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I read the whole tree of responses under this comment and I could only convince myself that when people have no arguments they try to make you look bad. Most o

I read the whole tree of responses under this comment and I could only convince myself that when people have no arguments they try to make you look bad. Most of criticisms are just "But they think they are better than us !" and the rest is "But sometimes they are wrong !" I don't know about the community and couldn't care less but their writings have brought me some almost life saving fresh air in how to think about the world. It is very sad to me to read so many falsely elaborate responses from supposedly intelligent people having their ego hurt but in the end it reminds me why I like rationalists and I don't like most people.

ajkjk 1y ago
Here's a theory of what's happening, both with you here in this comment section and with the rationalists in general. Humans are generally better at perceiving threats than they are at putting those threats into words. When something seems "dangerous" abstractly, they will come up with words for why---but those words don't necessarily reflect the actual threat, because the threat might be hard to describe. Nevertheless the valence of their response reflects their actual emotion on the subject. In this case: the rationalist philosophy basically creeps people out. There is something "insidious" about it. And this is not a delusion on the part of the people judging them: it really does threaten them, and likely for good reason. The explanation is something like "we extrapolate from the way that rationalists think and realize that their philosophy leads to dangerous conclusions." Some of these conclusions have already been made by the rationalists---like valuing people far away abstractly over people next door, by trying to quantify suffering and altruism like a math problem (or to place moral weight on animals over humans, or people in the future over people today). Other conclusions are just implied, waiting to be made later. But the human mind detects them anyway as implications of the way of thinking, and reacts accordingly: thinking like this is dangerous and should be argued against. This extrapolation is hard to put into words, so everyone who tries to express their discomfort misses the target somewhat, and then, if you are the sort of person who only takes things literally, it sounds like they are all just attacking someone out of judgment or bitterness or something instead of for real reasons. But I can't emphasize this enough: their emotions are real, they're just failing to put them into words effectively. It's a skill issue. You will understand what's happening better if you understand that this is what's going on and then try to take their emotions seriously even if they are not communicating them very well. So that's what's going on here. But I think I can also do a decent job of describing the actual problem that people have with the rationalist mindset. It's something like this: Humans have an innate moral intuition that "personal" morality, the kind that takes care of themselves and their family and friends and community, is supposed to be sacrosanct: people are supposed to both practice it and protect the necessity of practicing it. We simply can't trust the world to be a safe place if people don't think of looking out for the people around them as a fundamental moral duty. And once those people are safe, protecting more people, such as a tribe or a nation or all of humanity or all of the planet, becomes permissible. Sometimes people don't or can't practice this protection for various reasons, and that's morally fine, because it's a local problem that can be solved locally. But it's very insidious to turn around and justify not practicing it as a better way to live: "actually it's better not to behave morally; it's better to allocate resources to people far away; it's better to dedicate ourselves to fighting nebulous threats like AI safety or other X-risks instead of our neighbors; or, it's better to protect animals than people, because there are more of them". It's fine to work on important far-away problems once local problems are solved, if that's what you want. But it can't take priority, regardless of how the math works out. To work on global numbers-game problems instead of local problems, and to justify that with arguments, and to try to convince other people to also do that---that's dangerous as hell. It proves too much: it argues that humans at large ought to dismantle their personal moralities in favor of processing the world like a paperclip-maximizing robot. And that is exactly as dangerous as a paperclip-maximizing robot is. Just at a slower timescale. (No surprise that this movement is popular among social outcasts, for whom local morality is going to feel less important, and (I suspect) autistic people, who probably experience less direct moral empathy for the people around them, as well as to the economically-insulated well-to-do tech-nerd types who are less likely to be directly exposed to suffering in their immediate communities.) Ironically paperclip-maximizing-robots are exactly the thing that the rationalists are so worried about. They are a group of people who missed, and then disavowed, and now advocate disavowing, this "personal" morality, and unsurprisingly they view the world in a lens that doesn't include it, which means mostly being worried about problems of the same sort. But it provokes a strong negative reaction from everyone who thinks about the world in terms of that personal duty to safety, because that is the foundation of all morality, and is utterly essential to preserve, because it makes sure that whatever else you are doing doesn't go awry. (edit: let me add that your aversion to the criticisms of rationalists is not unreasonable either. Given that you're parsing the criticisms as unreasonable, which they likely are (because of the skill issue), what you're seeing is a movement with value that seems to be being unfairly attacked. And you're right, the value is actually there! But the ultimate goal here is a synthesis: to get the value of the rationalist movement but to synthesize it with the recognition of the red flags that it sets off. Ignoring either side, the value or the critique, is ultimately counterproductive: the right goal is to synthesize both into a productive middle ground. (This is the arc of philosophy; it's what philosophy is. Not re-reading Plato.) The rationalists are probably morally correct in being motivated to highly-scaling actions e.g. the purview of "Effective Altruism". They are getting attacked for what they're discarding to do that, not for caring about it in the first place.)
- flufluflufluffy 1y ago
  Holy heck this is so well put and does the exact thing where it puts into words how I feel which is hard for me to do myself.
- johhnylately535 1y ago
