11 ms·

The Zizians and the rationalist death cult

185 points by dsr_ 2y ago

imgabe 2y ago
When you find yourself in an -ism you’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere.
- omnibrain 2y ago
  Capitalism?
  - ben_w 2y ago
    I have vague memories of a scene from the UK comedy show "The Thin Blue Line" where a bunch of bad -isms were followed by counter-examples of good -isms, but despite the episode itself being easy to find (the episode is called "Ism Ism Ism"), I can't easily find the scene within the episode.
  - adbachman 2y ago
    Absolutely! If it means you are unable to make any decisions or reach any conclusions which do not align with your -ism, then you're in a dead end.
- getnormality 2y ago
  Ah, so your thing must be skepticism.
- pavlov 2y ago
  I find myself in Cubism and realize I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere, but perspective has collapsed all around me and the way out is blocked by fragments of guitar strings and noses of long-dead Parisian mistresses.
  - Trasmatta 2y ago
    That reminds me of this excellent Calvin and Hobbes strip: https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1990/06/17 https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1990/06/17
- DiscourseFan 2y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxsNU7ZZAlU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxsNU7ZZAlU
- layer8 2y ago
  That sounds like a criticism.
roenxi 2y ago
My favourite part about the rationalists is that they are a completely normal community apart from the rationalism. You'd think a group of people devoted to being rational would be a group of monk-like beings, cerebral, disconnected from the concerns of the flesh. Instead we get this weird hotbed of fanfiction, cults, wild sex crime allegations, financial schemes so brazen they almost wouldn't qualify as fraud and a vague sense of some sort of group that are capable of any evil. Plus I can't stop laughing at the idea of Aella as "that rationalist hooker" [0] - a combination of words which never fails to make me chuckle. The whole scene really deserves some sort of film, book, video game or something. I can't get a vision out of my head where some straitlaced person realises rationalists are involved and their face twists in horror. Keeping an eye on them over the years the communities that grew up around LessWrong really are as good as any work of fiction. Plus they're doing their best to make the world better and maybe people will learn something about Bayesianism, who knows. [0] https://knowingless.com/about/ https://knowingless.com/about/
- williamcotton 2y ago
  Oh come on, the vast majority of LW meetups are about as racy as the IRL comment section of HN.
  - bordercases 2y ago
    The Berkeley and New York scenes are special in that they lead and guide the community on a whole mainly by example.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Even the completely anonymous 18+ only rationalist telegram groups are only just as racy as the normal non-yiff furry groups.
- getnormality 2y ago
  I think they're basically secular humanists who decided they wanted a more muscular guiding ideology.
deleted 2y ago
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wslh 2y ago
Rephrasing Arthur C. Clarke: "Any sufficiently sophisticated ideology is indistinguishable from madness".
- flippyhead 2y ago
  I love this, but I'm not sure it's right. As for cults, people want to join them. It's more like any sufficiently sophisticated ideology is hard to distinguish from reality.
dismalaf 2y ago
This is fascinating... Also some apparent link to SV and Ai? Reminds me of this story: https://futurism.com/researcher-openai-sex-drug-parties https://futurism.com/researcher-openai-sex-drug-parties Also both the cult founder and person who got shot in the beginning of the story are transwomen? Just started reading https://zizians.info https://zizians.info ... Apparently this cult has a thing for transwomen, or influences them, or something. Lots of weirdness and I don't have time to read it all right now. All very interesting and will probably be a movie someday.
jampekka 2y ago
A lot of the "rationalist" scene would be more accurately called "rationalizationist".
- api 2y ago
  It’s reasoning without reality, the same mocked with sayings like “arguing about how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.” Reasoning must be checked against observation and experiment. It must be checked against reality. It’s not just that humans are fallible and full of biases and failure modes. It’s that reason itself is only capable of crystalline perfection in domains where all priors can be enumerated and the system is closed, like pure math. Even there we know of mathematical constructs that exhibit phenomena like emergence and computational irreducibility where the future state can’t be guessed without fully evaluating the function; where “leaps” are provably impossible. The craziest stuff is some of the longtermism stuff. They are literally writing sci fi (and cliche sci fi at that) and then reasoning from it as if it were real and using those conclusions to guide present day moral and political thinking. Absolute lunacy. We can’t predict the next 50 years let alone the next 5000. Sometimes I think one of the evolutionary counter pressures that has likely prevented human IQ from being driven entirely up and to the right is that high IQ increases propensity for delusional thinking. I’ve met quite a few incredibly brilliant idiots. The smarter you are the more elaborate a prison you can construct for your own brain. The major innovation of the discipline of science (and it is a discipline) was to put forward a method to avoid this by taking a step, confirming, and only then taking the next step. It’s pretty simple but it requires restraint even when there’s a shiny thing that looks so “truthy” and cool.
  - iterateoften 2y ago
    > Sometimes I think one of the evolutionary counter pressures that has likely prevented human IQ from being driven entirely up and to the right is that high IQ increases propensity for delusional thinking. I had often had this thought too. Imagine if humans were 100x more intelligent, would we have necessarily survived for 200k odd years? Society, technology, morality all evolve at different paces and if one “outcompetes” the others then an imbalance can happen and humanity could be wiped out. Imagine if a caveman was super intelligent enough to build some type of weapon of mass destruction but humanity doesn’t yet have enough experience to police this person or have laws or power structures to keep themselves safe. If you consider language and “memetics” technology than you have to consider beings 100x smarter could also be master manipulators capable of leading the group off the ledge. so many ways civilization could be wiped out. Really the only reason we are around today is that society as a whole’s ability to implement strategies at recognizing dangerous groups and individuals outpaces the individual or small group’s ability to wield technology for dangerous means (well at least up until now).
lemonberry 2y ago
Interesting to see CFAR involved. I'm a big fan of Julia Galef. She's the president and cofounder of CFAR. One of the things that struck me most was an interview with her years ago talking about the people that CFAR let into their programs. She said something to the effect that they didn't let people in that were trying to change other people's minds, but that were out to clarify their own thinking. I really liked that. I'm a big fan of intellectual honesty: pursuing truth (however loosey-goosey that is for humans) rather needing to be right or win the argument.
- zozbot234 2y ago
  > they didn't let people in that were trying to change other people's minds, but that were out to clarify their own thinking. I'm not sure how much we can take this at face value, given that the OP mentions a guy (Michael Vassar), who apparently associates himself with the rationalist space and has been accused of brainwashing people and driving them crazy with "mind tricks". There's even been allegations that the now infamous craziness of this Zizian group may effectively be downstream of that. (An earlier HN discussion is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42849281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42849281 )
  - lemonberry 2y ago
    That could very well be true. However, it's still an important idea to me and, I think, a lot of others. People and organizations change. It's possible the CFAR and its founders started out with one mission or goal and that changed internally for whatever reason.
    - Viliam1234 2y ago
      I have heard a version saying that Vassar changed (after he started experimenting with drugs). And at some moment later, he also got banned from the community.
throw241098 2y ago
What's so bad about this cult is all the murders. However, if you bracket out all the murders for a second (a big ask), I don't think there's anything particularly special about this cult. This is just the modern incarnation of something that's been going on for almost a hundred years in California. In California there are Bohemian social scenes with a mix of high-performing technical people, spiritual/New Age/woo people, and "human potential" secular spirituality and self-improvement. Magicians and Satanists involved in the founding of JPL (with a cameo from L. Ron Hubbard.) in the 1940s and 1950s. EST seminars, Esalen, UFO movements, communal yoga groups. Lesser known is the "General Semantics" movement (really quite similar to the Rationalists) from the 1950s. All these movements mix and overlap. Mostly these social scenes are weird but harmless. But genuine cults often form in them and then spin off. The Rationalists themselves are just another incarnation of this. They may seem totally bizarre, but if you just dig back in the history of California, they look very familiar. They are part of this stew of self-improvement/spirituality/tech/meditation. In particular they are the secular self-improvement people -- one thing they did is run training seminars where they teach you new thought techniques that will help you be more productive and successful. Many of them also engage in Buddhist meditation practices or take psychedelic drugs for exploration. In that scene, cults form. There have been multiple other rationalist-adjacent cults, although those did not kill people thank God. I think it's a mistake to start analyzing the rationalists' beliefs about Bayesianism and expected utility and all that, to try and wonder how a cult could have possibly formed in this social scene. Nothing should be less surprising. Now that this cult went on to commit multiple murders -- this is surprising and frightening. Perhaps some of the rationalist beliefs have something to do with it, but since there are a small number of other cults that have committed murders, looking at shared factors across all of them, such as charismatic psychopaths as leaders, may be a better choice. Edit: upon reading to the very very bottom of the article, the author makes the exact same point. I'll leave this up just in case others aren't good readers either.
