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Scott Alexander's correction on ivermectin and its meaning for the rationalists

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Re: Scott Alexander's correction on ivermectin and its meaning for the rationalists

#91

Post by kaba0 »

toolz wrote: post #5
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #2

The "rationalist community" is morbidly fascinating in their tendency to be so self-important while also having a deficit of self-awareness. The author of this piece can't understand why an internet-famous blogger/Substack writer that he follows doesn't have time to drop everything and debate the minutia of a blog post he wrong last year on a topic that has long since been settled. Note that Scott did listen to him,…

Quoted post unavailable.

How can some people die on this hill? Like, seriously, the only positive effect it had was strangely enough in regions with significant worm infections. Significant positive effect is not hard to show, if there were any.

Re: Scott Alexander's correction on ivermectin and its meaning for the rationalists

#92

Post by native_samples »

marvin wrote: post #85
adamrezich wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's not complicated: people don't like heresy. notice how there are zero comments on this page that deal with the substance of the article in question, instead choosing to find various surface-level reasons unrelated to the findings in the article as cause to internally dismiss it. if the content of the article was not heresy and instead came from some trusted scientific authority, this would not be the case.

Yes. I would have written exactly what you did here, but then I’d probably have to fend off the comments you are referring to. So I worded it more diplomatically, or ambiguously. Shame; it’s interesting to get challenged. At least I got to read it before it got flushed.

Tip: if you go to https://news.ycombinator.com/active instead of the front page you can see stories that were flagged. This is how I read HN because the number of interesting, relevant and useful stories that get flagged for ideological reasons is just far too high. This one being a good case in point. It's a pattern: there's a group of people who will reliably flag any article demonstrating that official COVID science is wrong. Doesn't matter what it's about - if it contradicts official narratives then it's probably going to disappear within an hour or two.

One might think a site dedicated to intellectual curiousity would be interested in stories like that, or that at least flagging such stories would be penalized, but no.

Re: Scott Alexander's correction on ivermectin and its meaning for the rationalists

#93

Post by pasabagi »

feoren wrote: post #72
pasabagi wrote: post #6

I guess 'rationalism', as a name, calls a certain kind of person out of the ether: 1. They like rationality, and feel it's opposed by 'irrationality'. 2. They want to be part of some 'rational group'. 3. They're ignorant enough not to know the name is already taken. 4. They're ignorant enough not to know that the name means pretty much the opposite of what they believe. (A real rationalist, for instance, probably wou…

Yay gatekeeping! And look at all these idiots using the word "computer" to mean an electronic computation device! They must be super ignorant to not realize the word was already taken to mean human beings who perform computations as their job! I would like to be more rational in my thoughts and decisions. I would like it if others were as well. I find that reading articles by so-called "rationalists", and reading deb…

Rationalism != Rational. Putting an ism on the end of the word makes it a new word. Also, computation is still used in the sense you described.

PS: I'm not sure if it's gatekeeping to expect people who are interested in something to know a word you would learn in the first hour(s?) of learning about it. But if so, I am fully behind it.

Re: Scott Alexander's correction on ivermectin and its meaning for the rationalists

#94

Post by pasabagi »

Isinlor wrote: post #75
pasabagi wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rationalism is an important term in exactly the field they are supposed to be interested in. And they're using it in more or less the opposite of its conventional sense. I guess it could be just really perverse usage, but I figure it's more like 'objectivism', or 'scientology', words that sound big and impressive to people who are either dumb, or just not very well informed. You can't really change a term like ration…

The meaning of the word can change and it will change sooner or later, in Anglo-sphere or somewhere else. Historically, the meaning of "rationalism" changed both trough time and cultures. The way "rationalism" is being used by the lesswrong crowd is currently accepted for example by Polish dictionaries: Rationalism ( https://sjp.pwn.pl/sjp/racjonalizm;2573228.html ): 3. "a position requiring the observance of restric…

I guess contemporary history of philosophy is kind of a modern product, so it makes sense that it might have been used in a different way back in the day. A lot of historical rationalists considered themselves empiricists, and vice versa. It's also not a term contemporary to like, Descartes (iirc).

I think the current meaning of rationalism (as opposed to empiricism) is vastly more useful than it as yet another 'good-ism', but you're probably right, words can change. It's still stupid that they didn't bother googling the term before calling themselves it.

Re: Scott Alexander's correction on ivermectin and its meaning for the rationalists

#95

Post by marvin »

native_samples wrote: post #92
marvin wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I would have written exactly what you did here, but then I’d probably have to fend off the comments you are referring to. So I worded it more diplomatically, or ambiguously. Shame; it’s interesting to get challenged. At least I got to read it before it got flushed.

Tip: if you go to https://news.ycombinator.com/active instead of the front page you can see stories that were flagged. This is how I read HN because the number of interesting, relevant and useful stories that get flagged for ideological reasons is just far too high. This one being a good case in point. It's a pattern: there's a group of people who will reliably flag any article demonstrating that official COVID scien…

Thanks. That's a good idea. I already have showdead activated, so I can at least track them down when they disappear.

Wonder if this phenomenon is discussed with dang et al. I am very motivated to find the truth whereever the search takes me, so encountering this kind of collectivist censorship is very frustrating.

Re: Scott Alexander's correction on ivermectin and its meaning for the rationalists

#96

Post by topgun77 »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #52
adamrezich wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why? what am I missing?

