#rationalists

[jadagul]

I really feel like Nate Silver should be more of a rationalist icon than he is.

He's an outspoken Bayesian who believes in probabilistic reasoning and does explicit calibration tests of himself. He's incredibly good at this, producing consistently well-calibrated forecasts across multiple domains. (And he's winning!)

He even exemplifies the actual primary rationalist virtue, which is pissing people off by being contrarian on the internet.

I suspect he loses points for forecasting with actual math, rather than putting a number on his intuition and muttering something about priors. Doing math in your Bayesian updates is cheating!

[kvothbloodless]

So I saw that ratblr was trending, and I consider myself vaguely rat-adjacent-adjacent, even if just as a lurker, so my first reaction was "Oh God what happened Now".

What happened is that tumblr is apparently very excited about pet rats today :).

[sewer-swan]

I have to consciously dodge sounding like a rationalist sometimes. We probably share some ground, we both worship the effective and love analysis. But they have this certain bright-eyed optimism, a total lack of edge with a slight note of corniness. You hear them pipe up from 6 feet deep in the weeds, all nuance and pet theory, and you just think "god, I should step on that thing."

I think if tumblr people can be corny too, we at least like to think we're outrageous outsiders. Rationalists seem to allow no concept of the outrageous and they're so damn sincere about that: you need a patina of cynicism, a hint of jadedness, to pull it off.

[stackslip]

i know i have mutuals and followers who are/were close to rationalist circles, or rationalists themselves, or who are simply anarchist trans girl hackers who seem to br broadly familiar with the subject. and tbc it really REALLY isnt for me (im vaguelu familiar with the arguments and have read about rokos basilisk and lesswrong etc and it's beffudling to me). but do you guys have any good writings or posts on how much it's influencing tech giants and in which ways? there's been a lot of sensational writings on the ftx polycule etc and how elon and co are claiming to embrace longtermism but I'd love to see stuff on what they specifically get out of it and how close their interpretation is to the og ideas and circles, and what movements and groups DO exist today and how much they oppose or embrace recent tech industry developments (from ai chat and art to crypto crashing to elon and others indicating they're fans of the whole thing)

tbc this isn't about drama or sensationalist stuff, and im not seeking intellectual arguments on why it's the right way or utter bullshit. rather im trying to understand how these ideas developed, where the movement is today, and what kind of cultural and intellectual influence they actually DO have on tech giants and tech billionaires as a whole

[wisdomfish]

This promise in Jeremiah [29:13] eliminates two types of people who claim to be seekers. There is the rationalist (who only allows reason – but the true seeker needs to be a whole person not just an 'autonomous' mind). And there is the cynic (whose start point assumes there is not enough evidence available and they seem committed only to seeking confirmation for their start-point). Hence both are defective seekers.

Andrew Fellows 

[folatefangirl]

Y'all this is EXACTLY what I mean when I am talking about Antideathism and how Rationalists who worship Eliezer Yudkowsksy, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk are 100% a cult. The Antideathists literally believe the most important thing society should be doing is ending death and that anything contrary to fighting death is genocide by dooming people to "preventable" death due to inaction. You might think people like this weirdo are one-offs, but there are a not insignificant number of them with power and wealth and political influence because death terrifies many rich assholes who've never been denied anything nor faced real consequences for their actions. Go figure.

scrunching my face real hard rn

[aorish]

Recent discourse reminds me of that cult indoctrination trick that's often used to weed out more difficult marks early on, where they tell you all that you aren't allowed to eat rice on Tuesdays and then if you protest they go "wow SOMEBODY likes rice a little much huh" as if you're the fucking weirdo who cares too much about how much rice is consumed between Monday and Wednesday instead of them.

And this forces you to decide whether your autonomy matters to you more than the approval of the group - while they'll still act like you're on thin ice either way, if you give in at this point they know you're theirs forever, because now they've established a foothold, you've shown a moral weakness, which they will brand you with so it can be used against you in the future ("hey RICE-addict here doesn't want help break into the city records office") to force you to double-down and isolate you further.