- _yb2s 2y ago
  I see a lot of parallels between the rationalists and the Beatniks- both seem to be a social experiment of radically throwing out the existing culture and lifestyle, and trying to think through something new from scratch. In both cases there are a lot of failed experiments, and disastrous personal consequences for many of the individuals involved, but also a lot of discovery and good ideas. Both groups are even obsessed with Moloch (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/).
Trasmatta 2y ago
I've been following the "rationalist movement" for a long time, and there has always been so many early cult warning signs among the various sub groups. I'm sad that it's gone so far as to result in deaths and murder attempts with some of them. I expect it to get worse as some of the "rationalists" continue to embrace bizarre groupthink irrationality.
- pr337h4m 2y ago
  Utilitarianism can be used to justify literally anything, especially when paired with large scale drug use. FTX was just the beginning.
  - Trasmatta 2y ago
    Yeah, Yudkowsky saying many years ago that it would be better for one person to be tortured for 50 years than for 3^^^3 people to get a dust speck in their eye was pretty much everything I needed to know to realize this group was going to be a problem. And things just get worse from there.
    - iterateoften 2y ago
      > saying many years ago that it would be better for one person to be tortured for 50 years than 3^^^3 people getting a dust speck in their eye I just looked this up on lw and it is pretty slimy text. These weasels always leave it ambiguous to leave room to deny if their perfect rational view somehow goes wrong. Notice instead of actually having a backbone or taking the stance he just says > I think the answer is obvious. How about you? I’m not a christian but this sharply contrast the story of christ in which he sacrificed himself to in his mind spare billions from torture and the worst anguish in the universe. Here we see Yudkowsky casually implying that it is better for someone to get tortured to save the inconvenience of a speck of dust, but notice he doesn’t volunteer himself. Its fundamental to these rationalist and effective altruists that they are the right ones and others must sacrifice to fulfill the rationalist elitist intelligent world view. Look at FTX and this group. Their point of view it is OK for others to suffer financially and it is morally justified for the “intelligent” to steal and kill because they are the right ones and the ends justify the means.
ipnon 2y ago
It is quite humorous to me in a dark way how the preeminent ethics movement of our times seems to spawn the most detestable behavior. How many Bentham essays and LessWrong posts do you need to read to conclude that psychological manipulation and wonton murder do not in fact contribute to the wellbeing of the world? There is a certain personality for whom rationality takes over their whole being, and they lose all their ability to feel connected to others in a profound way, and at this point their behavior is simply derived from whatever is left after they do the math.
- TylerLives 2y ago
  I don't have a way to prove this and it's based purely on intuition/experience, but I disagree. I think ideology doesn't meaningfully influence such people. There is a deeper psychological drive and they only create a philosophical justification later, which is of little importance. This is perhaps true of humans in general.
  - OmarShehata 2y ago
    you're both correct. All humans have a hardware component, an ideology acts as an attractor. Humans finding connection with other humans like them is one of the strongest pulls for a human mind. It has great power to amplify & grow. This can go in a direction of thriving and growth, and "win win" with their environment, or it can go in a direction of hate and aggression
    - mycall 2y ago
      Confirmation of the id.
  - ta988 2y ago
    I see two outcomes usually in the rationalist community: - those who can manipulate language enough to justify their behavior and can then manipulate others - those who modify their behavior and usually have some kind of mental breakdown because of internal conflicts To me it is a predator-prey abusive LARP that got out of scope and feeds on fragile people looking for sense in their lives. Just look at how new comers are hazed and tested when they come on their forums and discords and what not.
boringg 2y ago
Ugh i hope this dies off as quickly as quickly as it has shown off. The less attention they get the better off we all are.
awanderingmind 2y ago
I have had zero real-life interaction with the rationalist space beyond exchanging some emails with people and reading numerous blog posts, reading lesswrong, and stuff like that, but this post seems to lean too far into drawing a conclusion about a very non-homogeneous group of people based on a few individuals that seem to be mentally unwell. While I have become less enthusiastic about rationalism (in the sense of this post, not in the sense of the philosophical tradition) over time, the space seems to consist mostly of nerdy people who try really hard to reason properly. Sure, they sometimes come to absurd conclusions, but in general they have interesting perspectives and analyses. Without data on the percentage of people who reach the cult-like status referenced in the post, it seems premature to deride the entire enterprise; in any sufficiently large population group you will have that type of behavior. On the other hand the point about them being related in spirit to the various 'self-improvement', 'New Age', or whatever movements in California surely isn't WRONG, but it feels a bit... underdeveloped? I'm sure there are loads of connections, simply because the movement seems to be centered (in meatspace, anyway) in California. A more scholarly analysis explicitly drawing the connections would be more useful (and interesting!) than an ad hominem comparison to Scientology and the Manson family(!).
- matthewdgreen 2y ago
  There are different subgroups within the rationalist movement, just as there are different subgroups within many organized religions. It’s totally normal to have a movement with plenty of generally normal people, and also to have a committed and very opinionated subgroup within that movement that has access to resources and power. You might think of Scientology or the Catholic Church as examples of organizations where this is made very explicit, but it can happen organically as well. The main thing that makes the rationalist/EA groups worrying, in my opinion, is the massive access to money and resources that also tends to be concentrated in the hands of the people with the strongest beliefs (see TFA or, more importantly, the AI “doomer” folks.) We’re talking about groups of smart people who genuinely fear the world is going to end, have convinced themselves that stopping it is critical to saving future humanity, in some cases have access to capable scientists, and most critically: have resources ranging into the 10s and 100s of million dollars. This is potentially a very dangerous situation if the folks in charge make bad decisions.
greatquux 2y ago
Holy crap, you can sleep only one side of your brain?! How would anyone think of even doing this?
- sd9 2y ago
  It does seem like a terrible idea. The side effects listed in the article sound rather scary.
  - jstanley 2y ago
    The risk of giving yourself "split personalities" should not be underestimated. I recently had a mild panic attack in which I became convinced that my subconscious was secretly working against me. It was terrifying, and I couldn't see a way to think myself out of it. In fact I thought the very fact that I was worrying about it proved that my subconscious had planted the idea in my conscious experience specifically to hurt me. What worked was going for a short walk and physically touching the ground with my hands. "Touch grass" actually works sometimes, I think because if the stimuli of the mind are coming from within, then you have no way to override bad ones and you just get echoes of the same negative thing over and over again. Whereas if you can get stimulus of any kind from the external world, then you have something else to pay attention to, you can turn the focus outwards and the feedback loop subsides. I no longer believe my subconscious is working against me. But I agreed to try to pay attention to its concerns and take them more seriously in the future, so that it has no reason to work against me.
    - hobs 2y ago
      This is no diss or slam, but if you are concerned about the inner workings of your mind working against you, I highly recommend some additional professional help to peel apart the onion a little bit more.
      - shadowgovt 2y ago
        Concur. Also concur on external stimulus, and I'm pretty sure it works for exactly the reason you identified. I find the intrusive thoughts show up in the evening precisely because there's less stimulus (inside and out; my brain is quieting itself for sleep, giving the nastier, weirder parts of it their chance to say just the stupidest shit "out loud"). A major eye-opener for me was learning, awhile ago, that we differ from some other animals in that our limbic system is completely "wrapped" in malleable neurons. Some animals have (as far as we can tell) implastic wiring leading from some stimulus constructs straight into that system: they receive a stimulus, they respond immediately with physiological, emotional change. Ours is far more deeply tied to the plastic layers of the brain; we have a huge capacity to learn very complex stimulus-response ties between the world around us and how we should set our emotional state. On the one hand, that's great! It's good to think that we can change our responses to stimuli in a way that, say, penguins can't. On the other hand... "plastic" doesn't mean "you can will yourself to change them willy-nilly." It's more that we're capable of developing "mental allergies." We are unusual in that we can develop things like PTSD: you were shot at the same time you saw a Volkswagen Beetle drive by? Congratulations, you now experience a visceral survival-focused reaction every time you see one of the most classic examples of German engineering, and you can't will that feeling to stop because your brain's physiology changed under the dim hope that somehow avoiding vaguely-round cars avoids bullets, too. Our brains are wonderful, transcendental things, but they're also machines and they're machines that can malfunction. It's good we have professionals who study this.