  I finally gave in and created an account because of your comment. It's beautifully put. I would only perhaps add that, to me, the neo-rationalist thing looks the most similar to things that don't work yet attract hardcore "true believers". It's a pattern repeated through the ages, perhaps most intimately for me in the seemingly endless parades of computer system redesigns: software, hardware, or both. Randomly one might pick "the new and exciting Digg", the Itanium, and the Metaverse as fairly modern examples. There is something about a particular "narrowband" signaling approach, where a certain kind of purity is sought, with an expectation that, given enough explaining, you will finally get it, become enlightened, and convert to the ranks. A more "wideband" approach would at least admit observations like yours do exist and must be comprehensively addressed to the satisfaction of those who hold such beliefs vs to the satisfaction of those merely "stooping" to address them (again in the hopes they'll just see the light so everyone can get back to narrowband-ville).
  - ajkjk 1y ago
    (Thank you) I agree, although I do think that the rationalists and EAs are way better than most of the other narrowband groups, as you call them, out there, such as the Metaverse or Crypto people. The rationalists are at least mostly legitimately motivated by morality and not just by a "blow it all up and replace it with something we control" philosophy (which I have come to believe is the belief-set that only a person who is convinced that they are truly powerless comes to). I see the rationalists as failing due to a skill issue as well: because they have so-defined themselves by their rationalism, they have trouble understanding the things in the world that they don't have a good rational understanding of, such as morality. They are too invested in words and truth and correctness to understand that there can be a lot of emotional truth encoded in logical falsehood. edit: oh, also, I think that a good part of people's aversion to the rationalists is just a reaction to the narrowband quality itself, not to the content. People are well-aware of the sorts of things that narrowband self-justifying philosophies lead to, from countless examples, whether it's at the personal level (an unaccountable schoolteacher) or societal (a genocidal movement). We don't trust a group unless they specifically demonstrate non-narrowbandedness, which means being collectively willing to change their behavior in ways that don't make sense to them. Any movement that co-opts the idea of what is morally justifiable---who says that e.g. rationality is what produces truth and things that run counter to it do not---is inherently frightening.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
smus 1y ago
Feels like "they are wrong and smug" is enough reason to dislike the movement
- TeMPOraL 1y ago
  Bashir: Even when they're neither? Garak: Especially when they're neither.
  - smus 1y ago
    The comment I replied to conceded wrongness and smugness but is still somehow confused why otherwise intelligent ppl dislike the movement. I was hoping to clear it up for them Extra points for that comment's author implying that people who don't like the wrong and smug movement are unintelligent and protecting their egos, thus personally proving its smugness
    - cassepipe 1y ago
      I only conceded it insofar as everyone can be wrong sometimes, but at least those people seem to have a protocol to deal with it.Most people don't, and are fine with it. I stand on the side of those who care and are trying. As for smugness, it is subjective. Are those people smug ? Or are they talking passionately about some issue with the confidence of someone who feel what they are talking about and are expecting for it to resonate ? It's the eye of the beholder I guess. For example what you call my smugness is what I would a slightly depressed attitude fueled by the fact that it's sometimes hard to relate to other people feelings and behavior.
trod1234 1y ago
[flagged]
gopher_space 1y ago
Ever had a conversation with someone who literally cannot reexamine their base principles? Like, it's functionally impossible for them? That's everyone's central criticism of rationalists. Being able to do that is pretty much "entry level cognition" for a lot of us. You should be doing that yourself and doing it all the time if you want to play with the big kids. One of the things I really miss about the old nerds-only programmer's pit setup was the amount of room we had for instruction, especially regarding social issues. The scenes from the college department in Wargames were really on the nose, but highlight a form of education that was unavoidable if you couldn't just dip out of a conversation.
- comp_throw7 1y ago
  What a deeply confused criticism of rationalists, who are possibly the only meaningful social group in existence to celebrate changing their minds in response to new evidence.
  - sanderjd 1y ago
    It's truly fascinating how this thread is full of demonstrations of the exact phenomenon being discussed! Accused of being unable to reexamine your base principles, you respond: > rationalists, who are possibly the only meaningful social group in existence to celebrate changing their minds in response to new evidence Which is exactly the kind of base principle that could use some reexamination.
    - comp_throw7 1y ago
      That's an empirical claim, not a "base principle" (whatever that is). And, uh, yeah, I agree that I am not re-examining my beliefs in response to a bunch of random unsupported accusations by people who are demonstrably not familiar with the thing they're attacking. You should update your beliefs in response to evidence, not in response to social attacks.
      - sanderjd 1y ago
skinnymuch 1y ago
Read other comments then. Not everyone is saying “they think they are better than us”. The primary issues as others have noted is they focus on people going to the highest paying jobs without much care for morality of the jobs. Ergo they are fine being net negatives in terms of their work and philosophy. All they do is donate money. Donations don’t fix society. Nothing changes structurally. No root problems are looked at. They largely ignore capitalism’s faults or when I’ve seen them talk about, it’s done in a way of superficially decrying capitalist issues but then largely going along with them. Which ties into how they focus on high paying jobs regardless of morality (I’m exaggerating here but the overall point is correct). — HN is not intelligent when it comes to politics or the world. The avg person here is a western chauvinist with little political knowledge but a defensive ego about it. No need to be sad about this comment page.
- chipsrafferty 1y ago
  Well put.
  - skinnymuch 1y ago
    Thanks
sanderjd 1y ago
Or maybe you are demonstrating the exact failure to demonstrate introspective humility that people are talking about?

