Espouse your beliefs, participate in certain circles if you want, but avoid labels unless you intend to do ideological battle with other label-bearers.
[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-to-stop-worrying-and-le...
If you take a look at the biodiversity survey here https://reflectivealtruism.com/2024/12/27/human-biodiversity...
1/3 of the users at acx actually support flawed scientific theories that would explain iq on a scientific basis. The Lynn study on iq is also quite flawed https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations
If you want to read about human biodiversity, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Biodiversity_Institute
As I said, it's not very rational of them to support such theories. And of course as you scratch the surface, it's the old 20th century racist theories, and of course those theories are supported by (mostly white men, if I had to guess) people claiming to be rational
Saying in 2025 that the study is still debated is not only racist, but dishonest as well. It's not debated, it's junk
This is a pathology that has not really been addressed in the large, anywhere, really. Very few in the applied sciences who understand statistical methodology, "leave their areas" -- and many areas that require it, would disappear if it entered.
i looked into this when taleb made a splash denying it, but i ran the numbers myself and sent them over to a quant friend to look over and he agreed. the reality of our world is less than optimal.
i hope the stealth start-ups working on iq increasing drugs are successful and everyone who knows the truth stays real quiet about in their public life, which you will too if you want a career in the west.
i heard you can talk more openly about it in china of all places.. funny how that is.
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 considered all angles to it, maybe I'm wrong - but here it is". The type of people that would be embarrassed to not have an opinion on a topic or say "I don't know"
In the Pre-AI days this was sort of tolerable, but since then.. The frothing at the mouth convinced of the end of the world.. Just shows a real lack of humility and lack of acknowledgment that maybe we don't have a full grasp of the implications of AI. Maybe it's actually going to be rather benign and more boring than expected
I get it, I enjoyed being told I'm a super genius always right quantum physicist mathematician by the girls at Stanford too. But holy hell man, have some class, maybe consider there's more good to be done in rural Indiana getting some dirt under those nails..
Both our biology and other complex human affairs like societies and cultures evolved organically over long periods of time, responding to their environments and their competitors, building bit by bit, sometimes with an explicit goal but often without one.
One can learn a lot from unicellular organisms, but won’t probably be able to reason from them all the way to an elephant. At best, if we are lucky, we can reason back from the elephant.
Actually, neither do Rationalists, but instead they cosplay at being rational.
What do you mean? The biologists I've had the privilege of working with absolutely do try to. Obviously some work at a higher level of abstraction than others, but I've not met any who apply any magical thinking to the actual biological investigation. In particular (at least in my milieu), I have found that the typical biologist is more likely to consider quantum effects than the typical physicist. On the other hand (again, from my limited experience), biologists do tend to have some magical thinking about how statistics (and particularly hypothesis testing) works, but no one is perfect.
What you are mentioning is called western reductionism by some.
In the western world it does map to Plato etc, but it is also a problem if you believe everything is reducible.
Under the assumption that all models are wrong, but some are useful, it helps you find useful models.
If you consider Laplacian determinism as a proxy for reductionism, Cantor diagonalization and the standard model of QM are counterexamples.
Russell's paradox is another lens into the limits of Plato, which the PEM assumption is based on.
Those common a priori assumptions have value, but are assumptions which may not hold for any particular problem.
post-rationalism is where all the cool kids are and where the best ideas are at right now. the post rationalists consistently have better predictions and the 'rationalists' are stuck arguing whether chickens suffer more getting factory farmed or chickens cause more suffering eating bugs outside.
they also let SF get run into the ground until their detractors decided to take over.
Maybe, but generally speaking, if I think people are playing around with technology which a lot of smart people think might end humanity as we know it, I would want them to stop until we are really sure it won't. Like, "less than a one in a million chance" sure.
Those are big stakes. I would have opposed the Manhattan Project on the same principle had I been born 100 years earlier, when people were worried the bomb might ignite the world's atmosphere. I oppose a lot of gain-of-function virus research today too.
That's not a point you have to be a rationalist to defend. I don't consider myself one, and I wasn't convinced by them of this - I was convinced by Nick Bostrom's book Superintelligence, which lays out his case with most of the assumptions he brings to the table laid bare. Way more in the style of Euclid or Hobbes than ... whatever that is.
Above all I suspect that the Internet rationalists are basically a 30 year long campaign of "any publicity is good publicity" when it comes to existential risk from superintelligence, and for what it's worth, it seems to have worked. I don't hear people dismiss these risks very often as "You've just been reading too many science fiction novels" these days, which would have been the default response back in the 90s or 2000s.
I've recently stumbled across the theory that "it's gonna go away, just keep your head down" is the crisis response that has been taught to the generation that lived through the cold war, so that's how they act. That bit was in regards to climate change, but I can easily see it apply to AI as well (even though I personally believe that the whole "AI eat world" arc is only so popular due to marketing efforts of the corresponding industry)
I don't buy the marketing angle, because it doesn't actually make sense to me. Fear draws eyeballs, sure, but it just seems otherwise nakedly counterproductive, like a burger chain advertising itself on the brutality of its factory farms.
It’s rather more like the burger chain decrying the brutality as a reason for other burger chains to be heavily regulated (don’t worry about them; they’re the guys you can trust and/or they are practically already holding themselves to strict ethical standards) while talking about how delicious and juicy their meat patties are.