nla 2y ago
Clearly there are not enough mental institutions in the United States.
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benreesman 2y ago
So this is what effective altruism becomes on its way to full blown Time Cube? Because make no mistake, these folks with the public benefit corporations doing doomer PR around AI are very, very much a branch of this family tree.
DiscourseFan 2y ago
And they say studying Philosophy is useless! This idea of "Rationalism" does bear a remarkable correspondence to its 17th century cousin, in that it allows "Reason" to run wild, to go to the end of all its conclusions. That is the importance of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, as Kant introduces finitude into the discourse of philosophy; since, Reason, left to run wild, will always miss the empirical world. Thus, there can be stupid questions, there can be things that are just "nuts," not because they can be proven right or wrong, but because the very basis of the question is already outside of empirical possibility and practical use.
- sevensor 2y ago
  Not to mention the parallels with ancient fringe philosophical schools like the Cynics and Cyrenaics spinning off from the Socratic tradition.
thrance 2y ago
What's particularly scary about this cult, when compared to others, is how some of their weird ideas permeate to those in powers. Tech oligarchs speak of "long-termism", "accelerationism", etc. They use these concepts to undermine worker rights and justify increasing inequalities, all in a vague utilitarian perspective of future utopia.
foldr 2y ago
A tangentially related classic from the archives: https://web.archive.org/web/20130426115531/http://plover.net/~bonds/cultofbayes.html https://web.archive.org/web/20130426115531/http://plover.net...
moolcool 2y ago
The funniest thing to me about “rationalists” and “less wrong” is the implication that other schools of thought are “irrationalist” or “more wrong”. The smugness comes before anything else.
- I-M-S 2y ago
  I always read it the other way around - a humble acknowledgement that they're still wrong, just less than whatever came before.
  - moolcool 2y ago
    It’s smug to say that your group bickering on an Internet forum is “less wrong” than centuries of philosophers and ethicists
    - azeirah 2y ago
      I've always understood it as by using principled rationalism, you will become _less wrong_ over time.
    - golly_ned 2y ago
      They’re really invested in the study of philosophy, epistemology, and ethics and how it applies to their lives, and frequently reference philosophers and ethicists.
      - moolcool 2y ago
        Half the time I come across that community online, it’s just love triangles between people with anime profile pictures, “rationalizing” atrocities, and comparing IQ test scores.
    - slooonz 2y ago
      You average grad student in physics is less wrong than Newton in physics (he knows about special relativity for example). It’s not "smugness", of course building on the shoulders of those who comes before means building better than them.
TZubiri 2y ago
"Ziz believes there are two kinds of core, "good" and "nongood". "Nongood" cores are the most common (about 95% of the population)." https://youtu.be/h242eDB84zY?si=Q2Ef9Hi1kqMFdeNP https://youtu.be/h242eDB84zY?si=Q2Ef9Hi1kqMFdeNP
- wellthisisgreat 2y ago
  Dungeons & Dragons did it better.
olalonde 2y ago
> By the same token, the ability to dismiss an argument with a “that sounds nuts,” without needing recourse to a point-by-point rebuttal, is anathema to the rationalist project. But it’s a pretty important skill to have if you want to avoid joining cults. Aka as "common sense". It seems like these people make small errors in their base assumptions or reasoning. Over time, as these mistakes compound, they can lead to increasingly bizarre philosophies. Common sense might serve as a safeguard against such pitfalls, but it is frowned upon in those circles.
bowsamic 2y ago
They’re not only socially tiring but philosophically uninteresting
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morpheos137 2y ago
[flagged]
- perlgeek 2y ago
  > There is no reason to believe in a singularity. There are reasons, and the proponents aren't shy about stating them. > Technological progress follows a sigmoid pattern not an exponential pattern. That's true, but you don't know in advance where it will start to flatten. > No significant new physics applicable to humans has been discovered since maybe the 1970s or 80s It really depends on what you call "new physics". There are lots of discoveries related to quantum dots, graphene, high-temperature superconductivity, meta materials etc. Those aren't really "new" in the sense that they contradict the Schrödinger equation, but that was also true for Giant magnetoresistance, which was crucial for magnetic hard drives. Heck, a new form of magnetism was discovered just last year, first published in December 2024 (see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08234-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08234-x for example).
  - morpheos137 2y ago
    Where in nature, outside supposedly, black holes do we see singularities? Humans and all human technology are a product of nature, why should we expect abstract "intelligence" resulting from human technology to accumulate into a singularity (unregulated positive feedback) instead of being subject to limiting constraints like every other natural phenomenon? Belief in a singularity is the most irrational thing I have heard of. Supernatural things like the resurrection of Christ seem more likely than the Kurzweil/Yudkowski singularity. The idea appeals to people who don't understand what intelligence is. I first heard of it and rejected it in high school more than 20 years ago. Yudkowski didn't graduate highschool or go to college so he spent his time using his verbal skills to convince people he knew what he was talking about when in fact he is less of an authority in his field than even a moderately educated, intelligent person. The fact this stuff continues to appeal to silicon valley types just goes to show they are not in fact much different from populist conspiracy believers in fly over country. It is kind of funny actually to me, especially how these folks call themselves "rationalists..."
qrsjutsu 2y ago
once a person breaks or is broken through a specific cognitive barrier, rationalism becomes the easiest form of thinking and living. you could make it a bit harder on yourself and help your genes and synapses get back on track and your offspring evolve but you deliberately decide against it because it's less effort to succumb to the worst version of others than think about or work on any version of yourself. math, science, money, the psycho-social level, it doesn't really matter. it's a bit like people who just throw the towel and accept what limits them or their endeavor and people who just engineer something to solve their problem and evolve. rationalists throw the towel and accept what is, despite having all the evidence that it is NOT so. throw in some statistics and they'll take it (Quillette) as a general truth, emphasizing their understanding of the small sample, of course :D, and then they do a lot to make that truth work. that's why rationalist thinking in science and engineering and business falls short all the time. short of contextual potential and necessity, not under some utopian or dystopian "perfect conditions" but in the real world. they follow something allegedly perfect because striving for the next better and forever imperfect thing triggers some psychological or linguistic trauma, the resolve of which they did not put in the work into. this is commonly abused by "top-down" for status, covetousness, control, and it's the main sub-textual theme of therapeutic techniques and methods and everywhere in the advertisement and entertainment industry and trigger the whole reinforcement cycle as soon as they can get into the next generation of child or teen minds. it's too poofy, really, as if poofy wanted to have their own concept behind why a different kind of poofy is their real self and requires numerous surgeries and entirely different sets of hormones from somewhere else in the animal kingdom. "it should cost a billion to look that good". wtf. yeah, sure, there's statistics and algorithms, and linguistics can be twisted and turned either way but any proper scrutiny of these people and their thinking usually ends up in some whiny rejection to face illusions and the mechanics behind those illusions. it works, of course, but it really does not bode all that well. It's enough to understand that if your narrative is "rational", it's about as rational as that of the Church when they fucked Jesus and some of the greatest scientists, inventors in history. Rationality leads to Mafia-style thinking, buying wins and titles in competitions like the Fußball-Weltmeisterschaft and while most people don't care because it's just bread and games, it should bother rational people even more than anyone, because fraud breaks rational links. If A or B are complete fucking bullshit and actually unrelated to each other or their context, then A + B equals something that is not a rational result - not a result at all, actually. I used to always think "organic" and "natural" evolution and development are better, but the "AI" industry proved that it applies to artificial evolution and progress as well. And it's all due to Game Theory rationality and whiny grown-ups with childhood trauma or the fear that their offspring might evolve beyond their methods and lose their position in the deluded hierarchies for the sake of better ways, better living, better loving, better thinking. To give even more attack surface and inspiration: if you can't admit symbiosis is possible because you got mobbed or can't stand losing with or without sabotage, then you will attempt to break anyone who made symbiosis happen, going so far as to burn everything down that worked and is evolving __perfectly fine, or you slowly narrow the field of possibilities to prove some "self-fulfilling" systems effect (over time).
whatshisface 2y ago
I don't really care about whether this person is criticising the author's moral philosophy, I care about this thing about sex crime at MIRI.
- apsec112 2y ago
  The allegations were not true and the accuser retracted them. See MIRI's statement here: https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1q0uv-sPpmvmm_5YH6zSBBqDe098O_bwT_EzAkB7BRak/mobilebasic https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1q0uv-sPpmvmm_5YH6zSB...
- sd9 2y ago
