Guess I'm a rationalist now • Hacker News Board

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#961

Post by sanderjd » Sat, Jun 21, 2025, 1:49 PM UTC

comp_throw7 wrote: post #951

sanderjd wrote: post #891

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Again, this is exactly what we're talking about. You expressed a belief about "rationalists" and the history of people changing their minds about things, I suggested maybe you should reexamine that belief, and you said nope absolutely not. (In a condescending way.) This is the kind of engagement that is being critiqued in this thread.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#962

Post by anton-c » Sat, Jun 21, 2025, 2:04 PM UTC

9rx wrote: post #263

pavlov wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And today the railroad system in the USA sucks compared to other developed countries and even China. It turns out that boom-and-bust capitalism isn’t great for building something that needs to evolve over centuries. Perhaps American AI efforts will one day be viewed similarly. “Yeah, they had an early rush, lots of innovation, high valuations, and robber barons competing. Today it’s just stale old infra despite the h…

> And today the railroad system in the USA sucks compared to other developed countries and even China. Nonsense. The US has the largest freight rail system in the world, and is considered to have the most efficient rail system in the world to go along with it. There isn't much in the way of passenger service, granted, but that's because people in the US aren't, well, poor. They can afford better transportation option…

Yeah the best in the world freight industry that is being sued by every company in America for their decades long price fixing scandal. Cant find the list of plaintiffs right now but it had ford and frito lay and hundreds of others. An update from yesterday:

https://www.mlex.com/mlex/antitrust/articles/2355294/us-rail...

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#963

Post by lisper » Sat, Jun 21, 2025, 2:20 PM UTC

TheAncientGeek wrote: post #958

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…

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

The problem is not with rationalism, it's with Rationalism (with a capital R), the cult-like phenomenon that has grown up around rationalism that fetishizes things like Bayes's theorem, hostile AI, Roko's basilisk, and the MWI.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#964

Post by mkoubaa » Sat, Jun 21, 2025, 3:04 PM UTC

pjscott wrote: post #945

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.)

No need to apologize, I am unashamedly an opponent of rationalism and I hold the entire movement and every one like it in history in withering contempt.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#965

Post by tptacek » Sat, Jun 21, 2025, 4:51 PM UTC

comp_throw7 wrote: post #952

tptacek wrote: post #868

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 it's an assertion of force, it's by Scott against the reporter, who needed only Google to find Scott's name. People don't get to demand that reporters un-know common knowledge just because publicity is unwelcome.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#966

Post by jefftk » Sat, Jun 21, 2025, 6:23 PM UTC

imtringued wrote: post #755

bena wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's essentially a grift. An excuse to do nothing while looking like you care and reaping rewards. If they wanted to help, they should be focused on the now. Global poverty, climate change, despotic world leaders. They should be aligning themselves against such things. But instead what we see is essentially not that. Effective altruism is a lot like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, a bit of a misnom…

They have aligned themselves in favor of global poverty, climate change and despotic world leaders. A lot of them argue that poor countries essentially don't matter. Climate change is not an extinction event and there should an authoritarian world government to prevent nuclear conflict to minimize the risk of nuclear extinction. >In his dissertation On the Overwhelming Importance of Shaping the Far Future (2013), sup…

The site you reference quotes Beckstead out of context, and either reading the context or looking at what he spent the next decade of his life working on would make it clear that he thinks the marginal dollar is better spent on saving lives in poor countries than rich ones. He well understands that his "other things being equal" in his dissertation essentially never holds in practice, and was writing for a philosophy audience where this kind of hypothetical is expected.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#967

Post by bmandale » Sat, Jun 21, 2025, 7:11 PM UTC

throwaway314155 wrote: post #780

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.

His reaction to this incident as being a sort of targeted hit piece towards him specifically was utter paranoid nonsense and just really made him look full of shit from an outside perspective. Further, authors of the piece received countless death threats from a mob of angry redditors with no real insight other than "someone got doxxed?!?! HOW DARE THEY!!!" (a narrative which I personally fell victim to before readin…

Maybe mr metz could have written under a pseudonym in order to avoid the very serious threats on his life

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#968

Post by FeepingCreature » Sat, Jun 21, 2025, 7:55 PM UTC

throwaway314155 wrote: post #948

FeepingCreature wrote: post #855

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 referri…

I mean, I find them underwhelming today. I just also haven't been given any convincing evidence that the technology is anywhere close to tapped out yet, and lots of evidence that it isn't.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#969

Post by ashwinsundar » Sat, Jun 21, 2025, 7:56 PM UTC

HDThoreaun wrote: post #340

ashwinsundar wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have an answer here either, but after suffering through the first few chapters of HPMOR, I've found that Yudk and others tech-bros posing as philosophers are basically like leaky, dumbed-down abstractions for core philosophical ideas. Just go to the source and read about utilitarianism and deontology directly. Yudk is like the Wix of web development - sure you can build websites but you're not gonna be a prop…

HPMOR is not supposed to be rigorous. It’s supposed to be entertaining in a way that rigorous philosophy is not. You could make the same argument about any of Camus’ novels but again that would miss the point. If you want something more rigorous yudkowsky has it, bit surprising to me to complain he isn’t rigorous without talking about his rigorous work.

I really have no interest in reading any more of that guy’s “work”

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#970

Post by ajkjk » Sat, Jun 21, 2025, 8:01 PM UTC

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…

you've latched on to some academic sense of the term but I understood exactly what the person you're replying to meant. They mean: are these people you would respect and trust to be in charge of things? What would they do? And a lot of people's vibe-check says it's a big unknown question mark, or worse, which is not something you can put faith in.