Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Guess I'm a rationalist now

scottaaronson.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

811–820 of 1001 posts

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#811

Post by j7ake »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #730
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…

> then even small probabilities of catastrophic events wiping out humanity yield enormous negative expected value. Therefore, nothing can produce greater positive expected value than preventing existential risks—so working to reduce these risks becomes the highest priority. This is the logic of someone who has failed to comprehend the core ideas of Calculus 101. You cannot use intuitive reasoning when it comes to inf…

This summarizes what irks me about the community.

They use technical terms (eg expected value, KL divergence) in their verbal reasoning only to sound rational, but don’t ever mean to use those terms technically.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#812

Post by AntiDyatlov »

throwaway314155 wrote: post #771
NoGravitas wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hank Hill: Are y'all with the cult? Cult member: It's not a cult! It's an organization that promotes love and.. Hank Hill: This is it.

Does this quote make more sense in context? I don't watch the show.

It makes perfect sense as a comment, seeing the clip from the show doesn't add anything.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#813

Post by hollerith »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #530
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…

> 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".

Maybe the effort to make machines that are as smart and as capable as possible (the professed goal of the leaders of most of the AI labs) should be singled out because it actually is very dangerous.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#814

Post by TheAncientGeek »

lisper wrote: post #560
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…

If you get down to the quantum level there is no such thing as objective reality. Our perception that the world is made of classical objects that actually exist at particular places at particular times and have continuity of identity is an illusion. But it's a really compelling illusion, and you won't go far wrong treating it as if it were the truth in 99% of real-world situations. Likewise, free will is an illusion,…

There is no local realism. That doesn't at all add up to all-in-the-head idealism.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#815

Post by hollerith »

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".

Yes, people worried about AI started the Berkeley rationality movement (or whatever you want to call it) in the hope that it would help people become rational enough to understand the argument that AI is a very potent danger.

Some people who fit the description above are Eliezer Yudkowsky and Anna Salamon.

Eliezer started writing a sequence of blog posts that formed the nucleus of the movement in Nov 2006 (a month after the start of Hacker News).

Anna started working full time on AI safety in Mar 2008 and a few years later became the executive director of a non-profit whose mission was to try to help people become more rational. (The main way of its doing so has been in-person workshops IIUC.)

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#816

Post by TheAncientGeek »

astrange wrote: post #449
TeMPOraL wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Incidentally, the flaw in this theory is in thinking you understand what all the existential risks are. Rationalist community understands that very well. They even know how to put bounds on the unknowns and their own lack of information. > The thing evolution teaches us is that diversity is a group survival trait. Anybody insisting "nobody anywhere should do X" is more likely to cause an ELE than prevent one. Right…

> They even know how to put bounds on the unknowns and their own lack of information. No they don't. They think they can do this because they've accidentally reinvented the philosophy "logical positivism", which philosophers gave up on because it doesn't work. (This is similar to how they accidentally reinvented reconstructing arguments and called it "steelmanning".) https://metarationality.com/probability-limitation…

https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/dTkWWhQkgxePxbtPE/no-logi...

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#817

Post by margalabargala »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #701
margalabargala wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Additional note: compatibilism is only obviously correct if you accept that "free will" actually just means "the experienced perception/illusion of free will" as described by Schopenhauer. Using a slightly different definition of free will, suddenly Compatibilism becomes obviously incorrect. And now it's been reduced to quibbling over definitions, thereby reinventing much of the history of philosophy.

I think free will as philosophically used is inherently self-defeating and one of the largest black marks on the entire field, to be fair.

Why is that?

Here's what we know:

- we appear to experience what we call free will from our own perspective. This isn't strong evidence obviously. - we are aware that we live in a world full of predictable mechanisms of varying levels of complexity, as well as fundamentally unpredictable mechanisms like quantum mechanics. - we know we are currently unable to fully model our experience and predict next steps. - we know that we don't know whether consciousness as an emergent property of our brains is fully rooted in predictable mechanisms or has some decree of unknowability to it.

So really "do we have free will" is a question that relies on the nature of consciousness.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#818

Post by DrNosferatu »

I'm yet to see "Effective Altruism" or (neo-)"Rationalism" that is not mostly the rationalization of exploiting less privileged people than them, and justifying behaving in anti-social, exploitative and extractionary ways.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#819

Post by kragen »

baxtr wrote: post #723
kragen wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just "dethroning" in the sense that QED dethroned Maxwellian classical electrodynamics; it provides additional precision and shows how to correct the more limited theory in the cases where it gives obviously implausible results.

What is a good example for which Popper delivers "obviously implausible results"?

From the page, the only point in the extensive discussion of Popper where it disagrees with (its own explanation of) Popper's ideas:

> On the other hand, Popper’s idea that there is only falsification and no such thing as confirmation turns out to be incorrect. Bayes’ Theorem shows that falsification is very strong evidence compared to confirmation, but falsification is still probabilistic in nature; it is not governed by fundamentally different rules from confirmation, as Popper argued.

Popper's idea that confirmatory evidence has no value at all is obviously implausible. Some obviously implausible things turn out to be true anyway, since the universe is not constrained by our imaginations, but not this one; as the page clearly shows, we know that this particular implausible result is slightly false, and we can use Bayesian probability to calculate exactly how wrong.

I've answered your question, because I think that's what a bare minimum level of courtesy demands, but you keep evading mine. What epistemological propositions of Popper's do you think they're missing?

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#820

Post by TheAncientGeek »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #280
jandrese wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They remind me of the "Effective Altruism" crowd who get completely wound up in these hypothetical logical thought exercises and end up coming to insane conclusions that they feel trapped in because they got there using pure logic. Not realizing that their initial conditions were highly artificial so any conclusion they reach is only of academic value. There is a term for this. "Getting stuck up your own butt." It wo…

> their initial conditions were highly artificial There has to be (or ought to be) a name for this kind of epistemological fallacy, where in pursuit of truth, the pursuit of logical sophistication and soundness between starting assumptions (or first principles) and conclusions becomes functionally way more important than carefully evaluating and thoughtfully choosing the right starting assumptions (and being willing…

Bullet biting.
Post reply on HN