  The allegations were not true, and this moral philosophy is now responsible for a handful of killings and suicides.
jonstewart 2y ago
A college roommate of mine had a joke: “what’s the difference between Ayn Rand and the tooth fairy? No one believes in the tooth fairy when they grow up.” I feel like it could be updated for Yudkowsky easily enough. I don’t want to waste my time reading all this; as a mid-40s parent living on the East coast, I feel like the appropriate response to any discussion of rationalism is “grow up.”
- falcor84 2y ago
  I understand your sentiment, but would strongly disagree. Even if you really think that rationalism offers its followers nothing of value, it's still enlightening to try to understand what it is about the human psyche that draws people towards it, and how one might go about offering a better version of that.
  - jonstewart 2y ago
    Why would that effort be enlightening? Many many more people are part of Falun Gong; shouldn’t I prioritize learning more about Falun Gong and what it is about the human psyche that draws people towards it? And why do I need to offer such people a better version? Given the choice between reading a good book or Harry Potter fanfic from a guy who’s scared of floating point numbers, shouldn’t I read the good book?
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Fraterkes 2y ago
Slightly offtopic but, Lesswrong and the Rationality community more broadly have had AI-safety as their main focus for nearly as long as they exist. Now that AI is actually making advancements, very little of that work seems to have had much effect. Theres the famous Vonnegut qoute about the combined effort of all preeminent artists protesting the Vietnam war having the effect of a pie dropped from a step-ladder. Id argue that the vietnam war protests were vastly more effective at achieving anything than the AI-safety research. So isn't all of the above an essentially complete indictment of the rationality movement, seeing as it has effectiveness and pragmatism as its main pillars?
- kloomi 2y ago
  This is mostly because actually working on AI systems, rather than just blogging about some pie-in-the-sky assumptions of AI systems, is almost entirely outside of the skill set of Eliezer Yudkowsky and other LessWrong enthusiasts. They are remarkably ignorant on the topic apart from the small niche they carved out to bloviate upon.
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    Philosophy is a useful discipline, but there's a chronic trap in it shown historically: getting way too high on your own supply. It's possible to build a logical chain that reaches some very solid conclusions that turns out to be way far out from where evidence or measurable reality lies, and (especially when the stories in those conclusions are fun or compelling) they can sometimes overshadow the reality they initially set out to explore. The Greeks are credited for conceiving of atoms originally, but it's always worth remembering that they had few tools to investigate their idea, and it was just one of dozens of ideas at the time of the true nature of reality, the rest of which are now known as outlandish. Besides, our modern understanding of atoms as envelopes of quantized probability in a semi-measurable universe bears little resemblance to their concept of them. The LessWrong philosophy on AI would be useful... If AI looked anything like that.
- streptomycin 2y ago
  It provides a little evidence in that direction, but not much. If I give you 10:1 odds on a coin flip and you lose, that is not a complete indictment of your betting strategy. I doubt many people thought AI safety research was guaranteed to succeed either.
saddat 2y ago
We have a lot of names these days for mentally ill people
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Bengalilol 2y ago
Is it just a sparkle in the universe, or the rise of the next movement to take Scientology’s place? I bet on the sparkle and fade since everything is so self destructive. Amazing read, so keenly written, on a new form of the good old « waste your brain like never » principle.
antonkar 2y ago
Curious how people who are supposed to be rational, have never read what is anger (or “badness” and “evilness” as some people still call it) - the best way to do it is to read any recent meta analysis on what is the most effective anger treatment. It’s cognitive therapy and it not only explains the mechanics of it: misunderstanding - worry and resulting anger (anything enforced on another without consent is anger, even if you think it’s good for them). So we actually have predictive understanding of the mechanics of “good” and “evil” - a person without or with anger management problems. “Evil” is nothing more than misunderstanding, worrying and protecting yourself (often for reasons that they invented themselves after trying to read the mind of another - something that’s impossible) - forcefully enforcing something upon another. “Good” is nothing more than trying to understand another, not fearing (because you understood another and yourself) and as a result not trying to enforce your will upon them
screye 2y ago
A comment on another thread mentioned California's predisposition to New Age cults. California makes it easy to avoid touching grass. It lacks the population density of the Northeast Corridor which forces social collisions. It lacks the conservative pressure of middle American Suburbia which forces conformity. Lastly, it allows you to circumvent globally consistent corporate culture through well-paying backend (not people facing) jobs. Intelligent misfits must touch grass. Like glacier carved mountains, normal social collisions force misfits to step outside their own head. It scrubs the trivially repulsive parts off them. Ofc, young misfits being willing to entertain novel/strange ideas results in bullying from normal people. It's tempting to disregard all normal people as close minded bigots. However, it's important for misfits to continue pushing at understanding. Normal people are harmless. But,these misfits are both intelligent and high agency. So they have a capacity for both great good & evil. Put simply, these misfits need common sense. Because when spiraling misfits find spiraling misfits, they can accelerate into dark places real fast. Add a few drops of common sense, and it stops the stupidest ideas right at their inception.
- toss1 2y ago
  Excellent description of how things can go off the rails, very far off the rails. It also brings to mind the role of FU money insulating people from consequences and allowing them to live with near-zero empathy or common sense, or consideration of how their actions will affect others. Brings to mind what entirely un-elected Elon Musk is doing tonight, having just gotten full access to the full set of highly internal US treasury payment data, which would ordinarily be considered a massive security breach... [0] https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-elon-musk-doge-treasury-5e26cc80fcb766981cea56afd57ae759 https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-elon-musk-doge-treas...
  - d0mine 2y ago
    Isn't it like an engineer requiring access to logs to optimize the backend?
    - DiscourseFan 2y ago
yencabulator 2y ago
> self-knowledge, spectral sight, DRM stripping So, yet another new age cult?
_zagj 2y ago
I get people are probably going to flag this like they did the other article (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897871), probably more so out of concern for the trans optics (Ziz and many in her orbit are trans/non-binary) than how it reflects on the wider rationalist community. But we should be able to discuss why this group, which is influential in discussions of AI alignment, is producing these people. Zizians aren't the only ones. Luigi Mangione was also a rationalist (and cis), and I remember a thread on a certain website that documented some other oddball fellow travelers. How does a community dedicated to "rationalism," whose leader writes Harry Potter fanfics, produce people like this? Does it attract maladjusted people to begin with? One common thread seems to be psychedelics. Mangione, for example, experimented with psychedelics heavily (possibly to treat pain) not long before he assassinated the United CEO.
- Viliam1234 2y ago
  > Luigi Mangione was also a rationalist What? Okay, my first reaction was "I should check Wikipedia, because if this is true (and probably even if it is not), David Gerard will certainly make a huge subsection on Wikipedia about it". Turns out, what Wikipedia says about Mangione and rationalist is only this: > Journalist Robert Evans described Mangione as being associated with a loosely-defined online subculture called the "gray tribe" or the "rationalist movement", whose members he described as "self-consciously intellectual and open-minded, [and] preoccupied with learning how to overcome their own mental biases. Ok, checking the journalist's article: > ”Increasingly looks like we've got our first gray tribe shooter, and boy howdy is the media not ready for that,” wrote the journalist and extremism expert Robert Evans, who analysed Mangione’s online life earlier this week. > There's no single accepted name for this loose, extremely online subculture of bloggers, philosophers, shitposters and Silicon Valley coders. "The gray tribe” is one term; ”the rationalist movement” is another. Ok, checking another link: > The term “Gray Tribe” was coined by an influential rationalist blogger and psychiatrist named Scott Alexander Siskind. He used it to refer to an intersection of nerd culture with Silicon Valley-influenced ideology descended from the online rationalist movement. Ok, checking the Slate Star Codex: > [Grey Tribe is defined by] libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk So... to wrap it up, the reason for calling Mangione a rationalist is that he is "associated with" "libertarianism, Dawkins-style atheism, etc.", which have "descended from the rationalist movement". Somehow I am not convinced. (Among other reasons, I am pretty sure that libertarianism and Dawkins-style atheism are older than the rationalist movement.)
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jrflowers 2y ago
Internet rationalists are funny because they aren’t interested in reasoning well, they’re all about reasoning better, with the implication that anything that’s been previously thought out has been thought out incorrectly. It’s a group where you can prove you have the most biggest smartest genious brain by just making shit up and it attracts people that feel an urgent need to be regarded as intelligent by strangers, which is a need that’s… generally disconnected from intelligence in any tangible way.
silexia 2y ago
Another left wing journalist failing to mention the Zizians are a far left trans group.
- brinkofdth 2y ago
  [dead]

