new or groundbreaking like it's being pitched as. That indifference can feel like rejection to the highly-excited outsiders which can develop into animosity which just further isolates them.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#809

Post by TheAncientGeek »

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…

Randomness based free will still gives you a non-inevitable future.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#810

Post by JKCalhoun »

creata wrote: post #653
JKCalhoun wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lack of acknowledgment that maybe we don't have a full grasp of the implications of AI And why single out AI anyway? Because it's sexy maybe? Because if I had to place bets on the collapse of humanity it would look more like the British series "The Survivors" (1975–1977) than "Terminator".

For what it's worth (not much), they were obsessed with AI safety way before it was "sexy".

Thanks. I don't know their history. (They've only come up on my radar since a string of murders in the news earlier this year.)
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