Comment by ccppurcell
5 days ago
Once you decide that you believe what you believe because you are very smart and almost always believe true things, and the things you believe just happen to be the true ones (I am being unfair but I think this is the psychological effect of this so-called rationalism) it's not a big leap to: everything I have to say is worth hearing.
> So why, then, does truth sometimes engender hatred? Why does the servant of God come to be an enemy of those who want a happy life, even though true happiness is joy in the truth? The reason must be this: Our love of truth is such that when we love something that’s not the truth, we pretend to ourselves that we we love is the truth. Then, because we hate to be proved wrong, we’re unwilling to be convinced that we’ve deceived ourselves. In this way, then, people hate the truth for the sake of whatever it is that they love more than the truth. They love truth when it shines warmly on them, and hate it when it rebukes them.
* Augustine, Confessions, Book 10, ch. 23 / sec. 34, https://wist.info/augustine-of-hippo/46880/
Feels personal
I feel like Scott Alexander sacrificed the truth on the alter of status a long time ago
Why?
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~ 397–400 AD(!)
Can this truly be the reason? Aren't there infinitly many non-verbose writers out there who believe themselves to be correct just as much?
I suspect a reason for the length of rationalist writers is often rather that they value being objectively correct more than others. Length is just an attempt to be less wrong by including many aspects of a topic to paint as complete a picture as possible.
Additionally people often write what they like to read. It may be shocking to many, but some people may enjoy reading long form text that includes a lot of information that allows them to form their own thoughts. Just like some people enjoy noise music others would characterize as a frontal assault on human hearing. Those people would often find 90% of the music regular people enjoy mind-numbingly boring. Human taste is surprisingly diverse.
That doesn't mean that there isn't objectively bad rationalist writing (or objectively bad noise music). E.g. sometimes the train of thought is entirely missing and instead of building an argument it feels more like a lose pile of material that the author stumbled upon by chance in that specific order. If it is declared as that in the start, fine. If it pretends to be a great essay on the nature of $topic and then derails, that means the promise isn't kept.
I always get the impression that they correlate length and correctness. As if the Perfect Best Answer to some question is an infinitely long essay that resembles someone’s rambling mind obsessing over a particular topic, forever.
Which is part of the reason why many people find their actual arguments lacking, and the attitude self-absorbed. Because they don’t seem super interested in arriving at a precise argument, but rather in demonstrating the operation of their mind.
Length is no substitute for substance. However, reality, as they say, has an surprising amount of detail. That means if someones goal is to adequately represent it you will not be able to do so in a engaging, polemic one-liner that puts everything neatly into a box.
Note that within my argument the arrow of causality points in one direction: To explain complex topics adequately a certain amount of length is needed. That obviously doesn't mean long texts are automatically the more adequate explaination of a complex topic in all cases.
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> Length is just an attempt to be less wrong
Don't know if it was intended but there's something to be said about the discussions happening at length on www.lesswrong.com and I felt I had to acknowledge your penmanship.
On the actual topic I for one think some people like reading themselves just as much as hearing themselves thus they're writing for their own audience of one.
Yeah sure. Writing is a way of structuring your thinking. Now whether you need to air that out to the public is a question of character. I tend to do 90% of writing purely for myself and need to force myself to write a blog post, for others that may differ.
Some of my favourite websites are weird 90s website where some weirdo decided to dedicate a website to their extremely obscure niche interest in way more detail than anybody would ever need.
Oh God, that's why pastors keep giving long-winded sermons that are claim after claim after claim and without any argumentative structure (and divine inspiration stands in for self-belief in one's own intelligence)
The only time I was wrong was when I thought I was wrong
Einstein?
Gesundheit.
Such a great description of Rationalism: "I am very smart and I made up a methodology that is infallible therefore..."
It's like a secular IQ-Calvinist take on infallible religious authority.
An ingredient you're missing though is what I call "intellectual edgelording." All Rationalists don't do this, but it's endemic in the community and has helped give birth to things like neoreaction (monarchy is good actually), extreme "if anyone builds it everyone dies" AI doomerism, and has made them very open to things like "race science" and other "forbidden ideas THEY don't want you to believe!"
They'd never characterize it that way though. They launder it through "giving a fair hearing to ideas that are outside the normal Overton window" or similar framings. But if you look closely, the ideas they give that fair hearing to all have a certain kind of bent: edgy, elitist, or validating to their belief that intelligence can be reduced to a single scalar 'g' and this confers some kind of divine authority.
I think the AI doomerism might stem from this. If intelligence can be summarized by one scalar value than if we build something whose 'g' is on average much higher than ours, it will of course annihilate us. The other unexamined prior there is that intelligence is necessarily supremacy which is necessarily dominating or genocidal. Which leads back to why they fall so easily for fascist-adjacent and racist ideas.
The least charitable take I have on that line of thinking is: they at least secretly believe that lower-IQ people should all die, so they project that belief onto their hypothetical superintelligent AI. It would, of course, come to the same conclusion, right?
I've never seen someone describe the movement as infallible. They are pretty self critical if you actually read their writing.
I think their self-criticism is an act, a sham to make their arguments look stronger. They pick battles they can win and don't engage with ideas that really are challenging to their reasoning methods or priors, especially if they come from outside the rationalist community.
It's like this:
I can write an unbreakable cryptographic system by inventing one, going through the motions of making up attacks and showing that those attacks are impossible, and then concluding my system is unbreakable. Anyone can design cryptography they themselves cannot break.
