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Guess I'm a rationalist now

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Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#901

Post by pixodaros »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #876
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…

> That hasn't defined EA for at least 10 years or so. Meanwhile, on an actual EA website: https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities * Medicine to prevent malaria * Nets to prevent malaria * Supplements to prevent vitamin A deficiency * Cash incentives for routine childhood vaccines

GiveWell is an example of the short-termist end of EA. At the long-termist end people pay their friends to fantasize about Skynet at 'independent research institutes' like MIRI and Apollo Research. At the "trendy way to get rich people to donate" end you get buying a retreat center in Berkley, a stately home in England, and a castle in Czechia so Effective Altruists can relax and network.

Its important to know which type of EA organization you are supporting before you donate, because the movement includes all three.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#902

Post by GuinansEyebrows »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #878
GuinansEyebrows wrote: post #849

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But they treat those issues as if they'll work out in the wash. there's something pathologically, virally sick about wealth accumulation's primary function being the further accumulation of wealth. for a movement rooted in "rationalism," EA seems pretty irrationally focused on excusing antisocial behavior.

> wealth accumulation's primary function being the further accumulation of wealth Then we are lucky that EA promotes giving more to charity as the primary function of accumulation of wealth. > EA seems pretty irrationally focused on excusing antisocial behavior. Is a guy getting a well-paid job at Microsoft and donating half of his salary to African charities really your best example of antisocial behavior?

> Then we are lucky that EA promotes giving more to charity as the primary function of accumulation of wealth.

no, we are not lucky. EA-good-because-charity-good is a brain-pretzel way of lobbying against equitable taxation.

> Is a guy getting a well-paid job at Microsoft and donating half of his salary to African charities really your best example of antisocial behavior?

you're inventing a competitive debate regarding a hypothetical "best example of antisocial behavior". i didn't target anyone specifically with any part of my post.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#903

Post by lechatonnoir »

sanderjd wrote: post #888
lechatonnoir wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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". The type of people that would be embarrassed to not have an opinion on a topic or say "I don't know" edit: my apologies, that was someone else in the thread. I do feel like between the two comments though there is a "damned if you do, damned if you don't". (The original qu…

> "damned if you do, damned if you don't" This is right, but doesn't actually cover all the options. It's damned if you [write confidently about something and] do or don't [hedge with a probability or "epistemic status"]. But the other option, which is the one the vast majority of people choose, is to not write confidently about everything. It's fine, there are far worse sins than writing persuasively about tons of s…

Well, on a meta level, I think their community has decided that in general it's better to post (and subsequently be able to discuss) ideas that one is not yet very confident about, and ideally that's what the "epistemic status" markers are supposed to indicate to the reader.

They can't really be blamed for the fact that others go on to take the ideas more seriously than they intended.

(If anything, I think that at least in person, most rationalists are far less confident and far less persuasive than the typical person in proportion to the amount of knowledge/expertise/effort they have on a given topic, particularly in a professional setting, and they would all be well-served to do at least a normal human amount of "write and explain persuasively rather than as a mechanical report of the facts as you see them".)

(Also, with all communities there will be the more serious and dedicated core of the people, and then those who sort of cargo-cult or who defer much, or at least some, of their thinking to members with more status. This is sort of unavoidable on multiple levels-- for one, it's quite a reasonable thing to do with the amount of information out there, and for another, communities are always comprised of people with varying levels of seriousness, sincere people and grifters, careful thinkers and less careful thinkers, etc. (see mobs-geeks-sociopaths))

(Obviously even with these caveats there are exceptions to this statement, because society is complex and something about propaganda and consequentialism.)

Alternately, I wonder if you think there might be a better way of "writing unconfidently", like, other than not writing at all.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#904

Post by Viliam1234 »

sanderjd wrote: post #886
Veedrac wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please be civil. I genuinely don't understand how you can point to someone's calibration curve where they've broadly done well, and cherry pick the failed predictions they made, and use this not just to claim that they're making bad predictions but that they're slimy about admitting error. What more could you possibly want from someone than a tally of their prediction record graded against the probability they explic…

> Please be civil. lol, what? That was a civil comment. This seems like an excellent example of the point being made. Replying to a perfectly reasonable but critical comment with "please be civil" is super condescending. So is stuff like "one man's modus ponens". Look, we get it, you're talking to people who found this stuff smart and interesting in the past. But we got tired of it. For me, I realized after awhile th…

Scott:

> This isn’t about me being an expert on these topics and getting them exactly right, it’s about me calibrating my ability to tell how much I know about things and how certain I am.

> At least $250 million in damage from BLM protests this year: 30%

Aurornis:

> I forgot about the slightly condescending, lecturing tone that comes out when you disagree with rationalist figureheads.

> Since Scott Alexander comes up a lot, a few randomly selected predictions that didn't come true:

> He predicted at least $250 million in damages from Black Lives Matter protests.

Is this a "perfectly reasonable but critical comment"?

Am I condescending if I say that predicting a 30% chance that something happens means predicting a 70% chance that it won't happen... so the fact that it didn't happen probably shouldn't be used as "gotcha!"?

