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[Former member of that world, roommates with one of Ziz's friends for a while, so I feel reasonably qualified to speak on this.] The problem with rationalists/

[Former member of that world, roommates with one of Ziz's friends for a while, so I feel reasonably qualified to speak on this.] The problem with rationalists/EA as a group has never been the rationality, but the people practicing it and the cultural norms they endorse as a community. As relevant here: 1) While following logical threads to their conclusions is a useful exercise, each logical step often involves some degree of rounding or unknown-unknowns. A -> B and B -> C means A -> C in a formal sense, but A -almostcertainly-> B and B -almostcertainly-> C does not mean A -almostcertainly-> C. Rationalists, by tending to overly formalist approaches, tend to lose the thread of the messiness of the real world and follow these lossy implications as though they are lossless. That leads to... 2) Precision errors in utility calculations that are numerically-unstable. Any small chance of harm times infinity equals infinity. This framing shows up a lot in the context of AI risk, but it works in other settings too: infinity times a speck of dust in your eye >>> 1 times murder, so murder is "justified" to prevent a speck of dust in the eye of eternity. When the thing you're trying to create is infinitely good or the thing you're trying to prevent is infinitely bad, anything is justified to bring it about/prevent it respectively. 3) Its leadership - or some of it, anyway - is extremely egotistical and borderline cult-like to begin with. I think even people who like e.g. Eliezer would agree that he is not a humble man by any stretch of the imagination (the guy makes Neil deGrasse Tyson look like a monk). They have, in the past, responded to criticism with statements to the effect of "anyone who would criticize us for any reason is a bad person who is lying to cause us harm". That kind of framing can't help but get culty. 4) The nature of being a "freethinker" is that you're at the mercy of your own neural circuitry. If there is a feedback loop in your brain, you'll get stuck in it, because there's no external "drag" or forcing functions to pull you back to reality. That can lead you to be a genius who sees what others cannot. It can also lead you into schizophrenia really easily. So you've got a culty environment that is particularly susceptible to internally-consistent madness, and finally: 5) It's a bunch of very weird people who have nowhere else they feel at home. I totally get this. I'd never felt like I was in a room with people so like me, and ripping myself away from that world was not easy. (There's some folks down the thread wondering why trans people are overrepresented in this particular group: well, take your standard weird nerd, and then make two-thirds of the world hate your guts more than anything else, you might be pretty vulnerable to whoever will give you the time of day, too.) TLDR: isolation, very strong in-group defenses, logical "doctrine" that is formally valid and leaks in hard-to-notice ways, apocalyptic utility-scale, and being a very appealing environment for the kind of person who goes super nuts -> pretty much perfect conditions for a cult. Or multiple cults, really. Ziz's group is only one of several.