Ask any cryptographer how well that works.
This is pretty normal human behavior, but it's not rational.
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Yeah but would they ever admit they were wrong about things they published themselves? Are they open to criticism they didn't come up with themselves?
I feel (but gut feeling, I'm just an internet commenter / shitposter that doesn't have the time or inclination to fully engage with these people) that the bigger rationalist bloggers all stand on a tall soapbox, broadcast something, then disappear into their own head again.
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Ahh yes, the extreme intellectual humility of lesswrong and the EA guys! ;)
Correct. They basically just want intelligence to determine social ranking in society.
Whether society eats the people at the bottom or not doesn't matter to them, they just want to be at the top.
If AI is at the top then they will be thrown into the hypothetical meat grinder [0] they thought they were safe from. So AI is the devil to them because it breaks their ideology at its core.
[0] Is it hypothetical if a rationalist is scared of it?
I think a lot of people are tempted to define the people they disagree with as idiots. Not all of them write down their thoughts at length. Both the verbosity and the edgelordery seem to be part of the culture of that community rather than inherent consequences. I think the sequences and HPMOR started or popularised a sort of norm that length is indicative of serious thought.
When I was younger I kinda liked edgy topics and stances for the sake of being edgy. I can easily see how self identified rationalist people that want e.g. racial superiority to be true persuade them self into believing that by looking at economical outcomes and crime statistics handwaiving away historical circumstances and the pressure on the bottom rungs of society which are in the bottom be design.
Their leaning towards fascism is some sort of reductionism for these people I think. In essence political violence make the perpetrators more powerful than if they were nice playing liberals given the same popular support. Thus fuscism. Q.E.D.
Way too little focus on second or third order effects.
Rightwing radicals that 10 to 30 years ago would say they are libertarians are now fascists instead. It is really strange to witness. I think there is a lack of focus on second or third order effects. It is just problem and superficial cause. How hard can it be, just do it, etc.
On the contrary - I found rationalist bloggers to be the most willing to change their mind in face of new evidence out of all groups of people I've ever met o the internet. Although HN commenters are a close second.
I think rationalism might be one of those things where those self identifying and those practicing might only be slightly intersecting.
So it does depend on what you mean by rationalist.
I think it is vastly more likely that those who feel like everything they say is incredibly important might just be idiots who self identify as rationalists, and those who are rationalists are doing more thinking than broadcasting.
That feels like a "no true scotsman"...
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In the context of this discussion, rationalist should be taken to refer to people who are or have been active on LessWrong
This unfortunately doesn’t help if it isn’t paired with withholding judgement in the face of insufficient evidence, but rationalists don’t do that. They just pick a model they like and continue, and the burden of scrutinizing that model is on others.
Making rational decisions means picking the most responsible option given imperfect information. It doesn't mean delaying decisions until you have perfect information because that point never comes.
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Rationalists seem to believe that their ability to convince themselves of anything given enough evidence is a sign of intelligence. It's not. It's a sign of being disconnected from yourself and your true values. There is a great amount of wisdom and intelligence in properly honed intuition.
Rational thought should help you understand yourself, not disappear.
What you're really saying is that intelligence is multi-modal, what we'd call an "ensemble" in machine learning terminology. Intuition is another mode, a cognitive process that doesn't look or feel like symbolic reason but has evolved to do something that fills in symbolic reasoning's blind spots or serve some other evolutionary function.
I agree.
I might be wrong, of course, but I would argue that general intelligence -- meaning intelligence reducible to a single scalar 'g' -- does not exist. All intelligence is a hybrid ensemble and an adaptation to a particular niche or set of niches. I'm a reasonably smart human but I'd make a really dumb tree or dolphin.
To get started, look up the no free lunch theorem.
There's room for debate here though. I think our technological journey with AI is going to help answer some of these questions.
With the Rationalists, I get the sense that 'g' is a faith, a prior they won't examine.
I have never seen a room get colder than when I told a bunch of rationalists that intuition has value.
This so-called rationalist movement is better described as rationalisationist movement.
Rationalisation is the default mode of operation for humans. Believe first; find evidence to justify it. That's what everyone is doing. Not that self proclaimed rationalists would be free of that. But pretty unfair characterization for a movement whose key goal is to that as little as possible.
The heart of science is not doing this but checking your reason against reality constantly.
It took us thousands upon thousands of years to arrive at this simple idea because it's a blow to our egos and to primate hierarchy and its pretensions of authority. If I am big monkey, I must be right.
I would say it is spot on based on what they do, despite being based at doing the opposite.
Their stated key goal is avoiding it, sure. But in practice?
My idea is that through first principles and made up probabilities, they can reach any conclusion they want. But there's a veil of authority: "I'm a rationalist, therefore I arrived this conclusion, surely not from rationalization, but from first principles, probabilities and logic! It doesn't matter if it sounds insane, because it uses first principles, probabilities and logic!".
Not sure - perhaps true for an oversocialized subset or people who try to wield and gather social influence.
Robinson Crusoe has no use for rationalization. Him rationalizing the berry he ate is not poisonous, or that the shack he built will hold up in the storm is outright dangerous, and definitely useless.
Totally agree, it's like their singular defining characteristic.
It's just that: wanting to have more accurate beliefs. Believing that this is worthwhile even if it's hard to push against human nature of habitually "choosing" beliefs.
Pretty unfair of you to conflate a movement's stated goals with its behavior when the comment that you are replying to is very obviously talking about the latter. So rationalist!
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