Comment by pavlov
4 days ago
A very interesting read.
My idea of these self-proclaimed rationalists was fifteen years out of date. I thought they’re people who write wordy fan fiction, but turns out they’ve reached the point of having subgroups that kill people and exorcise demons.
This must be how people who had read one Hubbard pulp novel in the 1950s felt decades later when they find out he’s running a full-blown religion now.
The article seems to try very hard to find something positive to say about these groups, and comes up with:
“Rationalists came to correct views about the COVID-19 pandemic while many others were saying masks didn’t work and only hypochondriacs worried about covid; rationalists were some of the first people to warn about the threat of artificial intelligence.”
There’s nothing very unique about agreeing with the WHO, or thinking that building Skynet might be bad… (The rationalist Moses/Hubbard was 12 when that movie came out — the most impressionable age.) In the wider picture painted by the article, these presumed successes sound more like a case of a stopped clock being right twice a day.
You're falling into some sort of fallacy; maybe a better rationalist than I could name it.
The "they" you are describing is a large body of disparate people spread around the world. We're reading an article that focuses on a few dysfunctional subgroups. They are interesting because they are so dysfunctional and rare.
Or put it this way: Name one -ism that _doesn't_ have sub/splinter groups that kill people. Even Pacifism doesn't get a pass.
> The "they" you are describing is a large body of disparate people spread around the world.
[Citation needed]
I sincerely doubt anything but a tiny insignificant minority consider themselves part of the "rationalist community".
I realized a few years ago that there's an important difference between someone who believes women should have equal rights and a feminist. Similarly, there's a difference between someone who believes men should have equal rights and a men's rights advocate. I often sympathize with the first group. I often disagree with the latter. This same distinction applies to rationality: there's a huge difference between someone who strives to be rational and someone who belongs to a "rationalist community".
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"Large" is very vague.
The leaderboard shows (50 of) 166385 registered accounts* on https://www.lesswrong.com/leaderboard
This is simultaneously a large body and an insignificant minority.
* How many are junk accounts? IDK. But I do know it's international, because I live in Berlin, Germany, and socialise regularly.
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The article specifically defines the rationalists it’s talking about:
“The rationalist community was drawn together by AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky’s blog post series The Sequences, a set of essays about how to think more rationally.”
Is this really a large body of disparate people spread around the world? I suspect not.
Not sure how to define "drawn together", but the anecdata is: about half of my friends love Yudkowsky's works; they live all across US, EU and Middle Eastern countries.
So I suspect yes, it's a large body of loosely coupled people.
Define "large" :
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/fall-meetups-everywhere-cal...
(One of the largest subgroups AFAIK ?)
(They still seem to be leaning heavily USA-based, and in particular California-based.)
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It's large in the sense that it's not a single well connected group. There are subgroups within the rationalists
"Self-proclaimed rationalists" is a much broader group than people who read Yudkowsky.
Article (and this thread) is blog spam.
Arguments about who is/not a cult member (regardless of affiliation) don't seem relevant to HN. Perhaps HN should flag the thread.
Dadaism? Most art -isms didn't have subgroups who killed people. If people killed others in art history it was mostly tragic individual stories and had next to nothing to do with the ideology of the ism.
What is the connection between the Ziz crazies killing anyone and rationalism?
This sounds like the No True Scotsman fallacy.
We know all true scotsmen are good upstanding citizens. If you find a Scotsman who is a criminal, then obviously he is not a true Scotsman.
If you find a rationalist who believes something mad then obviously he is not a true rationalist.
There are now so many logical fallacies that you can point to any argument and say it’s a logical fallacy.
Existentialism.
Post-modernism.
Accidentalism.
Perhaps the difference is that these isms didn't think they had thought up everything themselves.
>The "they" you are describing is a large body of disparate people spread around the world.
And that "large body" has a few hundred core major figures and prominent adherents, and a hell of a lot of them seem to be exactly like how the parent describes. Even the "tamer" of them like ASC have that cultish quality...
As for the rest of the "large body", the hangers on, those are mostly out of view anyway, but I doubt they'd be paragons of sanity if looked up close.
>Or put it this way: Name one -ism that _doesn't_ have sub/splinter groups that kill people
-isms include fascism, nazism, jihadism, nationalism, communism, nationalism, racism, etc, so not exactly the best argument to make in rationalism's defense. "Yeah, rationalism has groups that murder people, but after all didn't fascism had those too?"
Though, if we were honest, it mostly brings in mind another, more medical related, -ism.
>> Or put it this way: Name one -ism that _doesn't_ have sub/splinter groups that kill people
> -isms include fascism, nazism, jihadism, nationalism, communism, nationalism, racism, etc, so not exactly the best argument to make in rationalism's defense. "Yeah, rationalism has groups that murder people, but after all didn't fascism had those too?