185 points by dsr_ 2y ago

imgabe 2y ago

When you find yourself in an -ism you’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere.

omnibrain 2y ago
Capitalism?
- ben_w 2y ago
  I have vague memories of a scene from the UK comedy show "The Thin Blue Line" where a bunch of bad -isms were followed by counter-examples of good -isms, but despite the episode itself being easy to find (the episode is called "Ism Ism Ism"), I can't easily find the scene within the episode.
- adbachman 2y ago
  Absolutely! If it means you are unable to make any decisions or reach any conclusions which do not align with your -ism, then you're in a dead end.
getnormality 2y ago
Ah, so your thing must be skepticism.
pavlov 2y ago
I find myself in Cubism and realize I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere, but perspective has collapsed all around me and the way out is blocked by fragments of guitar strings and noses of long-dead Parisian mistresses.
- Trasmatta 2y ago
  That reminds me of this excellent Calvin and Hobbes strip: https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1990/06/17 https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1990/06/17
DiscourseFan 2y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxsNU7ZZAlU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxsNU7ZZAlU
layer8 2y ago
That sounds like a criticism.

roenxi 2y ago

My favourite part about the rationalists is that they are a completely normal community apart from the rationalism. You'd think a group of people devoted to being rational would be a group of monk-like beings, cerebral, disconnected from the concerns of the flesh. Instead we get this weird hotbed of fanfiction, cults, wild sex crime allegations, financial schemes so brazen they almost wouldn't qualify as fraud and a vague sense of some sort of group that are capable of any evil. Plus I can't stop laughing at the idea of Aella as "that rationalist hooker" [0] - a combination of words which never fails to make me chuckle. The whole scene really deserves some sort of film, book, video game or something. I can't get a vision out of my head where some straitlaced person realises rationalists are involved and their face twists in horror. Keeping an eye on them over the years the communities that grew up around LessWrong really are as good as any work of fiction. Plus they're doing their best to make the world better and maybe people will learn something about Bayesianism, who knows. [0] https://knowingless.com/about/ https://knowingless.com/about/

williamcotton 2y ago
Oh come on, the vast majority of LW meetups are about as racy as the IRL comment section of HN.
- bordercases 2y ago
  The Berkeley and New York scenes are special in that they lead and guide the community on a whole mainly by example.
- ben_w 2y ago
  Even the completely anonymous 18+ only rationalist telegram groups are only just as racy as the normal non-yiff furry groups.
getnormality 2y ago
I think they're basically secular humanists who decided they wanted a more muscular guiding ideology.

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wslh 2y ago

Rephrasing Arthur C. Clarke: "Any sufficiently sophisticated ideology is indistinguishable from madness".

flippyhead 2y ago
I love this, but I'm not sure it's right. As for cults, people want to join them. It's more like any sufficiently sophisticated ideology is hard to distinguish from reality.

dismalaf 2y ago

This is fascinating... Also some apparent link to SV and Ai? Reminds me of this story: https://futurism.com/researcher-openai-sex-drug-parties https://futurism.com/researcher-openai-sex-drug-parties Also both the cult founder and person who got shot in the beginning of the story are transwomen? Just started reading https://zizians.info https://zizians.info ... Apparently this cult has a thing for transwomen, or influences them, or something. Lots of weirdness and I don't have time to read it all right now. All very interesting and will probably be a movie someday.

jampekka 2y ago

A lot of the "rationalist" scene would be more accurately called "rationalizationist".

api 2y ago
It’s reasoning without reality, the same mocked with sayings like “arguing about how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.” Reasoning must be checked against observation and experiment. It must be checked against reality. It’s not just that humans are fallible and full of biases and failure modes. It’s that reason itself is only capable of crystalline perfection in domains where all priors can be enumerated and the system is closed, like pure math. Even there we know of mathematical constructs that exhibit phenomena like emergence and computational irreducibility where the future state can’t be guessed without fully evaluating the function; where “leaps” are provably impossible. The craziest stuff is some of the longtermism stuff. They are literally writing sci fi (and cliche sci fi at that) and then reasoning from it as if it were real and using those conclusions to guide present day moral and political thinking. Absolute lunacy. We can’t predict the next 50 years let alone the next 5000. Sometimes I think one of the evolutionary counter pressures that has likely prevented human IQ from being driven entirely up and to the right is that high IQ increases propensity for delusional thinking. I’ve met quite a few incredibly brilliant idiots. The smarter you are the more elaborate a prison you can construct for your own brain. The major innovation of the discipline of science (and it is a discipline) was to put forward a method to avoid this by taking a step, confirming, and only then taking the next step. It’s pretty simple but it requires restraint even when there’s a shiny thing that looks so “truthy” and cool.
- iterateoften 2y ago
  > Sometimes I think one of the evolutionary counter pressures that has likely prevented human IQ from being driven entirely up and to the right is that high IQ increases propensity for delusional thinking. I had often had this thought too. Imagine if humans were 100x more intelligent, would we have necessarily survived for 200k odd years? Society, technology, morality all evolve at different paces and if one “outcompetes” the others then an imbalance can happen and humanity could be wiped out. Imagine if a caveman was super intelligent enough to build some type of weapon of mass destruction but humanity doesn’t yet have enough experience to police this person or have laws or power structures to keep themselves safe. If you consider language and “memetics” technology than you have to consider beings 100x smarter could also be master manipulators capable of leading the group off the ledge. so many ways civilization could be wiped out. Really the only reason we are around today is that society as a whole’s ability to implement strategies at recognizing dangerous groups and individuals outpaces the individual or small group’s ability to wield technology for dangerous means (well at least up until now).

lemonberry 2y ago

Interesting to see CFAR involved. I'm a big fan of Julia Galef. She's the president and cofounder of CFAR. One of the things that struck me most was an interview with her years ago talking about the people that CFAR let into their programs. She said something to the effect that they didn't let people in that were trying to change other people's minds, but that were out to clarify their own thinking. I really liked that. I'm a big fan of intellectual honesty: pursuing truth (however loosey-goosey that is for humans) rather needing to be right or win the argument.

zozbot234 2y ago
> they didn't let people in that were trying to change other people's minds, but that were out to clarify their own thinking. I'm not sure how much we can take this at face value, given that the OP mentions a guy (Michael Vassar), who apparently associates himself with the rationalist space and has been accused of brainwashing people and driving them crazy with "mind tricks". There's even been allegations that the now infamous craziness of this Zizian group may effectively be downstream of that. (An earlier HN discussion is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42849281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42849281 )
- lemonberry 2y ago
  That could very well be true. However, it's still an important idea to me and, I think, a lot of others. People and organizations change. It's possible the CFAR and its founders started out with one mission or goal and that changed internally for whatever reason.
  - Viliam1234 2y ago
    I have heard a version saying that Vassar changed (after he started experimenting with drugs). And at some moment later, he also got banned from the community.

throw241098 2y ago

What's so bad about this cult is all the murders. However, if you bracket out all the murders for a second (a big ask), I don't think there's anything particularly special about this cult. This is just the modern incarnation of something that's been going on for almost a hundred years in California. In California there are Bohemian social scenes with a mix of high-performing technical people, spiritual/New Age/woo people, and "human potential" secular spirituality and self-improvement. Magicians and Satanists involved in the founding of JPL (with a cameo from L. Ron Hubbard.) in the 1940s and 1950s. EST seminars, Esalen, UFO movements, communal yoga groups. Lesser known is the "General Semantics" movement (really quite similar to the Rationalists) from the 1950s. All these movements mix and overlap. Mostly these social scenes are weird but harmless. But genuine cults often form in them and then spin off. The Rationalists themselves are just another incarnation of this. They may seem totally bizarre, but if you just dig back in the history of California, they look very familiar. They are part of this stew of self-improvement/spirituality/tech/meditation. In particular they are the secular self-improvement people -- one thing they did is run training seminars where they teach you new thought techniques that will help you be more productive and successful. Many of them also engage in Buddhist meditation practices or take psychedelic drugs for exploration. In that scene, cults form. There have been multiple other rationalist-adjacent cults, although those did not kill people thank God. I think it's a mistake to start analyzing the rationalists' beliefs about Bayesianism and expected utility and all that, to try and wonder how a cult could have possibly formed in this social scene. Nothing should be less surprising. Now that this cult went on to commit multiple murders -- this is surprising and frightening. Perhaps some of the rationalist beliefs have something to do with it, but since there are a small number of other cults that have committed murders, looking at shared factors across all of them, such as charismatic psychopaths as leaders, may be a better choice. Edit: upon reading to the very very bottom of the article, the author makes the exact same point. I'll leave this up just in case others aren't good readers either.

