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Guess I'm a rationalist now

scottaaronson.blog

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Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#951

Post by comp_throw7 »

sanderjd wrote: post #891
comp_throw7 wrote: post #736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a deeply confused criticism of rationalists, who are possibly the only meaningful social group in existence to celebrate changing their minds in response to new evidence.

It's truly fascinating how this thread is full of demonstrations of the exact phenomenon being discussed! Accused of being unable to reexamine your base principles, you respond: > rationalists, who are possibly the only meaningful social group in existence to celebrate changing their minds in response to new evidence Which is exactly the kind of base principle that could use some reexamination.

That's an empirical claim, not a "base principle" (whatever that is). And, uh, yeah, I agree that I am not re-examining my beliefs in response to a bunch of random unsupported accusations by people who are demonstrably not familiar with the thing they're attacking. You should update your beliefs in response to evidence, not in response to social attacks.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#952

Post by comp_throw7 »

tptacek wrote: post #868
comp_throw7 wrote: post #747

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> My response to that is: it's good to want things. He doesn't get to ask the world to forget his name.

Is this anything other than a naked assertion of force, that might makes right? He couldn't stop it, therefore it's fine that it happened to him? (Also, it's extremely... something... to describe "he asked a journalist to not print his name on the front page of the NYT" as "asking the world to forget his name", as if his real name was already the primary referrent by which he wielded his influence, and he wanted to shield that power from scrutiny. This was obviously not the case, and is _still_ not the case despite the article, which is why nobody has actually made a compelling argument for why including his name in the article was _good_ rather than _something Cade Metz had the power to do_. I in fact don't particularly think that Cade Metz did it to deliberately hurt Scott, I just think he's a blankface who didn't care that his usual modus operandi would sometimes hurt people for no good reason and was unable to step out of his frame enough to actually check whether what he was doing made any sense, in that instance.)

> 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.

That you describe it as "patients must not be able to Google your blog" makes me not particularly trust the reports of those therapists. I, too, talked to some therapists, who thought that Scott's concerns were reasonable. Not that there was an overriding professional duty, sure, but that wasn't the claim, either. I dunno, man. The attitude you have towards this really seems like, "well, getting slapped isn't that bad, and you're not strong enough to stop him... maybe stop complaining?" What good thing happened when Cade Metz put his name in print? If you want to adopt a principled stance against pseudonymous writing online, do that. But don't pretend that Scott's failure to keep a pristine separation between his real name and his entire history of online writing somehow makes it so that the NYT printing his name is merely the maintaining the status quo ("ask the world to forget his name"), rather than dramatically expanding the circle of people for whom his identity was deanonymized.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#953

Post by fc417fc802 »

bell-cot wrote: post #844
fc417fc802 wrote: post #789

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your lead (the issue is 99% political) but man does that last bit demand a rebuttal. Waste left behind by the roman empire isn't even remotely comparable to long term radioactive material. I suggest having a look through the wikipedia list of orphan source incidents to get an idea of what happens when people unknowingly come across radioactive material. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source…

That's an interesting list - but the injury & death rates are several orders of magnitude below even lightning strikes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_injury#Epidemiology Also, PaulHoule's original comment said "in 20,000 years". Cobalt 60 (for example) has a half-life of 5 1/4 years - so there really won't be any of it left by then.

What's the rate conditioned on being near an incident though? And these are small, isolated incidents. How does what we see extrapolate to large scale nuclear waste storage, a state that failed a few hundred years ago, and someone inadvertently digging it up?

No one is talking about stuffing cobalt 60 in yucca mountain (at least as far as I know).

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#954

Post by Ancapistani »

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…

> 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 considered all angles to it, maybe I'm wrong - but here it is".

I’m not super familiar with this community in particular, but is it possible that it’s small/homogenous enough that participants feel comfortable “unmasking” aroudn one another? If so, then those seemingly-confident assertions may be seen by the in-group as implicitly tentative.

The Python community used to be like that. I’d say it peaked around 2014, at which point it became politically fractured.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#955

Post by Viliam1234 »

pixodaros wrote: post #901
Viliam1234 wrote: post #876

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I assume that GiveWell is the most popular of them. I mean, if you donate to MIRI, it is because you know about MIRI and because you specifically believe in their cause. But if you are just "hey, I have some money I want to donate, show me a list of effective charities", then GiveWell is that list.

(And I assume that GiveWell top charities receive orders of magnitude more money, but I haven't actually checked the numbers.)

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#956

Post by Viliam1234 »

GuinansEyebrows wrote: post #902
Viliam1234 wrote: post #878

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 regardi…

Well, I base my opinion about EA on specific people I happen to know, such as https://www.jefftk.com/news/ea , but of course that shouldn't stop anyone from making up edgy interpretations and posting them as a fact. Because what is the point of discussing actual effective altruists when imaginary villains are a much more interesting topic.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#957

Post by TheAncientGeek »

TheAncientGeek wrote: post #832
stickfigure wrote: post #385

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". Have you ever read Scott Alexander's blog (Slate Star Codex, now Astral Codex X)? It's full of doubt and self-questioning. The guy even keeps a public list of his mistakes: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mistakes I'll admit my only touchpoint to the "rationalist communit…

Well, you can get it from LessWrong and , even mire, Yudkowsky. Rationalism has overall and orthodox wings

Liberal and orthodox.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#958

Post by TheAncientGeek »

lisper wrote: post #499
dasil003 wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intelligence and rational thought is useful, but like any strategy it has its tradeoffs and limitations. No amount of intelligence can overcome the chaos of long time horizons, especially when we're talking about human civilization. IMHO it's reasonable to pick a long-term problem/risk and focus on solving it. But it's pure hubris to think rationality will give you anything approaching high confidence of what the big…

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…

But rationalism , if the modern sort, isn't supposed to be descriptive, it's supposed to be normative -- rationality lets you win.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#959

Post by Viliam1234 »

throwaway314155 wrote: post #949
Viliam1234 wrote: post #923

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> the nytimes piece covered him in a fairly neutral way from my perspective.

Really? I have read the article, and I basically agree with https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/statement-on-new-york-times... and https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=5310

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