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Why are there so many rationalist cults?

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Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#801

Post by niplav »

UltraSane wrote: post #555
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…

A good example of this is the number of huge assumptions needed for the argument for Roko's basilisk. I'm shocked that some people actually take it seriously.

I don't believe anyone has taken it seriously in the last half-decade, if you find counter-evidence for that belief let me know.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#802

Post by lostmsu »

bell-cot wrote: post #412
JKCalhoun wrote: post #235

> Many of them also expect that, without heroic effort, AGI development will lead to human extinction. Odd to me. Not biological warfare? Global warming? All-out nuclear war? I guess The Terminator was a formative experience for them. (For me perhaps it was The Andromeda Strain .)

My interpretation: When they say "will lead to human extinction", they are trying to vocalize their existential terror that an AGI would render them and their fellow rationalist cultists permanently irrelevant - by being obviously superior to them, by the only metric that really matters to them.

You sound like you wouldn't feel existential terror if after typing "My interpretation: " into the text field you'd see the rest of your message suggested by Copilot exactly how you wrote it letter by letter. And the same in every other conversation. How about people interrupting you in "real" life interaction after an AI predicted your whole tirade for them and they read it faster than you said it, and also read an analysis of it?

Dystopian sci-fi for sure, but many people dismissing LLMs as not AGI do so because LLMs are just "token predictors".

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#803

Post by stickfigure »

pavlov wrote: post #706
stickfigure wrote: post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're falling into some sort of fallacy; maybe a better rationalist than I could name it. The "they" you are describing is a large body of disparate people spread around the world. We're reading an article that focuses on a few dysfunctional subgroups. They are interesting because they are so dysfunctional and rare. Or put it this way: Name one -ism that _doesn't_ have sub/splinter groups that kill people. Even Paci…

The article specifically defines the rationalists it’s talking about: “The rationalist community was drawn together by AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky’s blog post series The Sequences, a set of essays about how to think more rationally.” Is this really a large body of disparate people spread around the world? I suspect not.

"Self-proclaimed rationalists" is a much broader group than people who read Yudkowsky.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#804

Post by kayodelycaon »

lostmsu wrote: post #796
sien wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rationalists have not read or understood David Hume. You cannot work out what out to be from what is. To want to be alive is irrational. Nietzsche and the Existentialists understood that. Arguably religions too.

> To want to be alive is irrational. This is some philosophy bullshit. Taking "rational" to be ~ "logical choice" the truthness of this statement depends on the assumed axioms, and given you didn't list them this statement is clearly false under rather simple "sum of all life is the value" system until that system is proven self-contradictory. Which I doubt you or the famous mouths you mentioned did at any point, bec…

Even if being alive was irrational by some measure, it’s not a particularly useful or helpful observation.

The desire or instinct to be alive is necessary for the survival of a sentient species. (Sentient, not sapient)

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#805

Post by GeoAtreides »

NoGravitas wrote: post #790
GeoAtreides wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

why so aggressive chief

I am certain that your position "All academic philosophers never claim complete certainty about their beliefs" is not even wrong or falsifiable.

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#806

Post by PaulHoule »

NoGravitas wrote: post #788
PaulHoule wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, there is "well read" and "educated" which aren't the same thing. I started reading when I was three and checked out ten books a week from the public library throughout my youth. I was well read in psychology, philosophy and such long before I went to college -- I got a PhD in a STEM field so I didn't read a lot of that stuff for classes [1] I still read a lot of that stuff.

Perhaps the reason why Stanford and Oxford students are impressed by that stuff is that they are educated but not well read which has a few angles: STEM privileged over the humanities, the ride of Dyslexia culture, and a shocking level of incuriosity in "nepo baby" professors [2] who are drawn to the profession not because of a thirst for knowledge but because it's the family business.

[1] did get an introduction to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogerian_argument and took a relatively "woke" (in a good way) Shakespeare class such that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troilus_and_Cressida is my favorite

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9755046/

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#807

Post by throwaway290 »

seanhunter wrote: post #693
skybrian wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The WHO didn't declare a global pandemic until March 11, 2020 [1]. That's a little slow and some rationalists were earlier than that. (Other people too.) After reading a warning from a rationalist blog, I posted a lot about COVID news to another forum and others there gave me credit for giving the heads-up that it was a Big Deal and not just another thing in the news. (Not sure it made all that much difference, thoug…

Do you think that the consequences of the WHO declaring a pandemic and some rationalist blog warning about covid are the same? Clearly the WHO has to be more cautious. I have no doubt there were people at the WHO who felt a global pandemic was likely at least as early as you and the person writing the rationalist blog.

If you look at the timeline, it's purely political. Some earliest warnings came from Taiwan/ROC who found it in travelers from mainland. But WHO did not dare to anger PRC so they ignored Taiwan and that way caused probably thousands of unnecessary deaths in the whole world

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#808

Post by throwaway290 »

azangru wrote: post #733
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…

> 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).

Basic masks work for society because they stop your saliva from traveling but they don't work for you because they don't stop particles from other people saliva from reaching you

Re: Why are there so many rationalist cults?

#810

Post by coldtea »

stickfigure wrote: post #674
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…

You're falling into some sort of fallacy; maybe a better rationalist than I could name it. The "they" you are describing is a large body of disparate people spread around the world. We're reading an article that focuses on a few dysfunctional subgroups. They are interesting because they are so dysfunctional and rare. Or put it this way: Name one -ism that _doesn't_ have sub/splinter groups that kill people. Even Paci…

>The "they" you are describing is a large body of disparate people spread around the world.

And that "large body" has a few hundred core major figures and prominent adherents, and a hell of a lot of them seem to be exactly like how the parent describes. Even the "tamer" of them like ASC have that cultish quality...

As for the rest of the "large body", the hangers on, those are mostly out of view anyway, but I doubt they'd be paragons of sanity if looked up close.

>Or put it this way: Name one -ism that _doesn't_ have sub/splinter groups that kill people

-isms include fascism, nazism, jihadism, nationalism, communism, nationalism, racism, etc, so not exactly the best argument to make in rationalism's defense. "Yeah, rationalism has groups that murder people, but after all didn't fascism had those too?"

Though, if we were honest, it mostly brings in mind another, more medical related, -ism.

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