_yb2s 2y ago
I see a lot of parallels between the rationalists and the Beatniks- both seem to be a social experiment of radically throwing out the existing culture and lifestyle, and trying to think through something new from scratch. In both cases there are a lot of failed experiments, and disastrous personal consequences for many of the individuals involved, but also a lot of discovery and good ideas. Both groups are even obsessed with Moloch (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/).

Trasmatta 2y ago

I've been following the "rationalist movement" for a long time, and there has always been so many early cult warning signs among the various sub groups. I'm sad that it's gone so far as to result in deaths and murder attempts with some of them. I expect it to get worse as some of the "rationalists" continue to embrace bizarre groupthink irrationality.

pr337h4m 2y ago
Utilitarianism can be used to justify literally anything, especially when paired with large scale drug use. FTX was just the beginning.
- Trasmatta 2y ago
  Yeah, Yudkowsky saying many years ago that it would be better for one person to be tortured for 50 years than for 3^^^3 people to get a dust speck in their eye was pretty much everything I needed to know to realize this group was going to be a problem. And things just get worse from there.
  - iterateoften 2y ago
    > saying many years ago that it would be better for one person to be tortured for 50 years than 3^^^3 people getting a dust speck in their eye I just looked this up on lw and it is pretty slimy text. These weasels always leave it ambiguous to leave room to deny if their perfect rational view somehow goes wrong. Notice instead of actually having a backbone or taking the stance he just says > I think the answer is obvious. How about you? I’m not a christian but this sharply contrast the story of christ in which he sacrificed himself to in his mind spare billions from torture and the worst anguish in the universe. Here we see Yudkowsky casually implying that it is better for someone to get tortured to save the inconvenience of a speck of dust, but notice he doesn’t volunteer himself. Its fundamental to these rationalist and effective altruists that they are the right ones and others must sacrifice to fulfill the rationalist elitist intelligent world view. Look at FTX and this group. Their point of view it is OK for others to suffer financially and it is morally justified for the “intelligent” to steal and kill because they are the right ones and the ends justify the means.

ipnon 2y ago

It is quite humorous to me in a dark way how the preeminent ethics movement of our times seems to spawn the most detestable behavior. How many Bentham essays and LessWrong posts do you need to read to conclude that psychological manipulation and wonton murder do not in fact contribute to the wellbeing of the world? There is a certain personality for whom rationality takes over their whole being, and they lose all their ability to feel connected to others in a profound way, and at this point their behavior is simply derived from whatever is left after they do the math.

TylerLives 2y ago
I don't have a way to prove this and it's based purely on intuition/experience, but I disagree. I think ideology doesn't meaningfully influence such people. There is a deeper psychological drive and they only create a philosophical justification later, which is of little importance. This is perhaps true of humans in general.
- OmarShehata 2y ago
  you're both correct. All humans have a hardware component, an ideology acts as an attractor. Humans finding connection with other humans like them is one of the strongest pulls for a human mind. It has great power to amplify & grow. This can go in a direction of thriving and growth, and "win win" with their environment, or it can go in a direction of hate and aggression
  - mycall 2y ago
    Confirmation of the id.
- ta988 2y ago
  I see two outcomes usually in the rationalist community: - those who can manipulate language enough to justify their behavior and can then manipulate others - those who modify their behavior and usually have some kind of mental breakdown because of internal conflicts To me it is a predator-prey abusive LARP that got out of scope and feeds on fragile people looking for sense in their lives. Just look at how new comers are hazed and tested when they come on their forums and discords and what not.

boringg 2y ago

Ugh i hope this dies off as quickly as quickly as it has shown off. The less attention they get the better off we all are.

awanderingmind 2y ago

I have had zero real-life interaction with the rationalist space beyond exchanging some emails with people and reading numerous blog posts, reading lesswrong, and stuff like that, but this post seems to lean too far into drawing a conclusion about a very non-homogeneous group of people based on a few individuals that seem to be mentally unwell. While I have become less enthusiastic about rationalism (in the sense of this post, not in the sense of the philosophical tradition) over time, the space seems to consist mostly of nerdy people who try really hard to reason properly. Sure, they sometimes come to absurd conclusions, but in general they have interesting perspectives and analyses. Without data on the percentage of people who reach the cult-like status referenced in the post, it seems premature to deride the entire enterprise; in any sufficiently large population group you will have that type of behavior. On the other hand the point about them being related in spirit to the various 'self-improvement', 'New Age', or whatever movements in California surely isn't WRONG, but it feels a bit... underdeveloped? I'm sure there are loads of connections, simply because the movement seems to be centered (in meatspace, anyway) in California. A more scholarly analysis explicitly drawing the connections would be more useful (and interesting!) than an ad hominem comparison to Scientology and the Manson family(!).

matthewdgreen 2y ago
There are different subgroups within the rationalist movement, just as there are different subgroups within many organized religions. It’s totally normal to have a movement with plenty of generally normal people, and also to have a committed and very opinionated subgroup within that movement that has access to resources and power. You might think of Scientology or the Catholic Church as examples of organizations where this is made very explicit, but it can happen organically as well. The main thing that makes the rationalist/EA groups worrying, in my opinion, is the massive access to money and resources that also tends to be concentrated in the hands of the people with the strongest beliefs (see TFA or, more importantly, the AI “doomer” folks.) We’re talking about groups of smart people who genuinely fear the world is going to end, have convinced themselves that stopping it is critical to saving future humanity, in some cases have access to capable scientists, and most critically: have resources ranging into the 10s and 100s of million dollars. This is potentially a very dangerous situation if the folks in charge make bad decisions.

greatquux 2y ago

Holy crap, you can sleep only one side of your brain?! How would anyone think of even doing this?

sd9 2y ago
It does seem like a terrible idea. The side effects listed in the article sound rather scary.
- jstanley 2y ago
  The risk of giving yourself "split personalities" should not be underestimated. I recently had a mild panic attack in which I became convinced that my subconscious was secretly working against me. It was terrifying, and I couldn't see a way to think myself out of it. In fact I thought the very fact that I was worrying about it proved that my subconscious had planted the idea in my conscious experience specifically to hurt me. What worked was going for a short walk and physically touching the ground with my hands. "Touch grass" actually works sometimes, I think because if the stimuli of the mind are coming from within, then you have no way to override bad ones and you just get echoes of the same negative thing over and over again. Whereas if you can get stimulus of any kind from the external world, then you have something else to pay attention to, you can turn the focus outwards and the feedback loop subsides. I no longer believe my subconscious is working against me. But I agreed to try to pay attention to its concerns and take them more seriously in the future, so that it has no reason to work against me.
  - hobs 2y ago
    This is no diss or slam, but if you are concerned about the inner workings of your mind working against you, I highly recommend some additional professional help to peel apart the onion a little bit more.
    - shadowgovt 2y ago
      Concur. Also concur on external stimulus, and I'm pretty sure it works for exactly the reason you identified. I find the intrusive thoughts show up in the evening precisely because there's less stimulus (inside and out; my brain is quieting itself for sleep, giving the nastier, weirder parts of it their chance to say just the stupidest shit "out loud"). A major eye-opener for me was learning, awhile ago, that we differ from some other animals in that our limbic system is completely "wrapped" in malleable neurons. Some animals have (as far as we can tell) implastic wiring leading from some stimulus constructs straight into that system: they receive a stimulus, they respond immediately with physiological, emotional change. Ours is far more deeply tied to the plastic layers of the brain; we have a huge capacity to learn very complex stimulus-response ties between the world around us and how we should set our emotional state. On the one hand, that's great! It's good to think that we can change our responses to stimuli in a way that, say, penguins can't. On the other hand... "plastic" doesn't mean "you can will yourself to change them willy-nilly." It's more that we're capable of developing "mental allergies." We are unusual in that we can develop things like PTSD: you were shot at the same time you saw a Volkswagen Beetle drive by? Congratulations, you now experience a visceral survival-focused reaction every time you see one of the most classic examples of German engineering, and you can't will that feeling to stop because your brain's physiology changed under the dim hope that somehow avoiding vaguely-round cars avoids bullets, too. Our brains are wonderful, transcendental things, but they're also machines and they're machines that can malfunction. It's good we have professionals who study this.

nla 2y ago

Clearly there are not enough mental institutions in the United States.

deleted 2y ago

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benreesman 2y ago

So this is what effective altruism becomes on its way to full blown Time Cube? Because make no mistake, these folks with the public benefit corporations doing doomer PR around AI are very, very much a branch of this family tree.