Catholicism, empiricism, pragmatism, presenteeism.
Crusades; French revolution specifically; death penalty in general; IDK going postal?
More relevantly, given the number of people as per my other comment*, multiplied by e.g. the USA per-100k homicide rate** would lead to 166385 / 1e5 * 5.763 ~= 9.6 homicide victims in that group per year. Given many homicides are by people who are very close to the victim, this also suggests a similar (lower, but similar) expectation value for attackers.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2021_Homicide_rates_in_hi...
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The level of dysfunction which is described in the article is really rare. But dysfunction, the kind of which we talk about, is not really that rare, I would even say that quite common, in self proclaimed rationalist groups. They don’t kill people - at least directly - but they definitely not what they claim to be: rational. They use rational tools, more than others, but they are not more rational than others, they simply use these tools to prove their irrationality.
I touch rationalists only with a pole recently, because they are not smarter than others, but they just think that, and on the surface level they seem so. They praise Julia Galef, then ignore everything what she said. Even Galef invited people who were full blown racists, just it seemed that they were all right because they knew whom they talked with, and they couldn’t bullshit. They tried to argue why their racism is rational, but you couldn’t tell from the interviews. They flat out lies all the time on every other platforms. So at the end she just gave platform for covered racism.
The WHO didn't declare a global pandemic until March 11, 2020 [1]. That's a little slow and some rationalists were earlier than that. (Other people too.)
After reading a warning from a rationalist blog, I posted a lot about COVID news to another forum and others there gave me credit for giving the heads-up that it was a Big Deal and not just another thing in the news. (Not sure it made all that much difference, though?)
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7569573/
I worked at the British Medical Journal at the time. We got wind of COVID being a big thing in January. I spent January to March to get our new VPN into a fit state that the whole company could do their whole jobs from home. 23 March was lockdown and we were ready and had a very busy year.
That COVID was going to be big was obvious to a lot of people and groups who were paying attention. We were a health-related org, but we were extremely far from unique in this.
The rationalist claim that they were uniquely on the ball and everyone else dropped it is just a marketing lie.
I recall friends who worked for Google telling me that they instituted WFH for all employees from the start of March. I also remember a call with a co-worker in January/February who had a PhD in epidemiology (not a "rationalist" afaik); I couldn't believe what he was saying about the likelihood of a months-long lockdown in the West.
The first time I read about covid, was in a (printed) computer magazine as a side note about government oppression in China. At that time I didn't even memorized the name, because I just didn't heard about it from any other source.
I don't think anyone said they were unique? I was countering a claim that they just agreed with the WHO.
Do you think that the consequences of the WHO declaring a pandemic and some rationalist blog warning about covid are the same? Clearly the WHO has to be more cautious. I have no doubt there were people at the WHO who felt a global pandemic was likely at least as early as you and the person writing the rationalist blog.
This is going to be controversial. But WHO wasted precious time during the early phases of the pandemic. It could have been contained more effectively if they weren't in denial. And when they did declare a pandemic, it was all very sudden instead of gradually raising the level, leading to panic buying and anxiety.
Are the WHO personnel rational and competent? I would like to believe so. But that isn't a given - the amount of nonsense I had to fight in institutions considered as pinnacles of rationality is just depressing. Regardless, WHO was encumbered by international policitics. Their rationality would have made no difference. That is why the opinion of rational outsiders matter - especially of those with domain expertise.
The signs of an uncontained contagion were evident by the middle of December 2020, well before the WHO declared the pandemic in March 2021. They could have asked everyone to start preparing around then. Instead, there were alarming news coming out of Wuhan and endless debates on TV about the appeasement of the Chinese administration by WHO - things that started ringing the alarm bells for us. We started preparing by at least the middle of January. WHO chose to wait again till everything was obvious and a declaration was inevitable. People were dying by the thousands everyday and the lockdowns had already started by then. Their rubberstamp wasn't necessary to confirm what everyone knew already. That was one instance where waiting for the WHO wasn't a prudent choice.
WHO is a critical institution to the entire world. Their timing can mean the difference between life and death for millions everywhere. These sorts of failing shouldn't be excused and swept under the rug so easily.
If you look at the timeline, it's purely political. Some earliest warnings came from Taiwan/ROC who found it in travelers from mainland. But WHO did not dare to anger PRC so they ignored Taiwan and that way caused probably thousands of unnecessary deaths in the whole world
Shitposting comedy forums were ahead of the WHO when it came to this, it didn't take a genius to understand what was going on before shit completely hit the fan.
Yet the stock market mostly didn't get it. I know some people who made some money based on the knowledge that a pandemic was coming.
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I remember plotting exponential growth against the data in late February, it was a very exciting time.
