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Guess I'm a rationalist now

scottaaronson.blog

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Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#971

Post by FeepingCreature »

margalabargala wrote: post #817
FeepingCreature wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think free will as philosophically used is inherently self-defeating and one of the largest black marks on the entire field, to be fair.

Why is that? Here's what we know: - we appear to experience what we call free will from our own perspective. This isn't strong evidence obviously. - we are aware that we live in a world full of predictable mechanisms of varying levels of complexity, as well as fundamentally unpredictable mechanisms like quantum mechanics. - we know we are currently unable to fully model our experience and predict next steps. - we kno…

No, I disagree with this conclusion. The problem is very much solvable if one simply keeps the map/territory split in mind, and for every thing asks himself, "am I perceiving reality or am I perceiving a property of my brain?" That is, we "experience free will" - this is to say, our brain reports to us that it evaluated multiple possible behaviors and chose one. However, this does not indicate that multiple behaviors were physically possible, it only indicates that multiple behaviors were cognitively evaluated. In fact, because any deciding algorithm has to evaluate a behavior list or even a behavior tree, there is no reason at all to expect this to have any connection to physical properties of the world, such as quantum mechanics.

(The relevant LessWrong sequence is "How An Algorithm Feels From Inside" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yA4gF5KrboK2m2Xu7/how-an-alg... which has nothing to do with free will, but does make very salient the idea that perceptions may be facts about your cognition as easily, if not more easily, as facts about reality.)

And when you have that view in mind, you can ask: "wait, why would the brain be sensitive to quantum physics? It seems to be a system extremely poorly suited to doing macroscopic quantum calculations." Once the alternative theory of "free will is a perception of your cognitive algorithm" is salient, you will notice that the entire free-will debate will begin to feel more and more pointless, until eventually you no longer understand why people think this is a big deal at all, and then it all feels rather silly.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#972

Post by lazyasciiart »

ConspiracyFact wrote: post #933
jerf wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be easier to imagine someone trying to derive mathematics all by themselves, since it's less abstract. It's not that they won't come up with anything, it's that everything that even a genius can come up with in their lifetime will be something that the whole of humanity has long since come up with, chewed over, simplified, had a rebellion against, had a counter-rebellion against the rebellion, and ultimately p…

Just teasing here, but I presume you’re a social conservative…? ;)

Generally conservatives only want to conserve the way the world is as they grow up. Whether that involves respect for prior ideas and thought depends on their current ideas - hence the book burning.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#973

Post by chipsrafferty »

skinnymuch wrote: post #712
cassepipe wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the whole tree of responses under this comment and I could only convince myself that when people have no arguments they try to make you look bad. Most of criticisms are just "But they think they are better than us !" and the rest is "But sometimes they are wrong !" I don't know about the community and couldn't care less but their writings have brought me some almost life saving fresh air in how to think about…

Read other comments then. Not everyone is saying “they think they are better than us”. The primary issues as others have noted is they focus on people going to the highest paying jobs without much care for morality of the jobs. Ergo they are fine being net negatives in terms of their work and philosophy. All they do is donate money. Donations don’t fix society. Nothing changes structurally. No root problems are looke…

Well put.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#975

Post by chipsrafferty »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #329
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…

I'd like what the original sources would have written if someone had fed them some speak-clearly pills. Yudkowsky and company may have the dumbing-down problem, but the original sources often have a clarity problem. (That's why people are still arguing about what they meant centuries later. Not just whether they were right - though they argue about that too - but what they meant .) Even better, I'd like some filterin…

Have you considered that the ideas that philosophy discusses are very complex, and words are not a sufficient medium to describe those ideas?

That's why you have people arguing over what someone meant. Dumbing it down or trying to write something unambiguous doesn't actually make it better.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#977

Post by chipsrafferty »

timmytokyo wrote: post #828
achenet wrote: post #762

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they do it in tendentious disquisitions that take thousands of wasted words to get.. to.. the.. everloving.. point. Right, and "actual philosophers" like Sartre and Heidegger _never_ did that. Ever. "Being and Nothingness" and "Being and Time" are both short enough to fit into a couple tweets, right?

Thanks for reminding me that I left out their unjustified sense of significance and self-importance, thinking that their sophomoric ramblings are somehow comparable to Sartre's or Heidegger's writings.

I mean, I see the parallels. Heidegger was a Nazi, similar to how LWers are racist/eugenicists/Zionists.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#978

Post by chipsrafferty »

stevenhuang wrote: post #578
aosaigh wrote: post #112

> “You’re Scott Aaronson?! The quantum physicist who’s always getting into arguments on the Internet, and who’s essentially always right, but who sustains an unreasonable amount of psychic damage in the process?” Give me strength. So much hubris with these guys (and they’re almost always guys). I would have assumed that a rationalist would look for truth and not correctness. Oh wait, it’s all just a smokescreen for k…

Pretty sure that's meant to be taken light-heartedly. You know, as a joke.

It's not.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#979

Post by viccis »

lechatonnoir wrote: post #915
viccis wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree 100%, and that's my main issue with them. To build a group with its identity centered around "we form our opinions with logical inquiry from first principles" implies that you think that everyone else is doing something else. In reality, we just end up with a lot of worldviews and arguments that seem suspiciously like they are nothing more than people advocating for their own interests using some sophistry th…

I am sure that there are some people who exhibit the behaviors you're describing, but I really don't think the group as a whole is disinterested in prior work or discussion of philosophy in general: https://www.lesswrong.com/w/epistemology https://www.lesswrong.com/w/priors https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2x67s6u8oAitNKF73/ (a post noting that the foundational problems in mech interp are grounded in philosophical que…

The epistemology skews analytic and also "philosophy of science". It's not inherently an issue, but it does mean that there's a reason that I spend a lot of time here on orange site talking about Kantian concepts of epistemology in response to philosophical skepticism about AI.

A good example of the failing of "rationality" is Zionism. There are plenty of rationalists who are Zionists, including Scott Aaronson (who I incidentally think is not a very serious thinker). I think I can give a very simple rational argument for why making a colonial ethnostate is immoral and dangerous, and they have their own rational reasons for supporting it. Often, the arguments, including Scott's, are purely self interest. Not "rational."

>My personal view is that she does some interesting semi-rigorous surveying

Posting surveys on Twitter, as a sex worker account, is so unrigorous that to take it seriously is very concerning. On top of that, she lives in a bubble of autistic rationality people and tries to make general statements about humanity. And on top of that, half her outrageous statements are obvious attempts at bargaining with CSAM she experienced that she insists didn't traumatize her. Anyone who takes her seriously in any regard is a fool.

Re: Guess I'm a rationalist now

#980

Post by throwaway314155 »

bmandale wrote: post #967
throwaway314155 wrote: post #780

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Have you ever had random people harass you and threaten violence towards you in heavy numbers? No amount of resolve will keep that from being a deeply stressful situation.
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