DiscourseFan 2y ago

And they say studying Philosophy is useless! This idea of "Rationalism" does bear a remarkable correspondence to its 17th century cousin, in that it allows "Reason" to run wild, to go to the end of all its conclusions. That is the importance of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, as Kant introduces finitude into the discourse of philosophy; since, Reason, left to run wild, will always miss the empirical world. Thus, there can be stupid questions, there can be things that are just "nuts," not because they can be proven right or wrong, but because the very basis of the question is already outside of empirical possibility and practical use.

sevensor 2y ago
Not to mention the parallels with ancient fringe philosophical schools like the Cynics and Cyrenaics spinning off from the Socratic tradition.

thrance 2y ago

What's particularly scary about this cult, when compared to others, is how some of their weird ideas permeate to those in powers. Tech oligarchs speak of "long-termism", "accelerationism", etc. They use these concepts to undermine worker rights and justify increasing inequalities, all in a vague utilitarian perspective of future utopia.

foldr 2y ago

A tangentially related classic from the archives: https://web.archive.org/web/20130426115531/http://plover.net/~bonds/cultofbayes.html https://web.archive.org/web/20130426115531/http://plover.net...

moolcool 2y ago

The funniest thing to me about “rationalists” and “less wrong” is the implication that other schools of thought are “irrationalist” or “more wrong”. The smugness comes before anything else.

I-M-S 2y ago
I always read it the other way around - a humble acknowledgement that they're still wrong, just less than whatever came before.
- moolcool 2y ago
  It’s smug to say that your group bickering on an Internet forum is “less wrong” than centuries of philosophers and ethicists
  - azeirah 2y ago
    I've always understood it as by using principled rationalism, you will become _less wrong_ over time.
  - golly_ned 2y ago
    They’re really invested in the study of philosophy, epistemology, and ethics and how it applies to their lives, and frequently reference philosophers and ethicists.
    - moolcool 2y ago
      Half the time I come across that community online, it’s just love triangles between people with anime profile pictures, “rationalizing” atrocities, and comparing IQ test scores.
  - slooonz 2y ago
    You average grad student in physics is less wrong than Newton in physics (he knows about special relativity for example). It’s not "smugness", of course building on the shoulders of those who comes before means building better than them.

TZubiri 2y ago

"Ziz believes there are two kinds of core, "good" and "nongood". "Nongood" cores are the most common (about 95% of the population)." https://youtu.be/h242eDB84zY?si=Q2Ef9Hi1kqMFdeNP https://youtu.be/h242eDB84zY?si=Q2Ef9Hi1kqMFdeNP

wellthisisgreat 2y ago
Dungeons & Dragons did it better.

olalonde 2y ago

> By the same token, the ability to dismiss an argument with a “that sounds nuts,” without needing recourse to a point-by-point rebuttal, is anathema to the rationalist project. But it’s a pretty important skill to have if you want to avoid joining cults. Aka as "common sense". It seems like these people make small errors in their base assumptions or reasoning. Over time, as these mistakes compound, they can lead to increasingly bizarre philosophies. Common sense might serve as a safeguard against such pitfalls, but it is frowned upon in those circles.

bowsamic 2y ago

They’re not only socially tiring but philosophically uninteresting

deleted 2y ago

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morpheos137 2y ago

[flagged]

perlgeek 2y ago
> There is no reason to believe in a singularity. There are reasons, and the proponents aren't shy about stating them. > Technological progress follows a sigmoid pattern not an exponential pattern. That's true, but you don't know in advance where it will start to flatten. > No significant new physics applicable to humans has been discovered since maybe the 1970s or 80s It really depends on what you call "new physics". There are lots of discoveries related to quantum dots, graphene, high-temperature superconductivity, meta materials etc. Those aren't really "new" in the sense that they contradict the Schrödinger equation, but that was also true for Giant magnetoresistance, which was crucial for magnetic hard drives. Heck, a new form of magnetism was discovered just last year, first published in December 2024 (see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08234-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08234-x for example).
- morpheos137 2y ago
  Where in nature, outside supposedly, black holes do we see singularities? Humans and all human technology are a product of nature, why should we expect abstract "intelligence" resulting from human technology to accumulate into a singularity (unregulated positive feedback) instead of being subject to limiting constraints like every other natural phenomenon? Belief in a singularity is the most irrational thing I have heard of. Supernatural things like the resurrection of Christ seem more likely than the Kurzweil/Yudkowski singularity. The idea appeals to people who don't understand what intelligence is. I first heard of it and rejected it in high school more than 20 years ago. Yudkowski didn't graduate highschool or go to college so he spent his time using his verbal skills to convince people he knew what he was talking about when in fact he is less of an authority in his field than even a moderately educated, intelligent person. The fact this stuff continues to appeal to silicon valley types just goes to show they are not in fact much different from populist conspiracy believers in fly over country. It is kind of funny actually to me, especially how these folks call themselves "rationalists..."

qrsjutsu 2y ago

once a person breaks or is broken through a specific cognitive barrier, rationalism becomes the easiest form of thinking and living. you could make it a bit harder on yourself and help your genes and synapses get back on track and your offspring evolve but you deliberately decide against it because it's less effort to succumb to the worst version of others than think about or work on any version of yourself. math, science, money, the psycho-social level, it doesn't really matter. it's a bit like people who just throw the towel and accept what limits them or their endeavor and people who just engineer something to solve their problem and evolve. rationalists throw the towel and accept what is, despite having all the evidence that it is NOT so. throw in some statistics and they'll take it (Quillette) as a general truth, emphasizing their understanding of the small sample, of course :D, and then they do a lot to make that truth work. that's why rationalist thinking in science and engineering and business falls short all the time. short of contextual potential and necessity, not under some utopian or dystopian "perfect conditions" but in the real world. they follow something allegedly perfect because striving for the next better and forever imperfect thing triggers some psychological or linguistic trauma, the resolve of which they did not put in the work into. this is commonly abused by "top-down" for status, covetousness, control, and it's the main sub-textual theme of therapeutic techniques and methods and everywhere in the advertisement and entertainment industry and trigger the whole reinforcement cycle as soon as they can get into the next generation of child or teen minds. it's too poofy, really, as if poofy wanted to have their own concept behind why a different kind of poofy is their real self and requires numerous surgeries and entirely different sets of hormones from somewhere else in the animal kingdom. "it should cost a billion to look that good". wtf. yeah, sure, there's statistics and algorithms, and linguistics can be twisted and turned either way but any proper scrutiny of these people and their thinking usually ends up in some whiny rejection to face illusions and the mechanics behind those illusions. it works, of course, but it really does not bode all that well. It's enough to understand that if your narrative is "rational", it's about as rational as that of the Church when they fucked Jesus and some of the greatest scientists, inventors in history. Rationality leads to Mafia-style thinking, buying wins and titles in competitions like the Fußball-Weltmeisterschaft and while most people don't care because it's just bread and games, it should bother rational people even more than anyone, because fraud breaks rational links. If A or B are complete fucking bullshit and actually unrelated to each other or their context, then A + B equals something that is not a rational result - not a result at all, actually. I used to always think "organic" and "natural" evolution and development are better, but the "AI" industry proved that it applies to artificial evolution and progress as well. And it's all due to Game Theory rationality and whiny grown-ups with childhood trauma or the fear that their offspring might evolve beyond their methods and lose their position in the deluded hierarchies for the sake of better ways, better living, better loving, better thinking. To give even more attack surface and inspiration: if you can't admit symbiosis is possible because you got mobbed or can't stand losing with or without sabotage, then you will attempt to break anyone who made symbiosis happen, going so far as to burn everything down that worked and is evolving __perfectly fine, or you slowly narrow the field of possibilities to prove some "self-fulfilling" systems effect (over time).

whatshisface 2y ago

I don't really care about whether this person is criticising the author's moral philosophy, I care about this thing about sex crime at MIRI.

apsec112 2y ago
The allegations were not true and the accuser retracted them. See MIRI's statement here: https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1q0uv-sPpmvmm_5YH6zSBBqDe098O_bwT_EzAkB7BRak/mobilebasic https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1q0uv-sPpmvmm_5YH6zSB...
sd9 2y ago
The allegations were not true, and this moral philosophy is now responsible for a handful of killings and suicides.

jonstewart 2y ago

A college roommate of mine had a joke: “what’s the difference between Ayn Rand and the tooth fairy? No one believes in the tooth fairy when they grow up.” I feel like it could be updated for Yudkowsky easily enough. I don’t want to waste my time reading all this; as a mid-40s parent living on the East coast, I feel like the appropriate response to any discussion of rationalism is “grow up.”

falcor84 2y ago
I understand your sentiment, but would strongly disagree. Even if you really think that rationalism offers its followers nothing of value, it's still enlightening to try to understand what it is about the human psyche that draws people towards it, and how one might go about offering a better version of that.
- jonstewart 2y ago
  Why would that effort be enlightening? Many many more people are part of Falun Gong; shouldn’t I prioritize learning more about Falun Gong and what it is about the human psyche that draws people towards it? And why do I need to offer such people a better version? Given the choice between reading a good book or Harry Potter fanfic from a guy who’s scared of floating point numbers, shouldn’t I read the good book?