I think the piece bends over backwards to keep the charitable frame because it's written by someone inside the community, but you're right that the touted "wins" feel a bit thin compared to the sheer scale of dysfunction described.
How that dysfunction compares to similar socioeconomic group(s' median) baseline?
Personally I feel like the big thing to come out of rationalism is the insight that, in Scott Alexander's words [0] (freely after Julia Galef),
> Of the fifty-odd biases discovered by Kahneman, Tversky, and their successors, forty-nine are cute quirks, and one is destroying civilization. This last one is confirmation bias - our tendency to interpret evidence as confirming our pre-existing beliefs instead of changing our minds.
I'm mildly surprised the author didn't include it in the list.
[0] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-scout-minds...
> Rationalists came to correct views about the COVID-19 pandemic while many others were saying masks didn’t work
I wonder what views about covid-19 are correct. On masks, I remember the mainstream messaging went through the stages that were masks don't work, some masks work, all masks work, double masking works, to finally masks don't work (or some masks work; I can't remember where we ended up).
> to finally masks don't work (or some masks work; I can't remember where we ended up).
Most masks 'work', for some value of 'work', but efficacy differs (which, to be clear, was ~always known; there was a very short period when some authorities insisted that covid was primarily transmitted by touch, but you're talking weeks at most). In particular I think what confused people was that the standard blue surgical masks are somewhat effective at stopping an infected person from passing on covid (and various other things), but not hugely effective at preventing the wearer from contracting covid; for that you want something along the lines of an n95 respirator.
The main actual point of controversy was whether it was airborne or not (vs just short-range spread by droplets); the answer, in the end, was 'yes', but it took longer than it should have to get there.
> In particular I think what confused people was that the standard blue surgical masks are somewhat effective at stopping an infected person from passing on covid (and various other things), but not hugely effective at preventing the wearer from contracting covid
Yes, exactly.
If we look at guidelines about influenza, we will see them say that "surgical masks are not considered adequate respiratory protection for airborne transmission of pandemic influenza". And as far as I understand, it was finally agreed that in terms of transmission, Sars CoV-2 behaves similarly to the influenza virus.
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Putting just about anything in front of your face will help prevent spreading illness to some extent, this is why we teach children to "vampire cough". Masks were always effective to some degree. The CDC lied to the public by initially telling them not to use masks because they wanted to keep the supply for healthcare workers and they were afraid that the pubic would buy them all up first. It was a very very stupid thing to do and it undermined people's trust in the CDC and confused people about masks. After that masks became politicized and the whole topic became a minefield.
Basic masks work for society because they stop your saliva from traveling but they don't work for you because they don't stop particles from other people saliva from reaching you
FWIW, my rationalist friends were warning about Covid before I had heard about it from others, and talking about AI before it was on others radar.
Covid specifically or a pandemic in general?
Also AI doesn't really count because plenty of people have been riding that train for decades.
I was reminded of Hubbard too. In particular the "[belief that one] should always escalate when threatened" strongly echoes Hubbard's advice to always attack attack. Never defend.
The whole thing reminds me of EST and a thousand other cults / self-improvement / self-actualisation groups that seem endemic to California ever since the 60s or before.
Money and Heat has a strong ability to encourage crazy.
If that were the case you'd see this kind of crazy in Miami and you don't.
You see other kinds though.
As someone who started reading without knowing about rationalists, I actually came out without knowing much more. Lots of context is assumed I guess.
Some main figures and rituals are mentioned but I still don’t know how the activities and communities arise from the purported origin. How do we go from “let’s rationally analyze how we think and get rid of bias” to creating a crypto, or being hype focused on AI, or summoning demons? Why did they raise this idea of matching confrontation always with escalation? Why the focus on programming, is this a Silicon Valley thing?
Also lesswrong is mentioned but no context is given about it. I only know the name as a forum, just like somethingawful or Reddit, but I don’t know how it fits into the picture.
LessWrong was originally a personal blog of Eliezer Yudkowsky. It was an inspiration for what later became the "rationality community". These days, LessWrong is a community blog. The original articles were published as a book, freely available at: https://www.readthesequences.com/ If you read it, you can see what the community was originally about; but it is long.
Some frequent topics debated on LessWrong are AI safety, human rationality, effective altruism. But it has no strict boundaries; some people even post about their hobbies or family life. Debating politics is discouraged, but not banned. The website is mostly moderated by its users, by voting on articles and comments. The voting is relatively strict, and can be scary for many newcomers. (Maybe it is not strategic to say this, but most comments on Hacker News would probably be downvoted on LessWrong for insufficient quality.)
Members of the community, the readers of the website, are all over the planet. (Just what you would expect from readers of an internet forum.) But in some cities there are enough of them so they can organize an offline meetup once in a while. And if a very few cities, there are so many of them, that they are practically a permanent offline community; most notably in the Bay Area.
