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Guess I'm a rationalist now

scottaaronson.blog

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Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#831

Post by ajkjk »

skinnymuch wrote: post #714
ajkjk wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Thank you) I agree, although I do think that the rationalists and EAs are way better than most of the other narrowband groups, as you call them, out there, such as the Metaverse or Crypto people. The rationalists are at least mostly legitimately motivated by morality and not just by a "blow it all up and replace it with something we control" philosophy (which I have come to believe is the belief-set that only a pers…

They aren’t motivated by morality. They just are more moral relative to the niches you referred to. Any group that focuses on their own goals of high paying jobs regardless of the morality of those jobs or how they contribute to the structural issues of society is not that good. Then donating money while otherwise being okay with the status quo —- not touching anything systemic in such an unjust world but supposedly…

I see it as moral action with a skill issue, which is how I see a lot of bad things in the world. People are very good at missing the forest for the trees.

In their defense they do try to do the calculations: is a high-paying job okay on net if you give most of the money away? depends on the job; depends on if somebody else would have it if you didn't; etc. Not that there is a rigorous way to do them but it's very much a group that does try.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#832

Post by TheAncientGeek »

stickfigure wrote: post #385
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…

> They don't really ever show a sense of "hey, I've got a thought, maybe I haven't considered all angles to it, maybe I'm wrong - but here it is". Have you ever read Scott Alexander's blog (Slate Star Codex, now Astral Codex X)? It's full of doubt and self-questioning. The guy even keeps a public list of his mistakes: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mistakes I'll admit my only touchpoint to the "rationalist communit…

Well, you can get it from LessWrong and , even mire, Yudkowsky. Rationalism has overall and orthodox wings

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#833

Post by TheAncientGeek »

gilleain wrote: post #120
js8 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not be so sure. There are many fields where reductionism was applied in practice and it yielded useful results, thanks to computers. Examples that come to mind: statistical modelling (reduction to nonparametric models), protein folding (reduction to quantum chemistry), climate/weather prediction (reduction to fluid physics), human language translation (reduction to neural networks). Reductionism is not that u…

> protein folding (reduction to quantum chemistry), I am not sure in what sense folding simulations are reducable to quantum chemistry. There are interesting 'hybrid' approaches where some (limited) quantum calculations are done for a small part of the structure - usually the active site I suppose - and the rest is done using more standard molecular mechanics/molecular dynamics approaches. Perhaps things have progres…

That's a practical limitation. There's no barrier in principle to a complete reduction.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#834

Post by adastra22 »

naasking wrote: post #799
adastra22 wrote: post #726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is what some EAs believe, I don't think there was ever a broad consensus on those latter claims. As such, it doesn't seem like a fair criticism of EA.

You can’t paint a broad brush of a whole movement, but it’s true if the leadership of the EA organization. Once they went all-in on “AI x-risk”, there ceased being a meaningful difference between them and the fringe of the LW ratsphere.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#835

Post by nancyminusone »

bell-cot wrote: post #644
PaulHoule wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EA always rubbed me the wrong way. (1) The kind of Gatesian solutions they like to fund like mosquito nets are part of the problem, not part of the solution as I see it. If things are going to get better in Africa, it will be because Africans grow their economy and pay taxes and their governments can provide the services that they want. Expecting NGOs to do everything for them is the same kind of neoliberal thinking…

> When it comes to the nuclear waste issue, for instance ... Nuclear waste issues are 99.9% present-day political/ideological. Huge portions of the Earth are uninhabitable due to climate and/or geology. Lead, mercury, arsenic, and other naturally-occurring poisons contaminate large areas. Volcanoes spew CO2 and toxic gasses by the megaton. Vs. when is the last time you heard someone get excited over toxic waste left…

>when is the last time you heard someone get excited over toxic waste left behind by the Roman Empire?