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Fraterkes 2y ago

Slightly offtopic but, Lesswrong and the Rationality community more broadly have had AI-safety as their main focus for nearly as long as they exist. Now that AI is actually making advancements, very little of that work seems to have had much effect. Theres the famous Vonnegut qoute about the combined effort of all preeminent artists protesting the Vietnam war having the effect of a pie dropped from a step-ladder. Id argue that the vietnam war protests were vastly more effective at achieving anything than the AI-safety research. So isn't all of the above an essentially complete indictment of the rationality movement, seeing as it has effectiveness and pragmatism as its main pillars?

kloomi 2y ago
This is mostly because actually working on AI systems, rather than just blogging about some pie-in-the-sky assumptions of AI systems, is almost entirely outside of the skill set of Eliezer Yudkowsky and other LessWrong enthusiasts. They are remarkably ignorant on the topic apart from the small niche they carved out to bloviate upon.
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  Philosophy is a useful discipline, but there's a chronic trap in it shown historically: getting way too high on your own supply. It's possible to build a logical chain that reaches some very solid conclusions that turns out to be way far out from where evidence or measurable reality lies, and (especially when the stories in those conclusions are fun or compelling) they can sometimes overshadow the reality they initially set out to explore. The Greeks are credited for conceiving of atoms originally, but it's always worth remembering that they had few tools to investigate their idea, and it was just one of dozens of ideas at the time of the true nature of reality, the rest of which are now known as outlandish. Besides, our modern understanding of atoms as envelopes of quantized probability in a semi-measurable universe bears little resemblance to their concept of them. The LessWrong philosophy on AI would be useful... If AI looked anything like that.
streptomycin 2y ago
It provides a little evidence in that direction, but not much. If I give you 10:1 odds on a coin flip and you lose, that is not a complete indictment of your betting strategy. I doubt many people thought AI safety research was guaranteed to succeed either.

saddat 2y ago

We have a lot of names these days for mentally ill people

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Bengalilol 2y ago

Is it just a sparkle in the universe, or the rise of the next movement to take Scientology’s place? I bet on the sparkle and fade since everything is so self destructive. Amazing read, so keenly written, on a new form of the good old « waste your brain like never » principle.

antonkar 2y ago

Curious how people who are supposed to be rational, have never read what is anger (or “badness” and “evilness” as some people still call it) - the best way to do it is to read any recent meta analysis on what is the most effective anger treatment. It’s cognitive therapy and it not only explains the mechanics of it: misunderstanding - worry and resulting anger (anything enforced on another without consent is anger, even if you think it’s good for them). So we actually have predictive understanding of the mechanics of “good” and “evil” - a person without or with anger management problems. “Evil” is nothing more than misunderstanding, worrying and protecting yourself (often for reasons that they invented themselves after trying to read the mind of another - something that’s impossible) - forcefully enforcing something upon another. “Good” is nothing more than trying to understand another, not fearing (because you understood another and yourself) and as a result not trying to enforce your will upon them

screye 2y ago

A comment on another thread mentioned California's predisposition to New Age cults. California makes it easy to avoid touching grass. It lacks the population density of the Northeast Corridor which forces social collisions. It lacks the conservative pressure of middle American Suburbia which forces conformity. Lastly, it allows you to circumvent globally consistent corporate culture through well-paying backend (not people facing) jobs. Intelligent misfits must touch grass. Like glacier carved mountains, normal social collisions force misfits to step outside their own head. It scrubs the trivially repulsive parts off them. Ofc, young misfits being willing to entertain novel/strange ideas results in bullying from normal people. It's tempting to disregard all normal people as close minded bigots. However, it's important for misfits to continue pushing at understanding. Normal people are harmless. But,these misfits are both intelligent and high agency. So they have a capacity for both great good & evil. Put simply, these misfits need common sense. Because when spiraling misfits find spiraling misfits, they can accelerate into dark places real fast. Add a few drops of common sense, and it stops the stupidest ideas right at their inception.

toss1 2y ago
Excellent description of how things can go off the rails, very far off the rails. It also brings to mind the role of FU money insulating people from consequences and allowing them to live with near-zero empathy or common sense, or consideration of how their actions will affect others. Brings to mind what entirely un-elected Elon Musk is doing tonight, having just gotten full access to the full set of highly internal US treasury payment data, which would ordinarily be considered a massive security breach... [0] https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-elon-musk-doge-treasury-5e26cc80fcb766981cea56afd57ae759 https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-elon-musk-doge-treas...
- d0mine 2y ago
  Isn't it like an engineer requiring access to logs to optimize the backend?
  - DiscourseFan 2y ago

yencabulator 2y ago

> self-knowledge, spectral sight, DRM stripping So, yet another new age cult?

_zagj 2y ago

I get people are probably going to flag this like they did the other article (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897871), probably more so out of concern for the trans optics (Ziz and many in her orbit are trans/non-binary) than how it reflects on the wider rationalist community. But we should be able to discuss why this group, which is influential in discussions of AI alignment, is producing these people. Zizians aren't the only ones. Luigi Mangione was also a rationalist (and cis), and I remember a thread on a certain website that documented some other oddball fellow travelers. How does a community dedicated to "rationalism," whose leader writes Harry Potter fanfics, produce people like this? Does it attract maladjusted people to begin with? One common thread seems to be psychedelics. Mangione, for example, experimented with psychedelics heavily (possibly to treat pain) not long before he assassinated the United CEO.

Viliam1234 2y ago
> Luigi Mangione was also a rationalist What? Okay, my first reaction was "I should check Wikipedia, because if this is true (and probably even if it is not), David Gerard will certainly make a huge subsection on Wikipedia about it". Turns out, what Wikipedia says about Mangione and rationalist is only this: > Journalist Robert Evans described Mangione as being associated with a loosely-defined online subculture called the "gray tribe" or the "rationalist movement", whose members he described as "self-consciously intellectual and open-minded, [and] preoccupied with learning how to overcome their own mental biases. Ok, checking the journalist's article: > ”Increasingly looks like we've got our first gray tribe shooter, and boy howdy is the media not ready for that,” wrote the journalist and extremism expert Robert Evans, who analysed Mangione’s online life earlier this week. > There's no single accepted name for this loose, extremely online subculture of bloggers, philosophers, shitposters and Silicon Valley coders. "The gray tribe” is one term; ”the rationalist movement” is another. Ok, checking another link: > The term “Gray Tribe” was coined by an influential rationalist blogger and psychiatrist named Scott Alexander Siskind. He used it to refer to an intersection of nerd culture with Silicon Valley-influenced ideology descended from the online rationalist movement. Ok, checking the Slate Star Codex: > [Grey Tribe is defined by] libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk So... to wrap it up, the reason for calling Mangione a rationalist is that he is "associated with" "libertarianism, Dawkins-style atheism, etc.", which have "descended from the rationalist movement". Somehow I am not convinced. (Among other reasons, I am pretty sure that libertarianism and Dawkins-style atheism are older than the rationalist movement.)

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jrflowers 2y ago

Internet rationalists are funny because they aren’t interested in reasoning well, they’re all about reasoning better, with the implication that anything that’s been previously thought out has been thought out incorrectly. It’s a group where you can prove you have the most biggest smartest genious brain by just making shit up and it attracts people that feel an urgent need to be regarded as intelligent by strangers, which is a need that’s… generally disconnected from intelligence in any tangible way.

silexia 2y ago

Another left wing journalist failing to mention the Zizians are a far left trans group.

brinkofdth 2y ago
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