And if instead you do decide to push back further, after your abrupt departure from the group ("You're seriously leaving us over RICE?!? Seriously?") and subsequent ostracism, you can then be used as a demonstration to the others who were more pliable, of how the outgroup is full of people like you who are obsessed with violating the No-Tuesday-Rice rule to the point where they'll abandon all their friends, who cared so much for them, so it clearly isn't an arbitrary restriction, you're the kind of monster these rules are intended to protect them from, thus all the other wise and esoteric precepts of the charismatic leader are implied to be equally justified.

[philotreat]

Rationalist Philosophers Tutorial - YouTube

In this video, I explained about Rationalist philosophers- Descartes, Spinoza and Leibnitz, their theories of Substance, God and Rationalism.

[w-ht-w]

Eliezer Yudkowsky in 2009 on the coordination problem in effective altruist / rationalist communities.

Our culture puts all the emphasis on heroic disagreement and heroic defiance, and none on heroic agreement or heroic group consensus.  We signal our superior intelligence and our membership in the nonconformist community by inventing clever objections to others' arguments.  Perhaps that is why the atheist/libertarian/technophile/sf-fan/Silicon-Valley/programmer/early-adopter crowd stays marginalized, losing battles with less nonconformist factions in larger society.  No, we're not losing because we're so superior, we're losing because our exclusively individualist traditions sabotage our ability to cooperate.

The other major component that I think sabotages group efforts in the atheist/libertarian/technophile/etcetera community, is being ashamed of strong feelings. We still have the Spock archetype of rationality stuck in our heads, rationality as dispassion.  Or perhaps a related mistake, rationality as cynicism—trying to signal your superior world-weary sophistication by showing that you care less than others.  Being careful to ostentatiously, publicly look down on those so naive as to show they care strongly about anything.

We should aspire to feel the emotions that fit the facts, not aspire to feel no emotion.  If an emotion can be destroyed by truth, we should relinquish it.  But if a cause is worth striving for, then let us by all means feel fully its importance.

I've heard it argued that the taboo against emotional language in, say, science papers, is an important part of letting the facts fight it out without distraction.  That doesn't mean the taboo should apply everywhere.  I think that there are parts of life where we should learn to applaud strong emotional language, eloquence, and poetry.  When there's something that needs doing, poetic appeals help get it done, and, therefore, are themselves to be applauded.

You need both sides of it—

the willingness to turn away from counterproductive causes, and the willingness to praise productive ones; 

the strength to be unswayed by ungrounded appeals, and the strength to be swayed by grounded ones.

1. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7FzD7pNm9X68Gp5ZC/why-our-kind-can-t-cooperate

[tenth-sentence]

And the only way to rein in corruptible politicians, these rationalists believed, was by balancing them against other politicians.

"Humankind: A Hopeful History" - Rutger Bregman

[pageofheartdj]

There is something about this dynamic and I want more XD

[serial-unaliver]

speaking of aggrieved entitlement, I will never forget when a certain rationalist blogger on here implied i'd violently bully them because I made a post saying bullying is not the sole cause of school shootings. I don't feel like unnecessarily starting drama so i'm not naming urls (and tbh I don't see this person on my dash often anyway) but like...that was insane. neurodivergent, even

[centrally-unplanned]

Very much enjoyed Tracing Woodgrain's foray into the internet life of jilted ex-rationalist and Wikipedia editor David Gerard. It is of course "on brand" for me - the social history of the internet, as a place of communities and individual lives lived, is one of my own passion projects, and this slots neatly into that domain in more ways than one. At the object-level it is of course about one such specific community & person; but more broadly it is an entry into the "death of the internet-as-alternate-reality" genre; the 1990's & 2000's internet as a place separate from and perhaps superior to the analog world, that died away in the face of the internet's normalization and the cruel hand of the real.

Here that broad story is made specific; early Wikipedia very much was "better than the real", the ethos of the early rationalist community did seem to a lot of people like "Yeah, this is a new way of thinking! We are gonna become better people this way!" - and it wasn't total bullshit, logical fallacies are real enough. And the decline is equally specific: the Rationalist project was never going to Escape Politics because it was composed of human beings, Wikipedia was low-hanging fruit that became a job of grubby maintenance, the suicide of hackivist Aaron Swartz was a wake-up call that the internet was not, in any way, exempt from the reach of the powers-that-be. TW's allusion to Gamergate was particularly amusing for me, as while it wasn't prominent in Gerard's life it was truly the death knell for the illusion of the internet as a unified culture.

