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Guess I'm a rationalist now

scottaaronson.blog

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Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#861

Post by gammarator »

troyastorino wrote: post #276
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…

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…

It seems self-evident to me that epistemic humility _requires_ temporal discounting. We should not be confident we can predict the future well enough to integrate utility centuries forward.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#862

Post by naasking »

PaulHoule wrote: post #623
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…

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…

> 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

The problem with this argument is that the path to achieve this is unclear, and everyone who has tried has failed. In the absence of a clear path, it seems rational to set aside lofty ideals and do whatever good you can now.

> If you are looking for low-probability events to worry about I think you could find a lot of them.

Name one that hasn't already been considered that would be a serious threat to modern technological civilization.

> Although it is run by people who say they are militant atheists, the movement has all the trappings of a religion

Supposing you're correct this thought is incomplete. Take it to its logical conclusion: a religion centered around open rational debate is bad because...?

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#863

Post by [deleted] »

t_mann wrote: post #24

> “You’re [X]?! The quantum physicist who’s always getting into arguments on the Internet, and who’s essentially always right, but who sustains an unreasonable amount of psychic damage in the process?” > “Yes,” I replied, not bothering to correct the “physicist” part. Didn't read much beyond that part. He'll fit right in with the rationalist crowd...

[deleted]

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#864

Post by [deleted] »

PoignardAzur wrote: post #546

As someone who likes both the Rationalist community and the Rust community, it's fascinating to see the parallels in how the Hacker News crowd treats both. The contempt, the general lack of curiosity and the violence of the bold sweeping statements people will make here are mind-boggling.

[deleted]

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#865

Post by thornewolf »

lasersail wrote: post #537

I was at Lighthaven that week. The weekend-long LessOnline event Scott references opened what LightHaven termed "Festival Season", with a summer camp organised for the following 5 week days, and a prediction market & forecasting conference called Manifest the following weekend. I didn't attend LessOnline since I'm not active on LessWrong nor identify as a rationalist - but I did attended a GPU programming course in t…

I attended Manifest to meet some rationalists. I consider myself a post-rat. I also heard some comments that Manifest was less Rationalist-y than LessOnline but w/o the additional commentary on "dummies" (not meant to imply you didn't hear it).

I did find some rationalists too far down their "epistemological rabbit hole" to successfully unwind in one or two conversations but nevertheless many clever people. I still need some time to make post-rats out of them, though.

Affirming that it was a positive experience. I'm glad to have attended.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#866

Post by naasking »

lisper wrote: post #860
naasking wrote: post #797

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Western nations have dominated the world for centuries, in science, technology and cultural dominance. Russia is a bit player and has been for some time. Even if China were to ascend to equal prominence as the US, it would be an outlier in an otherwise clear trend.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#867

Post by thornewolf »

khazhoux wrote: post #579

I would love a link to anything that could convince me the Rationalist community isn't just a bunch of hoo-haw. I read the first third of HPMOR. I stopped because I found the writing poor, but more importantly, it didn't "open my mind" to any higher-order way of rationalist thinking. My takeaway was "Yup, the original HP story was full of inconsistencies and stupidities, and you get a different story if the character…

Self-help books are useful, not because they have "mind-shattering ideas", but because they collect a lot of self-consistent and reasonably coherent advice into the same place.

In this same way, the rationalist knowledge seeking strategies are not "mind-shattering" but simply reasonable. It presents a set of rules to follow to be more effective in the world around you.

The parts of rationalism that stretch past the half page of notes mainly concern all the downstream conclusions that pop up from this reasonable set of epistemological rules.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#868

Post by tptacek »

comp_throw7 wrote: post #747
tptacek wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hyperfixated on the idea that they're angry at Metz for "outing" Scott Alexander, who published some of his best-known posts under his own name.

Your persistent refusal to acknowledge that Scott did not want to go from a world where his patients Googling his real name did _not_ immediately lead to his blog, to a world where it _did_ immediately lead to his blog, and that was his primary (and valid) objection to having his real first and last name put into print, is baffling.

My response to that is: it's good to want things. He doesn't get to ask the world to forget his name. I actually talked to therapists when this whole story broke out, and none of them said this "patients must not be able to Google your blog" thing was an actual thing. People just believe it because they like Scott Alexander and believe whatever he tells them.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#869

Post by gammarator »

Certhas wrote: post #367
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fair point. Speaking only for myself, I think I fail to understand why it's important to situate philosophical discussions in the context of all the previous philosophers who have expressed related ideas, rather than simply discussing the ideas in isolation. I remember as a child coming to the same "if reality is a deception, at least I must exist to be deceived" conclusion that Descartes did, well before I…

It really depends on why you are having a philosophical discussion. If you are talking among friends, or just because you want to throw interesting ideas around, sure! Be free, have fun. I come from a physics background. We used to (and still) have a ton of physicists who decide to dable in a new field, secure in their knowledge that they are smarter than the people doing it, and that anything worthwhile that has alr…

Also http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21 (I am a physicist myself)

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#870

Post by ajkjk »

ta988 wrote: post #498
jandrese wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, but this way of thinking is the domain of comic book supervillains. "I must destroy the world in order to save it." Morality is only holding me back from maximizing the value of the human race 1,000 or 1,000,000 years from now type nonsense. This sort of reasoning sounds great from 1000 feet up, but the longer you do it the closer you get to "I need to kill nearly all current humans to eliminate genetic d…

but it will also contain infinite love.

the correct answer is probably that it could contain infinite of any of these things, but you don't know which one it's going to be a priori, and you get one shot to be right.
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