ajkjk 1y ago

Here's a theory of what's happening, both with you here in this comment section and with the rationalists in general. Humans are generally better at perceiving threats than they are at putting those threats into words. When something seems "dangerous" abstractly, they will come up with words for why---but those words don't necessarily reflect the actual threat, because the threat might be hard to describe. Nevertheless the valence of their response reflects their actual emotion on the subject. In this case: the rationalist philosophy basically creeps people out. There is something "insidious" about it. And this is not a delusion on the part of the people judging them: it really does threaten them, and likely for good reason. The explanation is something like "we extrapolate from the way that rationalists think and realize that their philosophy leads to dangerous conclusions." Some of these conclusions have already been made by the rationalists---like valuing people far away abstractly over people next door, by trying to quantify suffering and altruism like a math problem (or to place moral weight on animals over humans, or people in the future over people today). Other conclusions are just implied, waiting to be made later. But the human mind detects them anyway as implications of the way of thinking, and reacts accordingly: thinking like this is dangerous and should be argued against. This extrapolation is hard to put into words, so everyone who tries to express their discomfort misses the target somewhat, and then, if you are the sort of person who only takes things literally, it sounds like they are all just attacking someone out of judgment or bitterness or something instead of for real reasons. But I can't emphasize this enough: their emotions are real, they're just failing to put them into words effectively. It's a skill issue. You will understand what's happening better if you understand that this is what's going on and then try to take their emotions seriously even if they are not communicating them very well. So that's what's going on here. But I think I can also do a decent job of describing the actual problem that people have with the rationalist mindset. It's something like this: Humans have an innate moral intuition that "personal" morality, the kind that takes care of themselves and their family and friends and community, is supposed to be sacrosanct: people are supposed to both practice it and protect the necessity of practicing it. We simply can't trust the world to be a safe place if people don't think of looking out for the people around them as a fundamental moral duty. And once those people are safe, protecting more people, such as a tribe or a nation or all of humanity or all of the planet, becomes permissible. Sometimes people don't or can't practice this protection for various reasons, and that's morally fine, because it's a local problem that can be solved locally. But it's very insidious to turn around and justify not practicing it as a better way to live: "actually it's better not to behave morally; it's better to allocate resources to people far away; it's better to dedicate ourselves to fighting nebulous threats like AI safety or other X-risks instead of our neighbors; or, it's better to protect animals than people, because there are more of them". It's fine to work on important far-away problems once local problems are solved, if that's what you want. But it can't take priority, regardless of how the math works out. To work on global numbers-game problems instead of local problems, and to justify that with arguments, and to try to convince other people to also do that---that's dangerous as hell. It proves too much: it argues that humans at large ought to dismantle their personal moralities in favor of processing the world like a paperclip-maximizing robot. And that is exactly as dangerous as a paperclip-maximizing robot is. Just at a slower timescale. (No surprise that this movement is popular among social outcasts, for whom local morality is going to feel less important, and (I suspect) autistic people, who probably experience less direct moral empathy for the people around them, as well as to the economically-insulated well-to-do tech-nerd types who are less likely to be directly exposed to suffering in their immediate communities.) Ironically paperclip-maximizing-robots are exactly the thing that the rationalists are so worried about. They are a