Guess I'm a rationalist now • Hacker News Board

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#941

Post by j_timberlake » Sat, Jun 21, 2025, 2:17 AM UTC

habinero wrote: post #706

j_timberlake wrote: post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a perfect example of a Hacker News hot-take, you complain about their attitude while making zero reference to their actual accomplishments or failures. No one will downvote you for posting something factually incorrect, because you didn't post any facts at all. For anyone else reading, a good example of what EAs do can be seen with the GiveWell charity: https://www.givewell.org/top-charities-fund Lots of anti…

A weird cult doing helpful community service doesn't cancel out the harm of them being a cult. If they want to donate to charity, they can just donate. You don't gotta make a religion out of it.

Just like the other guy, you skip the part where you actually name a harm done by them, because then people could easily shoot down your comment. Or name how EAs are a religion, I haven't even seen that troll before.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#942

Post by pjscott » Sat, Jun 21, 2025, 2:24 AM UTC

jrm4 wrote: post #412

jrm4 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, can't stress the word "tool" enough. It's a "tool," it's a not a "magic window into absolute truth." Tools can be good for a job, or bad. Carry on.

looks like I riled up the Rationalists, huh

You stated one of their core doctrines, something they’ve been loudly preaching for as long as they’ve existed, as though it was something they disagree with and had never even considered. Can you blame them for a bit of exasperation? For wanting to simply downvote-and-disengage from someone who makes up falsehoods about them and then gloats about how it annoyed them? Life is too short to tilt at windmills.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#943

Post by skissane » Sat, Jun 21, 2025, 2:35 AM UTC

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 think there is some inherent tension btwn being "rational" about things and trying to reason about things from first principle..

Consider ethical pluralism – by which I mean, there is enormous disagreement among humans as to what is ethical, we can't even agree on what the first principles are. Sure, we all agree on a lot of non-controversial applications – e.g. killing children for sport is gravely evil – but even when we agree on the conclusion, we won't agree on the premises.

Is it any different for theoretical rationality? I don't think so. I think we have the same situation of rational pluralism – sure, we can agree on a lot of non-controversial applications, but we lack agreement on what the first principles are. And when you disagree on the principles, you tend to reach completely opposite conclusions in edge cases.

But at least, with ethical pluralism, a preference utilitarian or a Kantian or a natural law theorist is very open about what their ethical first principles are, and how they differ from those of others. By contrast, the "rationalists" seem to present there as being only one possible rationality, their own.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#944

Post by Blackthorn » Sat, Jun 21, 2025, 3:08 AM UTC

zahlman wrote: post #682

Aurornis wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been a while since I've engaged in rationalist debates, so I forgot about the slightly condescending, lecturing tone that comes out when you disagree with rationalist figureheads. :) You could simply ask "Can you provide examples" instead of the "If you ____ then I suggest ____" form. My point wasn't to nit-pick individual predictions, it was a general explanation of how the game is played. Since Scott Alexander…

> it was a general explanation of how the game is played. You seem to be trying to insinuate that Alexander et. al. are pretending to know how things will turn out and then hiding behind probabilities when they don't turn out that way. This is missing the point completely. The point is that when Alexander assigns an 80% probability to many different outcomes, about 80% of them should occur, and it should not be clear…

> If you make many predictions at 70-80% confidence, as he does, you should expect 20-30% of them not to come true.

Yes that's the point, these people hedge like crazy to the point that they say nothing, they mean nothing, and effectively predict nothing.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#945

Post by pjscott » Sat, Jun 21, 2025, 3:30 AM UTC

mkoubaa wrote: post #250

The problem with rationalism is we don't have language to express our thoughts formally enough nor a compiler to transform that language into something runnable (platonic AST) nor a machine capable of emulating reality. Expecting rational thought to correspond to reality is like expecting a 6 million line program written in a hypothetical programming language invented in the 1700s to run bug free on a turing machine.…

The rationalist movement has been talking about this since the beginning, and has consistently come to the conclusion that of course the thing to do is admit to our own fallibility and try to do the best we can with our profound limitations.

(You didn’t explicitly say otherwise, so if my exasperation is misdirected then you have my apology in advance.)