I agree about the general sentiment that the technology is dangerous, especially from a “oops, our agent stopped all of the power plants” angle. Just... the messaging from the big AI services is both that and marketing hype. It seems to get people to disregard real dangers as “marketing” and I think that’s because the actual marketing puts an outsized emphasis on the dangers. (Don’t hook your agent up to your power plant controls, please and thank you. But I somehow doubt that OpenAI and Anthropic will not be there, ready and willing, despite the dangers they are oh so aware of.)
One point is that when Mowshowitz is dispelling the argument that abuse rates are much higher for homeschooled kids, he (and the counterargument in general) references a study [1] showing that abuse rates for non-homeschooled kids are similarly high: both around 37%. That paper's no good though! Their conclusion is "We estimate that 37.4% of all children experience a child protective services investigation by age 18 years." 37.4%? That's 27m kids! How can CPS run so many investigations? That's 4k investigations a day over 18 years, no holidays or weekends. Nah. Here are some good numbers (that I got to from the bad study, FWIW) [2], they're around 4.2%.
But, more broadly, the worst failing of the US educational system isn't how it treats smart kids, it's how it treats kids for whom it fails. If you're not the 80% of kids who can somehow make it in the school system, you're doomed. Mowshowitz' article is nearly entirely dedicated to how hard it is to liberate your suffering, gifted student from the prison of public education. This is a real problem! I agree it would be good to solve it!
But, it's just not the problem. Again I'm sympathetic to and agree with a lot of the points in the article, but you can really boil it down to "let smart, wealthy parents homeschool their kids without social media scorn". Fine, I guess. No one's stopping you from deleting your account and moving to California. But it's not an efficient use of resources--and it's certainly a terrible political strategy--to focus on such a small fraction of the population, and to be clear this is the absolute nicest way I can characterize these kinds of policy positions. This thing is going nowhere as long as it stays so self-obsessed.
[0]: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/childhood-and-education-9-scho...
[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5227926/
[2]: https://acf.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cb/cm2023.pdf
The whole Rationalist community (along with the rest of their brethren like Effective Altruists, and the rest of the TESCREAL acronym), have always seemed nutty to me.
I.e., the following is, I believe, a reasonable argument:
"I should have a right to live in this general patch of land, since my grand-parents lived here. Maybe my parents moved away and I was born somewhere else, but they still had a right to live here and I should have it too. I may have to buy some land to have this right, I'm not saying I should be given land - but I should be allowed to do so. Additionally, it matters that my grand-parents were not invaders to this land. Their parents and grand-parents had also lived here, and so on for many generations."
This doesn't imply genetic heritage necessarily - cultural heritage and the notions of parents are not necessarily genetic. I might have ~0% of the specific DNA of some great-great-grand-parent (or even 0% of my parents' DNA, if I am adopted) - but I'm still their descendant. Now, how far you want to stretch this is very much debatable.
My claim is that this is factually incorrect by any stretch of the imagination, as soon as we recognize that the modern-day Palestinians and the modern-day Jewish people are just as much descendants of the ancient Israelites. Just because their language, culture, and religion have diverged, there is nothing that ties one group more to that land than the other (if anything, those that had left have a lesser tie than those that stayed, even if the culture of those that stayed diverged). So the claim of descent and continuity with the ancient kingdom of Israel, the 2-3000 year old history, is entirely irrelevant.
These people are just narcissists who use (often pseudo)intellectualism as the vehicle for their narcissism.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/11/un-special-c...
For what it’s worth, you seem to be agreeing with the person you replied to. Their main point is that this break down happens primarily because people identify as Rationalists (or whatever else). Taken from that angle, Rationalism as an identity does not appear to be useful.
* Group are "special"
* Centered around a charismatic leader
* Weird sex stuff
Guys we have a cult!
> “Yes,” I replied, not bothering to correct the “physicist” part.
Didn't read much beyond that part. He'll fit right in with the rationalist crowd...
I skimmed a bit here and there after that but this comes off as plain grandiosity. Even the title is a line you can imagine a hollywood character speaking out loud as they look into the camera, before giving a smug smirk.
Stopped reading thereafter. Nobody speaking like this will have anything I want to hear.
*Guess I’m a rationalist now.
> they gave off some (not all) of the vibes of a cult
...after describing his visit with an atmosphere that sounds extremely cult-like.
However, reading this article about all these people at their "Galt's Gultch", I thought — "oh, I guess he's a rhinoceros now"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhinoceros_(play)
Here's a bad joke for you all — What's the difference between a "rationalist" and "rationalizer"? Only the incentives.
For those who haven't delved(ha!) into his work or have been pushed back by the cultish looks, I have to say that he's genuinelly onto something. There are a lot of practical ideas that are pretty useful for everyday thinking ("Belief in Belief", "Emergence", "Generalizing from fiction", etc...).
For example, I recall being in lot of arguments that are purely "semantical" in nature. You seem to disagree about something but it's just that both sides aren't really referring to the same phenomenon. The source of the disagreement is just using the same word for different, but related, "objects". This is something that seems obvious, but the kind of thing you only realize in retrospect, and I think I'm much better equipped now to be aware of it in real time.
I recommend giving it a try.
Not saying this is you, but these topics have been discussed for thousands of years, so it should at least be surprising that Yudkowsky is breaking new ground.
And, BTW, I could just be ignorant in a lot of these topics, I take no offense in that. Still I think most people can learn something from an unprejudiced reading.
cue_the_strings•3h ago
greener_grass•2h ago