ericd 2y ago
Brilliant summary, thanks. I'm interested in #4, is there anywhere you know of to read more about that? I don't think I've seen that described except obliquely in eg sayings about the relationship between genius and madness.
- rachofsunshine 2y ago
  I don't, that one's me speaking from my own speculation. It's a working model I've had for a while about the nature of a lot of kinds of mental illness (particularly my own tendencies towards depression), which I guess I should explain more thoroughly! This gets a bit abstract, so stick with me: it's a toy model, and I don't mean it to be definitive truth, but it seems to do well at explaining my own tendencies. ------- So, toy model: imagine the brain has a single 1-dimensional happiness value that changes over time. You can be +3 happy or -2 unhappy, that kind of thing. Everyone knows when you're very happy you tend to come down, and when you're very sad you tend to eventually shake it off, meaning that there is something of a tendency towards a moderate value or a set-point of sorts. For the sake of simplicity, let's say a normal person has a set point of 0, then maybe a depressive person has a set point of -1, a manic person has a set point of +1, that sort of thing. Mathematically, this is similar to the equations that describe a spring. If left to its own devices, a spring will tend to its equilibrium value, either exponentially (if overdamped) or with some oscillation around it (if underdamped). But if you're a person living your life, there are things constantly jostling the spring up and down, which is why manic people aren't crazy all the time and depressed people have some good days where they feel good and can smile. Mathematically, this is a spring with a forcing function - as though it's sitting on a rough train ride that is constantly applying "random" forces to it. Rather than x'' + kx = 0, you've got x'' + kx = f(t) for some external forcing function f(t), where f(t) critically does not depend on x or on the individual internal dynamics involved. These external forcing functions tend to be pretty similar among people of a comparable environment. But the internal equilibria seem to be quite different. So when the external forcing is strong, it tends to pull people in similar directions, and people whose innate tendencies are extreme tend to get pulled along with the majority anyway. But when external forcing is weak (or when people are decoupled from its effects on them), internal equilibria tend to take over, and extreme people can get caught in feedback loops. If you're a little more ML-inclined, you can think about external influences like a temperature term in an ML model. If your personal "model" of the world tends to settle into a minimum labeled "completely crazy" or "severely depressed" or the like, a high "temperature" can help jostle you out of that minimum even if your tendencies always move in that direction. Basically, I think weird nerds tend to have low "temperature" values, and tend to settle into their own internal equilibria, whether those are good, bad, or good in some cases and bad in others (consider all the genius mathematicians who were also nuts). "Normies", for lack of a better way of putting it, tend to have high temperature values and live their lives across a wider region of state space, which reduces their ability to wield precision and competitive advantage but protects them from the most extreme failure-modes as well.

ericd 2y ago

Brilliant summary, thanks. I'm interested in #4, is there anywhere you know of to read more about that? I don't think I've seen that described except obliquely in eg sayings about the relationship between genius and madness.

rachofsunshine 2y ago
I don't, that one's me speaking from my own speculation. It's a working model I've had for a while about the nature of a lot of kinds of mental illness (particularly my own tendencies towards depression), which I guess I should explain more thoroughly! This gets a bit abstract, so stick with me: it's a toy model, and I don't mean it to be definitive truth, but it seems to do well at explaining my own tendencies. ------- So, toy model: imagine the brain has a single 1-dimensional happiness value that changes over time. You can be +3 happy or -2 unhappy, that kind of thing. Everyone knows when you're very happy you tend to come down, and when you're very sad you tend to eventually shake it off, meaning that there is something of a tendency towards a moderate value or a set-point of sorts. For the sake of simplicity, let's say a normal person has a set point of 0, then maybe a depressive person has a set point of -1, a manic person has a set point of +1, that sort of thing. Mathematically, this is similar to the equations that describe a spring. If left to its own devices, a spring will tend to its equilibrium value, either exponentially (if overdamped) or with some oscillation around it (if underdamped). But if you're a person living your life, there are things constantly jostling the spring up and down, which is why manic people aren't crazy all the time and depressed people have some good days where they feel good and can smile. Mathematically, this is a spring with a forcing function - as though it's sitting on a rough train ride that is constantly applying "random" forces to it. Rather than x'' + kx = 0, you've got x'' + kx = f(t) for some external forcing function f(t), where f(t) critically does not depend on x or on the individual internal dynamics involved. These external forcing functions tend to be pretty similar among people of a comparable environment. But the internal equilibria seem to be quite different. So when the external forcing is strong, it tends to pull people in similar directions, and people whose innate tendencies are extreme tend to get pulled along with the majority anyway. But when external forcing is weak (or when people are decoupled from its effects on them), internal equilibria tend to take over, and extreme people can get caught in feedback loops. If you're a little more ML-inclined, you can think about external influences like a temperature term in an ML model. If your personal "model" of the world tends to settle into a minimum labeled "completely crazy" or "severely depressed" or the like, a high "temperature" can help jostle you out of that minimum even if your tendencies always move in that direction. Basically, I think weird nerds tend to have low "temperature" values, and tend to settle into their own internal equilibria, whether those are good, bad, or good in some cases and bad in others (consider all the genius mathematicians who were also nuts). "Normies", for lack of a better way of putting it, tend to have high temperature values and live their lives across a wider region of state space, which reduces their ability to wield precision and competitive advantage but protects them from the most extreme failure-modes as well.