In style and content it max-es out on the "I am very smart" scale. So-called rationalists will comb through comments they see as oppositional and accuse them as being emotional as a way to "win" the "argument". It's funny that in the thread about rationalism someone posted a comment that checks off all the boxes. It's really well done.

All I’m saying is to substantiate your claims. That’s it.

Re: Scott Alexander's correction on ivermectin and its meaning for the rationalists

#97

Post by heavyset_go »

dekhn wrote: post #70
heavyset_go wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Regardless, this seems like a silly diatribe after the medical community has already investigated the Ivermectin idea to great lengths and at massive scale and concluded that any effects it might have are too small to be worth pursuing. It's weird to see someone writing volumes about re-litigating last years' amateur scientist social media battles. Many rationalists are driven by contrarianism and are the living em…

I used to think of myself as a rationalist, but after being wrong a few times in some passionate internet arguments I began to think about what it would mean to truly be a rationalist, and given my understanding of the fallibility of the human brain (evidenced by reproduced/reliable psychological studies), the best way to be rational would be to assume that I myself am not 100% rational (in the same sense that nobody…

I was once attracted to it, and to EA, because of the surface-level values. It seemed like a community that wanted to acknowledge their own biases and work past them, yet in practice, it is a community that uses intellectualism as an aesthetic to confirm their preconceived biases. In its malignant form, you have LW and adjacent communities engaging in scientific racism revival. In the less malignant form, you have people working backwards and pretending that the conclusions they came to were "objective" because of the flowery Bayesian language they dressed their thought experiments in, as if they're constantly doing complex Bayesian inference in their heads. In the end, what was striking, to me, was the lack of humility you'd expect from those who agreed with the LW premise.

Similarly with EA, I liked the idea of optimizing charity for the most good, but in practice, the community seems to have no problem dedicating a ton of money, time and effort to MIRI and adjacent groups and people, because they've managed to use their intellectual aesthetics to spook themselves into believing that science fiction is reality. As a result, very real problems people experience today are discounted in favor of whatever scary future AI meme is spooking the community this month.

It's really kind of funny when you think about it, it's just a shame that they suck up so much oxygen in the room.

Re: Scott Alexander's correction on ivermectin and its meaning for the rationalists

#98

Post by sinity »

robonerd wrote: post #56
reducesuffering wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what rationalists like to refer to as a strawman. Show me any example of one claiming to eventually be without err or irrationality. The claims are simply that most people have many implicit biases and illogical means, and that there are some ways of bettering your thinking methods.

> Show me any example of one claiming to eventually be without err or irrationality. Interact with them long enough and you'll come across a whole lot who act like it. What do you even think I'm strawmanning? That comment is a defense of Scott Alexander and rationalists generally.

I thought you meant to imply that rationalists believe they're perfectly rational. Lots of people do so.

Re: Scott Alexander's correction on ivermectin and its meaning for the rationalists

#99

Post by sinity »

pasabagi wrote: post #6

I guess 'rationalism', as a name, calls a certain kind of person out of the ether: 1. They like rationality, and feel it's opposed by 'irrationality'. 2. They want to be part of some 'rational group'. 3. They're ignorant enough not to know the name is already taken. 4. They're ignorant enough not to know that the name means pretty much the opposite of what they believe. (A real rationalist, for instance, probably wou…

> 3. They're ignorant enough not to know the name is already taken.

Overloads are a thing, you know?

> 4. They're ignorant enough not to know that the name means pretty much the opposite of what they believe.

String of characters doesn't mean anything by itself, it can point to meaning (or several).

> 5. They're ignorant enough not to know that 'rational' and 'irrational' are usually demarcate lines of social hierarchy, not lines of theoretical commitment.

By whom, and why is their use of the word supposed to be the default?

> I think the main thing that's nice about it is that no real work is called for.

Lol no. You might want to look back at your comment. Specifically, "I guess". You've done a lot of judging, without doing a shred of work to verify whether your insults are true.

"They're ignorant enough", repeated several times, despite utter ignorance about people you're talking about.

Anyway. "Rationalist" is aspirational, not a claim of one's own rationality.

Sure, this naming kinda sucks because it's unclear.

Re: Scott Alexander's correction on ivermectin and its meaning for the rationalists

#100

Post by pasabagi »

sinity wrote: post #99
pasabagi wrote: post #6

I guess 'rationalism', as a name, calls a certain kind of person out of the ether: 1. They like rationality, and feel it's opposed by 'irrationality'. 2. They want to be part of some 'rational group'. 3. They're ignorant enough not to know the name is already taken. 4. They're ignorant enough not to know that the name means pretty much the opposite of what they believe. (A real rationalist, for instance, probably wou…

> 3. They're ignorant enough not to know the name is already taken. Overloads are a thing, you know? > 4. They're ignorant enough not to know that the name means pretty much the opposite of what they believe. String of characters doesn't mean anything by itself, it can point to meaning (or several). > 5. They're ignorant enough not to know that 'rational' and 'irrational' are usually demarcate lines of social hierarc…

Lets say you want to contribute to military theory, you feel like you have some good ideas, but you think tactics means the broad goals you mean to obtain with your 'strategy', which is your low-level techniques you used to achieve these goals. How seriously do you think people in military circles would take you? How seriously do you think they should take you?

That's what the rationalist thing is, more or less. I think you can probably argue that the military guys should take you seriously because you have lots of clever ideas, but you can probably also understand it's kinda ridiculous and bonkers.

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