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#946

Post by ajkjk » Sat, Jun 21, 2025, 3:45 AM UTC

sanderjd wrote: post #893

ajkjk wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a theory of what's happening, both with you here in this comment section and with the rationalists in general. Humans are generally better at perceiving threats than they are at putting those threats into words. When something seems "dangerous" abstractly, they will come up with words for why---but those words don't necessarily reflect the actual threat, because the threat might be hard to describe. Neverthele…

Found the person who doesn't have this skill issue! :) Very well put. I never quite realized the connection between this creepy feeling and the Bleak House criticism of far-flung philanthropy, until this comment.

heh. It would not be an overstatement to say I've been working on better putting the issue with the rationalists into words for ten years. glad it's resonating with some people.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#947

Post by Veedrac » Sat, Jun 21, 2025, 3:48 AM UTC

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…

No. You're not being civil right now. You are lacing your reply with insults.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#948

Post by throwaway314155 » Sat, Jun 21, 2025, 4:01 AM UTC

FeepingCreature wrote: post #855

throwaway314155 wrote: post #779

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I find LLM's just as awe inspiring as you. But you and I both will find them underwhelming eventually. This is the history of the field going all the way back to Turing.

At any rate, my point remains. The flaws inherent to the current deep learning regime _absolutely_ disqualify them as being capable of any sort of rapid takeoff/escalation (a la paperclip optimization) that the rationalist community is likely referring to when they say super intelligence or ASI.

Sorry about the "asimovian" comment - you'd be correct to call it an exaggeration and somewhat toxic.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#949

Post by throwaway314155 » Sat, Jun 21, 2025, 6:04 AM UTC

Viliam1234 wrote: post #923

throwaway314155 wrote: post #775

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The leaked e-mails Curious to read these. Got a source? I've always been very skeptical of Scott "Alexander" after he and his supporters tricked half of reddit into harassing some journalists for "doxxing" him when his identity was public knowledge seemingly because he just really didn't like the takes presented by the journalists. The way he refers to them like it was a hit piece targeting him reeked of conspirato…

> when his identity was public knowledge The details are important here. His identity was "public knowledge" in the sense that regular readers of his blog could sometimes find links to his previous blog, and somewhere on that previous blog he mentioned his name. So many of his long-term readers knew. But in the opposite direction -- if all you knew was Scott's full name, and you did a Google search -- there was no co…

If the stakes were so high he shouldn't have been so careless with using his real name. As a professional psychiatrist it is 100% on him to make sure these situations aren't a possibility and if that isn't possible- it's really not that big of a deal to simply not blog about your deeply unrestrained and potentially offensive opinions about [insert culture war here].

This is not the fault of the nytimes and given the success of his blog, it absolutely would have happened eventually. It is frankly irresponsible on his part. He chose that profession and with it comes certain sacrifices made for the wellbeing of his patients.

Further he went on crazy rants about how the article was a hit piece which is deeply dramatic and maybe even a little egotistical. He's not nearly as important as he thinks - and the nytimes piece covered him in a fairly neutral way from my perspective.

You should read it if you haven't. It's an enlightening piece about the burgeoning semi-conservative movement masquerading as pseudo liberalism amongst so called thought leaders in silicon valley and tech more generally.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#950

Post by aussiethebob » Sat, Jun 21, 2025, 6:05 AM UTC

naasking wrote: post #801

com2kid wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the ends justify the means” which most popular moral philosophies reject with strong arguments. This is a false statement. Our entire modern world is built on the basis of the ends justify the means. Every time money is spent on long term infrastructure vs giving poor kids food right now, every time a war is fought, every time a doctor triages injuries at a disaster.

I don't think it's useful to conflate "the ends justify the means" with "cost-benefit analysis". You sometimes use the latter to justify certain means, but you don't have to , that's why they're different. When you believe that the ends justify the means, you can also just give no consideration at all to the ethics of the means. No doctor triaging patients would ever shoot a patient in the head so he could move onto…

In the framework of modern civilian medicine sure.

I'm sure exactly what you described was done plenty of times in ww1 and similar around that era, and seen as perfectly moral and rational.