Comment by api
4 days ago
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.
> They pick battles they can win and don't engage with ideas that really are challenging to their reasoning methods or priors
What's an example of one?
3 replies →
That or it’s just a blind spot. Plenty of people can say they are rational but not execute on it well.
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.
> but would they ever admit they were wrong about things they published themselves?
yes, frequently
https://www.lesswrong.com/search?query=i%20was%20wrong
IMO it seems to happen more often than in most other online communities
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.