4 ms·

> Eliezer is one of a handful of people putting their reputation on the line I have a hard time understanding why anyone takes Yudkowski seriously. What has he

by api 3y ago

> Eliezer is one of a handful of people putting their reputation on the line I have a hard time understanding why anyone takes Yudkowski seriously. What has he done other than found a cult around self-referential ideologies? By self-referential I mean the ideology's proof rests on its own claims and assertions. Rationalism is rational because it is rational according to its own assertions and methods, not because it has accomplished anything in the real world or been validated in any scientific or empirical-historical way. Longtermism is particularly inane. It defers everything to a hypothetical ~infinitely large value ~infinitely far in the future, thereby devaluing any real-world pragmatic problems that exist today. War? Climate change? Inequality? Refugee crises? None of that's important compared to the creation of trillions of hypothetical future minds in a hypothetical future utopia whose likelihood we can hypothetically maximize with NaN probability. You can see how absurd this is by applying it recursively. Let's say we have colonized the galaxy and there are in fact trillions of superintelligent minds living in a pain-free immortal near-utopia. Can we worry about mere proximate problems now? No, of course not. There are countless trillions of galaxies waiting to be colonized! Value is always deferred to a future beyond any living person's time horizon. The end result of this line of reasoning is the same as medieval religious scholasticism that deferred all questions of human well being to the next world. I just brought this up to provide one example of the inane nonsense this cult churns out. But what do I know. I obviously have a lower IQ than these people.

staunton 3y ago
> found a cult around self-referential ideologies That's something. > Rationalism is rational because it is rational... In his ideology, "rational" means "the way of thinking that best lets you achieve your goals". This not self-referential. A more appropriate criticism might be "meaningless by itself". I guess the self-referential aspect is that you're supposed to think about whether or not you're thinking well. At a basic level, that sounds useful despite being self-referential, in the same way that bootstrapping is useful. The question is if course what Yudkowski makes of this basic premise, which is hard to evaluate. The controversy about "longtermism" has two parts. The first is a disagreement about how much to discount the future. Some people think "making absolutely sure humanity survives the next 1000 years" is very important, some people think it's not that important. There's really no way to settle this question, it's a matter of preference. The second part is about the actual estimate of how big some dangers are. The boring part of this is that people disagree about facts and models, where more discussion is the way to go if you care about the results (which you might not). However, there is a more interesting difference between people who are/aren't sympathetic to longtermism, which lies in how they think about uncertainty. For example, suppose you make your best possible effort (maybe someone paid you to make this worthwhile for you) to predict how likely some danger is. This prediction is now your honest opinion about this likelihood because if you'd thought it was over/under-estimated, you'd adjusted your model. Suppose also that your model seems very likely to be bad. You just don't know in which direction. In this situation, people sympathetic towards longtermism tend to say "that's my best prediction, it says there is a significant risk, we have to care about it. Let's take some precautions already and keep working on the model.". People who don't like it, in the same situation, tend to say "this model is probably wrong and hence tells us nothing useful. We shouldn't take precautions and stop modeling because it doesn't seem feasible to build a good model.". I think both sides have a point. One side would think and act as best they can, and take precautions against a big risk that's hard to evaluate. The other would prioritize actions that are likely useful and avoid spending resources on modeling if that's unlikely to lead to good predictions. I find it a very interesting question which of these ways of dealing with uncertainty is more appropriate in everyday life, or in some given circumstances . As you rightfully point out, the "rationalist/longtermmist" side of the discussion has an inherent tendency to detach from reality and lose itself discussing the details of lots of very unrealistic scenarios, which they must work hard to counteract. The ideas naturally attract people who enjoy armchair philosophizing and aren't likely to act based on concrete consequences of their abstract framework.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

by api 3y ago

staunton 3y ago

> found a cult around self-referential ideologies That's something. > Rationalism is rational because it is rational... In his ideology, "rational" means "the way of thinking that best lets you achieve your goals". This not self-referential. A more appropriate criticism might be "meaningless by itself". I guess the self-referential aspect is that you're supposed to think about whether or not you're thinking well. At a basic level, that sounds useful despite being self-referential, in the same way that bootstrapping is useful. The question is if course what Yudkowski makes of this basic premise, which is hard to evaluate. The controversy about "longtermism" has two parts. The first is a disagreement about how much to discount the future. Some people think "making absolutely sure humanity survives the next 1000 years" is very important, some people think it's not that important. There's really no way to settle this question, it's a matter of preference. The second part is about the actual estimate of how big some dangers are. The boring part of this is that people disagree about facts and models, where more discussion is the way to go if you care about the results (which you might not). However, there is a more interesting difference between people who are/aren't sympathetic to longtermism, which lies in how they think about uncertainty. For example, suppose you make your best possible effort (maybe someone paid you to make this worthwhile for you) to predict how likely some danger is. This prediction is now your honest opinion about this likelihood because if you'd thought it was over/under-estimated, you'd adjusted your model. Suppose also that your model seems very likely to be bad. You just don't know in which direction. In this situation, people sympathetic towards longtermism tend to say "that's my best prediction, it says there is a significant risk, we have to care about it. Let's take some precautions already and keep working on the model.". People who don't like it, in the same situation, tend to say "this model is probably wrong and hence tells us nothing useful. We shouldn't take precautions and stop modeling because it doesn't seem feasible to build a good model.". I think both sides have a point. One side would think and act as best they can, and take precautions against a big risk that's hard to evaluate. The other would prioritize actions that are likely useful and avoid spending resources on modeling if that's unlikely to lead to good predictions. I find it a very interesting question which of these ways of dealing with uncertainty is more appropriate in everyday life, or in some given circumstances . As you rightfully point out, the "rationalist/longtermmist" side of the discussion has an inherent tendency to detach from reality and lose itself discussing the details of lots of very unrealistic scenarios, which they must work hard to counteract. The ideas naturally attract people who enjoy armchair philosophizing and aren't likely to act based on concrete consequences of their abstract framework.

deleted 3y ago

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