group of people who missed, and then disavowed, and now advocate disavowing, this "personal" morality, and unsurprisingly they view the world in a lens that doesn't include it, which means mostly being worried about problems of the same sort. But it provokes a strong negative reaction from everyone who thinks about the world in terms of that personal duty to safety, because that is the foundation of all morality, and is utterly essential to preserve, because it makes sure that whatever else you are doing doesn't go awry. (edit: let me add that your aversion to the criticisms of rationalists is not unreasonable either. Given that you're parsing the criticisms as unreasonable, which they likely are (because of the skill issue), what you're seeing is a movement with value that seems to be being unfairly attacked. And you're right, the value is actually there! But the ultimate goal here is a synthesis: to get the value of the rationalist movement but to synthesize it with the recognition of the red flags that it sets off. Ignoring either side, the value or the critique, is ultimately counterproductive: the right goal is to synthesize both into a productive middle ground. (This is the arc of philosophy; it's what philosophy is. Not re-reading Plato.) The rationalists are probably morally correct in being motivated to highly-scaling actions e.g. the purview of "Effective Altruism". They are getting attacked for what they're discarding to do that, not for caring about it in the first place.)

flufluflufluffy 1y ago
Holy heck this is so well put and does the exact thing where it puts into words how I feel which is hard for me to do myself.
johhnylately535 1y ago
I finally gave in and created an account because of your comment. It's beautifully put. I would only perhaps add that, to me, the neo-rationalist thing looks the most similar to things that don't work yet attract hardcore "true believers". It's a pattern repeated through the ages, perhaps most intimately for me in the seemingly endless parades of computer system redesigns: software, hardware, or both. Randomly one might pick "the new and exciting Digg", the Itanium, and the Metaverse as fairly modern examples. There is something about a particular "narrowband" signaling approach, where a certain kind of purity is sought, with an expectation that, given enough explaining, you will finally get it, become enlightened, and convert to the ranks. A more "wideband" approach would at least admit observations like yours do exist and must be comprehensively addressed to the satisfaction of those who hold such beliefs vs to the satisfaction of those merely "stooping" to address them (again in the hopes they'll just see the light so everyone can get back to narrowband-ville).
- ajkjk 1y ago
  (Thank you) I agree, although I do think that the rationalists and EAs are way better than most of the other narrowband groups, as you call them, out there, such as the Metaverse or Crypto people. The rationalists are at least mostly legitimately motivated by morality and not just by a "blow it all up and replace it with something we control" philosophy (which I have come to believe is the belief-set that only a person who is convinced that they are truly powerless comes to). I see the rationalists as failing due to a skill issue as well: because they have so-defined themselves by their rationalism, they have trouble understanding the things in the world that they don't have a good rational understanding of, such as morality. They are too invested in words and truth and correctness to understand that there can be a lot of emotional truth encoded in logical falsehood. edit: oh, also, I think that a good part of people's aversion to the rationalists is just a reaction to the narrowband quality itself, not to the content. People are well-aware of the sorts of things that narrowband self-justifying philosophies lead to, from countless examples, whether it's at the personal level (an unaccountable schoolteacher) or societal (a genocidal movement). We don't trust a group unless they specifically demonstrate non-narrowbandedness, which means being collectively willing to change their behavior in ways that don't make sense to them. Any movement that co-opts the idea of what is morally justifiable---who says that e.g. rationality is what produces truth and things that run counter to it do not---is inherently frightening.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