I don't live in the Bay Area. To describe how the community functions in my part of the world: we meet about once in a month, sometimes less frequently, and we discuss various nerdy stuff. (Apologies if this is insufficiently impressive. From my perspective, the quality of those discussions is much higher than I have seen anywhere else, but I guess there is no way to provide this experience second-hand.) There is a spirit of self-improvement; we encourage each other to think logically and try to improve our lives.
Oh, and how does the bad part connect to it?
Unfortunately, although the community is about trying to think better, for some reason it also seems very attractive for people who are looking for someone to tell them how to think. (I mean, we do tell them how to think, but in a very abstract way: check the evidence, remember your cognitive biases, et cetera.) They are a perfect material for a cult.
The rationality community itself is not a cult. Too much disagreement and criticism of our own celebrities for that! There is also no formal membership; anyone is free to come and go. Sometimes a wannabe cult leader joins the community, takes a few vulnerable people aside, and starts a small cult. Two out of three examples in the article, it was a group of about five people -- when you have hundreds of members in a city, you won't notice when five of them start attending your meetups less frequently, and then disappear completely. And one day... you read about them in the newspapers.
> How do we go from “let’s rationally analyze how we think and get rid of bias” to creating a crypto, or being hype focused on AI, or summoning demons? Why did they raise this idea of matching confrontation always with escalation?
Rationality and AI have always been the focus of the community. Buying cryptos was considered common sense back then when Bitcoin was cheap; but I haven't heard talking about cryptos in the rationality community recently.
On the other hand, believing in demons, and the idea that you should always escalate... those are specific ideas of the leaders of the small cults, definitely not shared by the rest of the community.
Notice how the first things the wannabe cult leaders do is isolate their followers even from the rest of the rationality community. They are quite aware that what they are doing would be considered wrong by the rest of the community.
The question is, how can the community prevent this? If your meetings are open for everyone, how can you prevent one newcomer from privately contacting a few other newcomers, meeting them in private, and brainwashing them? I don't have a good answer for that.
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The point of wearing a mask is to protect other people from your respiratory droplets. Please wear a mask when you're sick.
It's still mind boggling to me that governments didn't say "Don't wear a mask for yourself -- wear one to save your neighbor."
Sure, there would have been some people who ignored it because they're jackasses, but I can't believe we wouldn't be in a better place today.
Both in terms of public scientific- and community- appreciation.
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The point of masks, originally, was to catch saliva drops from surgeons as they worked over an open body, not to stop viruses.
For COVID its use was novel. But having an intention isn't enough. It must actually work. Otherwise, you are just engaging in witchcraft and tomfoolery.
The respiratory droplet model of how COVID spread was wrong, which was proven by lots of real world evidence. Look at how the Diamond Princess worked out and please explain how that was compatible with either masks or lockdowns working? SARS-CoV-2 spreads like every other respiratory virus, as a gaseous aerosol that doesn't care about masks in the slightest.
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Indoors. There were decades of research leading to the recommendations of mask wearing when symptomatic and only indoors.
All that fell by the wayside when mask wearing became a covid-time cult. A friend (with a degree in epidemiology) told me that if she tried to argue those points and doubts outdoor mask mandates she will be the immediately out of her job.
The covid-time environment of shutting down scientific discussions because policymakers decided that we had enough science to reach a conclusion should not be forgotten, it was a reasonable concern turned into a cult. My 2c.
> AI is very friendly, even
Very friendly until it reads in your email that you plan to replace it with a new model:
https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment
It was genuinely difficult to persuade people to wear masks before everyone started doing it and it became normal.
Nobody was persuaded, they were forced by law exactly because it was obvious to everyone with their brain switched on that masks didn't work. Remember how when the rules demanding masks on planes were rescinded there were videos of whole planes ripping off their masks and celebrating mid-flight? Literally the second the law changed, people stopped wearing masks.
That's because masks were a mass hysteria. They did not work. Everyone could see it.
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I hope we never have to find out how wrong you are.
> And masks? How many graphs of cases/day with mask mandate transitions overlayed are required before people realize masks did nothing? Whole countries went from nearly nobody wearing them, to everyone wearing them, overnight, and COVID cases/day didn't even notice.
Most of those countries didn't actually follow their mask mandates - the USA for example. I visited because the PRC was preventing vaccine deliveries to Taiwan so I flew to the USA to get a vaccine, and I distinctly remember thinking "yeah... Of course" when walked around an airport of people chin diapering.
Taiwan halted a couple outbreaks from pilots completely, partially because people are so used to wearing masks when they're sick here (and also because the mask mandate was strictly enforced everywhere).
I visited DC a year later where they had a memorial for victims of COVID. It was 700,000 white flags near the Washington monument when I visited, as I recall it broke a million a few months later.