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#905

Post by Viliam1234 »

bakuninsbart wrote: post #253
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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". Aren't these the people who started the trend of writing things like " epistemic status: mostly speculation " on their blog posts? And writing essays about the dangers of overconfidence? And measuring how often their predictions turn out wrong? And maintaining webpages tit…

Weirdly enough, both can be true. I was tangentially involved in EA in the early days, and have some friends who were more involved. Lots of interesting, really cool stuff going on, but there was always latent insecurity paired with overconfidence and elitism as is typical in young nerd circles. When big money got involved, the tone shifted a lot. One phrase that really stuck with me is "exceptional talent". Everyone…

> they bought mansions for team building

Because they we doing so many workshops that buying a building was cheaper than renting all the time.

You may argue that organizing workshops is wrong (and you might be right about that), but once you choose to do them, it makes sense to choose the cheaper option rather than the more expensive one. That's not rationalist rhetoric, that's just basic economy.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#906

Post by lechatonnoir »

creatonez wrote: post #665
therealdrag0 wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? They give millions of dollars to global humanitarian development funds saving at least 50,000 lives per year. Maybe you’re taking a few kooks who have a controversial lecture somewhere as representing everyone else.

It is true that there were EAs before the conception of "longtermism" that were relatively mundane and actually helping humanity, and not part of a death cult. But those have been shunned from the EA movement for a while now.

I think you're conflating different groups of people pretty severely.

"shunned" in particular is a really strong word, e.g, global health and biosecurity are two of the named categories at the most central EA events:

https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ea-global/events/ea-global...

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#907

Post by twoodfin »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #883
twoodfin wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What creeps me out is that I have no idea of their theory of power: How will they achieve their aims? Maybe they want to do it in a way I’d consider just: By exercising their rights as individuals in their personal domains and effectively airing their arguments in the public sphere to win elections. But my intuition is they think democracy and personal rights of the non-elect are part of the problem to rationalize ar…

Why is "theory of power" a necessary framing? "Theory of power" seems to be only a popular idea in "online left progressive" circles which are based on pop readings of post-structuralist continental philosophy. There's plenty of other schools of thought out there and there have been many criticisms of the idea of "theory of power" altogether. Reading critiques of Hegel is a great starting point for this reading. Whet…

I didn’t mean the term in anything but a colloquial sense: They believe certain outcomes are right and proper. Such outcomes don’t typically manifest themselves out of good intentions. What’s the plan?

When Curtis Yarvin is at least in your orbit, these should not be surprising questions to get.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#908

Post by danans »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #803
jay_kyburz wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think when the GP says "our assumptions about individuals' economic value." they mean half the workforce becoming unemployed because the auto corrector can do it cheaper. That's going to be a swift kick to your economy, no matter how strong.

If the "autocorrector" can do anything that used to be a paid wage/salary "cheaper", this isn't the case of another job being automated away. Either something is grossly wrong in that some are willing to have a stupid machine do that poorly (writing Sports Illustrated articles), or something was always grossly wrong in that we were paying someone to do something that never did matter (paying someone to write SEO spam…

> Either something is grossly wrong in that some are willing to have a stupid machine do that poorly (writing Sports Illustrated articles), or something was always grossly wrong in that we were paying someone to do something that never did matter

I recently had an LLM write a function for me that, for a given RGB color value and another integer n > 1, returned to me a list of n RGB colors equidistantly and sequentially spaced around the color wheel starting at the specified RGB value.

For a given system I'm creating, I might have lots of such tasks. That collection of tasks is something that did matter and took some education and skill to complete well.

In the pre-LLM world - assuming I was too busy to handle all the tasks myself - I would have delegated them to a junior software engineer.

In a post-LLM world, I just ask the LLM to implement tasks like that, and I review the code for correctness.

That seems like a pretty transformational change to me, and not just some kind of "rot" being removed from the process.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#909

Post by notahacker »

noname120 wrote: post #772
notahacker wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The confluence of Bay Area rationalism and academic philosophy means a lot of other EA space is given to discussing hypotheticals in longwinded forum posts, blogs and papers. Some of those are well-trod utilitarian debates, others take it towards uniquely EA arguments like asserting that given that there could be as many as 10^31 future humans, essentially anything which claims to reduce existential risk - no matter…

> that's not the centre of EA debate or culture.... EAs gave $1,886,513,058 through GiveWell[1], and there is 0 AI stuff in there (you can search in the linked Airtable spreadsheet). There is also a whole movement for doing a lifetime commitment to give 10% of your earnings to charity. 9,880 people took the pledge so far[2]. [1] https://airtable.com/appGuFtOIb1eodoBu/shr1EzngorAlEzziP/tbl... [2] https://www.givingwha…

Sure, but I'd say that the philosophical musings of EA's leadership, events, university outreach centres, and official forum were more representative of "the centre of EA debate or culture" than pledge signatories, even though I've got wayyy more time for stuff like the Giving Pledge.

GiveWell continues to plow its own rigorous international development-focused furrow, but it's cofounder, once noted for calling out everyone else for lack of rigour in their evidence base, has moved on to fluffy essays about how this is probably "the most important century" because it's either AI armageddon or maybe his wife's $61B startup will save us all...

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#910

Post by mensetmanusman »

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…

“ There’s no free will and everything is determined.”

Objects without free will aren’t able to come to conclusions like this.

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