smus 1y ago

Feels like "they are wrong and smug" is enough reason to dislike the movement

TeMPOraL 1y ago
Bashir: Even when they're neither? Garak: Especially when they're neither.
- smus 1y ago
  The comment I replied to conceded wrongness and smugness but is still somehow confused why otherwise intelligent ppl dislike the movement. I was hoping to clear it up for them Extra points for that comment's author implying that people who don't like the wrong and smug movement are unintelligent and protecting their egos, thus personally proving its smugness
  - cassepipe 1y ago
    I only conceded it insofar as everyone can be wrong sometimes, but at least those people seem to have a protocol to deal with it.Most people don't, and are fine with it. I stand on the side of those who care and are trying. As for smugness, it is subjective. Are those people smug ? Or are they talking passionately about some issue with the confidence of someone who feel what they are talking about and are expecting for it to resonate ? It's the eye of the beholder I guess. For example what you call my smugness is what I would a slightly depressed attitude fueled by the fact that it's sometimes hard to relate to other people feelings and behavior.

trod1234 1y ago

[flagged]

gopher_space 1y ago

Ever had a conversation with someone who literally cannot reexamine their base principles? Like, it's functionally impossible for them? That's everyone's central criticism of rationalists. Being able to do that is pretty much "entry level cognition" for a lot of us. You should be doing that yourself and doing it all the time if you want to play with the big kids. One of the things I really miss about the old nerds-only programmer's pit setup was the amount of room we had for instruction, especially regarding social issues. The scenes from the college department in Wargames were really on the nose, but highlight a form of education that was unavoidable if you couldn't just dip out of a conversation.

comp_throw7 1y ago
What a deeply confused criticism of rationalists, who are possibly the only meaningful social group in existence to celebrate changing their minds in response to new evidence.
- sanderjd 1y ago
  It's truly fascinating how this thread is full of demonstrations of the exact phenomenon being discussed! Accused of being unable to reexamine your base principles, you respond: > rationalists, who are possibly the only meaningful social group in existence to celebrate changing their minds in response to new evidence Which is exactly the kind of base principle that could use some reexamination.
  - comp_throw7 1y ago
    That's an empirical claim, not a "base principle" (whatever that is). And, uh, yeah, I agree that I am not re-examining my beliefs in response to a bunch of random unsupported accusations by people who are demonstrably not familiar with the thing they're attacking. You should update your beliefs in response to evidence, not in response to social attacks.
    - sanderjd 1y ago

skinnymuch 1y ago

Read other comments then. Not everyone is saying “they think they are better than us”. The primary issues as others have noted is they focus on people going to the highest paying jobs without much care for morality of the jobs. Ergo they are fine being net negatives in terms of their work and philosophy. All they do is donate money. Donations don’t fix society. Nothing changes structurally. No root problems are looked at. They largely ignore capitalism’s faults or when I’ve seen them talk about, it’s done in a way of superficially decrying capitalist issues but then largely going along with them. Which ties into how they focus on high paying jobs regardless of morality (I’m exaggerating here but the overall point is correct). — HN is not intelligent when it comes to politics or the world. The avg person here is a western chauvinist with little political knowledge but a defensive ego about it. No need to be sad about this comment page.

chipsrafferty 1y ago
Well put.
- skinnymuch 1y ago
  Thanks

sanderjd 1y ago

Or maybe you are demonstrating the exact failure to demonstrate introspective humility that people are talking about?