But anyway, the meat of the essay is also just extremely amusing; someone spending over a decade on a hate crusade using rules-lawyering spoiling tactics for the most petty stakes (unflattering wikipedia articles & other press). The internet is built by weirdos, and that is going to be a mixed bag! It is beautiful to see someone's soul laid bare like this.

It can be tempting to get involved in the object-level topics - how important was Lesswrong in the growth of Neoreaction, one of the topics of Gerard's fixations? It was certainly, obviously not born there, never had any numbers on the site, and soon left it to grow elsewhere. But on the flip side, for a few crucial years Lesswrong was one of the biggest sites that hosted any level of discussion around it, and exposed other people to it as a concept. This is common for user-generated content platforms; they aggregate people who find commonalities and then splinter off. Lesswrong's vaunted "politics is the mindkiller" masked a strong aversion to a lot of what would become left social justice, and it was a place for those people to meet. I don't think neoreaction deserves any mention on Lesswrong's wikipedia page, beyond maybe a footnote. But Lesswrong deserves a place on Neoreaction's wikipedia page. There are very interesting arguments to explore here.

You must, however, ignore that temptation, because Gerard explored fucking none of that. No curiosity, no context, just endless appeals to "Reliable Source!" and other wikipedia rules to freeze the wikipedia entries into maximally unflattering shapes. Any individual edit is perhaps defensible; in their totality they are damning. My "favourite" is that on the Slate Star Codex wikipedia page, he inserted and fought a half-dozen times to include a link to an academic publication Scott Alexander wrote, that no one ever read and was never discussed on SSC beyond a passing mention, solely because it had his real name on it. He was just doxxing him because he knew it would piss Scott off, and anyone pointing that out was told "Springer Press is RS, read the rules please :)". It is levels of petty I can't imagine motivating me for a decade, it is honestly impressive!

He was eventually banned from editing the page as some other just-as-senior wikipedia editor finally noticed and realized, no, the guy who openly calls Scott a neo-nazi is not an "unbiased source" for editing this page wtf is wrong with you all. I think you could come away from this article thinking Wikipedia is ~broken~ or w/e, but you shouldn't - how hard Gerard had to work to do something as small as he did is a testament to the strength of the platform. No one thinks it is perfect of course, but nothing ever will be - and in particular getting motivated contributors now that the sex appeal has faded is a very hard problem. The best solution sometimes is just noticing the abusers over time.

Though wikipedia should loosen up its sourcing standards a bit. I get why it is the way it is, but still, come on.

[thefriendoforatioisdead]

Anin is very angry at Pin for accepting to marry Kuea and I understand her BUT I'm afraid I'm siding with Pin on this one.

Because, besides what it would to her reputation, to her family's name, the fact that they don't belong to the same social class, that she's following her duty, that she's being loyal to her aunt, and all the reasons that motivate Pin to take this decision, the thing that in my opinion really determined her, is Anin saying she'd give up her title.

Because giving up her title is giving up her family. And Anin, with all the love she has for Pin and her family as well, is still a bit self-centered, and selfish, and probably not as mature as Pin because it had never been asked of her to be. So, when in the middle of her righteous fight for her love she throws that she's fine with being disowned, abandonning everything and eloping to another country, Pin has to stop it. She can't bear it. Because SHE knows what it is to lose your family. She lost her parents as a child, and all she has left is her aunt who, despites her genuine love for Pin, is not always the gentle parental figure someone like Pin might have needed. She can't watch Anin throw away something so important for her. She could not stand to be the reason the love of her life lost her family, and felt the same pain that she did. Because unlike Anin, she knows what it means to be all alone in the world.

So she had to put an end to this and say she'd marry Kuea. To protect Anin from the pain of losing her family, because she knows how much she loves them and how much they love her

[loki-zen]

like there was the worry that you'd make a computer for something specific like making paperclips and it'd develop general intelligence and take over the world when in fact they developed a chatbot and people are falling over themselves to use it like a general intelligence

I feel like the AI risk rats got it almost exactly backwards actually.