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Guess I'm a rationalist now

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Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#851

Post by naasking »

adastra22 wrote: post #834
naasking wrote: post #799

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which organization?

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/f6kg8T2Lp6rDqxWwG/...

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#853

Post by lisper »

dtj1123 wrote: post #837
lisper wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pic…

> Darwinian evolution fails to accurately describe real evolutionary processes.

That is not correct. Darwin did make a mistake, but it was not the fundamental dynamics of the process, but that he chose the wrong unit of selection. Darwin thought that selection selected for individuals or species when in fact it selects for genes. Richard Dawkins is the person who figured this out, but Darwin knew nothing about genes (OoS was published only three years after Gregor Mendel's work) so he still gets the credit nothwithsanding this mistake.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#854

Post by lisper »

Rastonbury wrote: post #824
lisper wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Couple of point to that, mainly why should one have to follow darwinian evolution just because we are a product of that. It's similar to the natural law argument against homosexuality, that unnatural sex is wrong. The argument against that is natural biology does not inform what is good or what we should do. I'm sure you would be able to predict what a rationalise will say when you ask them what future they prefer: o…

> why should one have to follow darwinian evolution

That depends on what you mean by "follow". You have to "follow" Darwinian evolution for the same reason you have to "follow", say, the law of gravity. That doesn't mean you can't build airplanes and spacecraft, but you still have to acknowledge and "follow" the law of gravity. You can't just glue feathers to your arms, jump off a cliff, and hope for the best. (Actually, rationalists aren't even gluing feathers to their arms. They are doing the equivalent of jumping off a cliff because they just don't believe gravity applies to them.)

[UPDATE]

> unnatural sex is wrong

The problem with that argument is that homosexuality is not unnatural. Many, many species have homosexual relations. Accounting for this is a little bit challenging, but the fact is undeniable.

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

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#855

Post by FeepingCreature »

throwaway314155 wrote: post #779
FeepingCreature wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twenty years or so ago, Eliezer Yudkowsky, a former proto-accelerationalist, realized that superintelligence was probably coming, was deeply unsafe, and that we should do something about that. Because he had a very hard time convincing people of this to him obvious fact, he first wrote a very good blog about human reason, philosophy and AI, in order to fix whatever was going wrong in people's heads that caused them t…

I don't know - the level of seriousness they discuss w.r.t. alignment issues just seem so out of touch with the realities of large language models and the notion of a super intelligence being "closer than ever" gives way too much credit to the capabilities (or lack there of) of LLM's. A lot of it seems rooted in Asimov-inspired, stimulant-fueled philosophizing than any kind of empirical or grounded observations.

The ability of humans to get used to progress is amazing to me. We have a computer system that you can describe, in conversational English, the requirements for a program, including style, conventions and programming language, and this system will then synthesize this program from thin air, even if it's a novel idea with novel requirements, it will autonomously test it, make improvements and take your feedback into account. It will do this using a vast (if imperfect) knowledge of programming frameworks, far outstripping in breadth any individual human programmer.

And knowing this, you think that the only reason we could have to expect to create intelligence in a machine, even surpassing a human... is "Asimov-inspired, stimulant-fueled philosophizing"? That seems deeply unserious to me.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#856

Post by lisper »

imtringued wrote: post #749
lisper wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You got Darwinism exactly backwards. Darwinism and nature do not select like an algorithm. There is no cost function in reality and no population selection and reproduction algorithm. What you're seeing is the illusion of selection due to selection bias. If gender equality and intellectual achievement don't produce children, then that isn't "darwinism selecting rationality out". You can't expect the continued existen…

> no population selection and reproduction algorithm

I never said there was. Darwin said it because he didn't know anything about genes, but that mistake was corrected by Dawkins.

> If gender equality and intellectual achievement don't produce children, then that isn't "darwinism selecting rationality out".

Why not?

> The people who believe in gender equality and intellectual achievement made the decision to not want more of themselves

That's the wrong way to look at it. Individuals are not the unit of reproduction. Genes are. Genes that build brains that want to have (and raise) children are more likely to propagate than genes that build brains that don't, all else being equial. So it is not rationality per se that is the problem -- rationality can provide a reproductive advantage because it lets you, for example, build technology. The problem is that non-rational brains can parasitically benefit from the phenotype of rational brains, at least for a while. But in the long run this is not a stable equilibrium.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#857

Post by jvvw »

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…

I wonder if there is also a problem where if you are too 'rational' then it's easy to dismiss other people's emotions as invalid - you see them as cognitive biases and look down on people who want to listen to or express those emotions in some way. Not all rationalists do this of course, but I think it's an easy trap to fall into and perhaps tolerated in the rationalist community in a way that it might not be elsewhere.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#858

Post by dmbche »

mettamage wrote: post #514
lisper wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Look into Chaos Theory - the universe is not deterministic, you're good.

Or for a tldr look for the three body problem or try to find a solution to a double pendulum!

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#859

Post by lisper »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #760
lisper wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Darwinism isn't a weakness of rationality, teleology has fine tuning problem, while darwinism is minimally fine tuned to work from scratch, which can be said to be optimal. Also darwinism doesn't select for reproductive fitness, it's only a proxy goal; true goal is survival, so you can produce more offspring only in a way compatible with true goal.

> Darwinism isn't a weakness of rationality

I didn't say it was. I said that the Rationalist community is not taking the implications of Darwinism into account when they choose where to focus their attention. This is what leads them to fixate on hostile AI and the MWI when what they should be worried about is the rise of MAGA. But not only is that not what they are worried about, many self-styled Rationalists are Trump supporters.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#860

Post by lisper »

naasking wrote: post #797
lisper wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If you are a gene, you can probably produce more offspring in an already-industrialized environment by making brains that lean more towards misogyny and sexual promiscuity than gender equality and intellectual achievement. The fact that humans are intelligent at all and Enlightenment peoples currently dominate the world suggests otherwise.

> Enlightenment peoples currently dominate the world

Huh??? How do you figure? AFAICT the world is dominated by Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin (if you reckon by power) or Christians and Muslims (if you reckon by population). None of these individuals or groups can be properly categorized as "Enlightenment peoples", certainly not with a capital E.

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

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