For archeologists, pretty much every time.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#836

Post by PaulHoule »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #789
bell-cot wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When it comes to the nuclear waste issue, for instance ... Nuclear waste issues are 99.9% present-day political/ideological. Huge portions of the Earth are uninhabitable due to climate and/or geology. Lead, mercury, arsenic, and other naturally-occurring poisons contaminate large areas. Volcanoes spew CO2 and toxic gasses by the megaton. Vs. when is the last time you heard someone get excited over toxic waste left…

I agree with your lead (the issue is 99% political) but man does that last bit demand a rebuttal. Waste left behind by the roman empire isn't even remotely comparable to long term radioactive material. I suggest having a look through the wikipedia list of orphan source incidents to get an idea of what happens when people unknowingly come across radioactive material. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source…

I think of the widespread heavy metal contamination in China which existed even before the modern age of manufacturing. Some might be naturally occurring but you had people like this guy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mausoleum_of_Qin_Shi_Huang

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#837

Post by dtj1123 »

lisper wrote: post #499
dasil003 wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intelligence and rational thought is useful, but like any strategy it has its tradeoffs and limitations. No amount of intelligence can overcome the chaos of long time horizons, especially when we're talking about human civilization. IMHO it's reasonable to pick a long-term problem/risk and focus on solving it. But it's pure hubris to think rationality will give you anything approaching high confidence of what the big…

I think one can levy a much more specific critique of rationalism: rationalism is in some sense self-defeating. If you are rational you will necessarily conclude that the fundamental dynamic that drives the (interesting parts of) the universe is Darwinian evolution, which is not rational. It blindly selects for reproductive fitness at the expense of all else. If you are a gene, you can probably produce more offspring…

An issue with this line of reasoning is that Darwinian evolution fails to accurately describe real evolutionary processes.

A counterexample is meiotic drive, where alleles disrupt the meiotic process in order to favour their own transmission, even if the alleles in question ultimately produce a less fit organism.

Whilst this is not an inherently positive observation, I think it does illustrate that the fatalistic picture you're painting here is incorrect. There's room for tentative optimism.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#838

Post by TheAncientGeek »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #118
loose-cannon wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a really hard belief to justify. And what implications would that position have? Should biologists give up?

I think that chemistry, physics, and mathematics, are engaged in a program of understanding their subject in terms of the sort of first principles that Descartes was after. Reduction of the subject to a set of simpler thoughts that are outside of it. Biologists stand out because they have already given up on that idea. They may still seek to simplify complex things by refining principles of some kind, but it's a "wha…

Several different definitions are being bandied about. If you think of reduction as understanding a material system in terms of its components, biology is now reductionist, having abandoned vitalism.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#839

Post by fanwood »

jandrese wrote: post #237
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…

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…

Absolutely agree. The whole movement is unbearably naive

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#840

Post by TheAncientGeek »

kurtis_reed wrote: post #134
baxtr wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My main problem with the movement is their emphasis on Bayesianism in conjunction with an almost total neglect of Popperian epistemology. In my opinion, there can’t be a meaningful distinction made between rational and irrational without Popper. Popper injects an epistemic humility that Bayesianism, taken alone, can miss. I think that aligns well with your observation.

So what's the difference between Bayesianism and Popperian epistemology?

.

Popperians claim that positive justification is impossible.

Popperians claim.Induction doesn't exist (or at least , matter in science)

Popper was prepared to consider the existence of Propensities objective.probabilities, whereas Bayesians, particularly those who follow Jaynes believe in determinism and subjective probability.

Popperian refutation is all or nothing, whereas Bayesian negative information is gradual.

In Popperism, there can be more than one front running or most favoured theory, even after the falsifiable ones have been falsified, since there aren't quantifiable degrees of confirmation.

For Popper and Deutsch, theories need to be explanatory, not just predictive. Bayesian confirmation and disconfirmation only target prediction directly -- if they are achieving explanation or ontological correspondence , that would be the result of a convenient coincidence.

For Popperians, the construction of good theoretical conjectures is as important as testing them. Bayesian seem quite uninterested in where hypotheses come from.

For Deutschians, being hard-to-vary is the preferred principle of parsimony. For Yudkuwsians, it's computation complexity.

Error correction as something you actually do. Popperians like to put forward hypotheses that are easy to refute. Bayesians approve theoretically of "updating", but dislike objections and criticisms in practice.

(Long term) prediction is basically impossible . More Deutsch than Popper -- DD believed that the growth and unpredictability of knowledge . The creation of knowledge is so unpredictable and radical that long term predictions cannot be made. Often summarised to "prediction is impossible". Of course , Bayesians are all about prediction --but the predictive power of Ates tends only to be demonstrated in you models, where the ontology isn't changing under your feet. Their AI I predictions are explicitly intuition based.

Optimism versus Doom. Deutsch is highly optimistic that continuing knowledge creation will change the world for the better (a kind of moral realism is a component of this). Yudkowsky thinks advanced AI is our last invention and will kill us all.*

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