6 ms·

This is vibe-based, but I think the Rationalists get more vitriol than they deserve. Upon reflecting, my hypothesis for this is threefold: 1. They are a commun

This is vibe-based, but I think the Rationalists get more vitriol than they deserve. Upon reflecting, my hypothesis for this is threefold: 1. They are a community—they have an in-group, and if you are not one of them you are by-definition in the out-group. People tend not to like being in other peoples' out-groups. 2. They have unusual opinions and are open about them. People tend not to like people who express opinions different than their own. 3. They're nerds. Whatever has historically caused nerds to be bullied/ostracized, they probably have.

teamonkey 1y ago
> This is vibe-based You mean an empirical observation
- lowbloodsugar 1y ago
  Three examples of feelings-based conclusions were presented. There is what is so, and how you feel about them. By all means be empirical about what you felt, and maybe look into that. “How this made me feel” describes the cause of how we got the USA today.
johnfn 1y ago
HN judges rationality quite severely. I mean, look at this thread about Mr. Beast[1], who it's safe to say is a controversial figure, and notice how all the top comments are all pretty charitable. It's pretty funny to take the conversation there and then compare the comments to this article. Scott Aaronson - in theory someone HN should be a huge fan of, from all reports a super nice and extremely intelligent guy who knows a staggering amount about quantum mechanics - says he likes rationality, and gets less charity than Mr. Beast. Huh? [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41549649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41549649
- foldr 1y ago
  Most people are trying to be rational (to be sure, with varying degrees of success), and people who aren't even trying aren't really worth having abstract intellectual discussions with. I'm reminded of CS Lewis's quip in a different context that "you might just as well expect to be congratulated because, whenever you do a sum, you try to get it quite right."
  - throwaway314155 1y ago
    Being rational and rationalist are not the same thing. Funnily this sort of false equivalence that relies on being "technically correct" is at the core of what makes them...difficult.
    - foldr 1y ago
      There's more to the group identity than just applying logic and rationality, yes. But surely 'rationalists' of all people wouldn't want to take the position that some of their key ideas don't result primarily from applying rational thought processes. Any part of their worldview that doesn't follow immediately from foundational principles of logic and reason is presumably subject to revision based on evidence and argument.
      - throwaway314155 1y ago
        Right but their version of rationality is very much lacking in emotional and even social intelligence. In fact it seems those traits are discouraged in discussions. Instead things are viewed from a purely Bayesian/Spock/Sherlocke/Data style perspective. These arguments can only make sense by assuming far more predictive power (or far less accounting for chaos and hidden variables) and by developing blind spots not found in softer arguments which have their own problems but at least try to consider ethics and economics from more nuanced perspectives. Their core principle seems to be that many or even most answers to humanity's problems can be well defined in the first place and then solved by invoking Bayesian logic. This is only true in a frictionless vacuum.
- creata 1y ago
  The people commenting under the Mr. Beast post are probably different to the people commenting under this post. Anyway, Mr. Beast doesn't really pretend to be more than what he is afaik. In contrast, the Rationalist tendency to use mathematics (especially Bayes's theorem) as window dressing is really, really annoying.
  - directevolve 1y ago
    What HN has for the rationalist movement isn’t just annoyance - it’s deep contempt and hatred.
- sandspar 1y ago
  Fittingly enough, the Rationalist community talks about this a lot. The canonical article is here ("I can tolerate anything except the outgroup").* The gist is that if people are really different from us then we tend to be cool with them. But if they're close to us - but not quite the same - then they tend to annoy us. Hacker News people are close enough to Rationalists that HN people find them annoying. It's the same reason why e.g. Hitler-style Neo Nazis can have a beer with Black Nationalists, but they tend to despise Klan-style Neo Nazis. Or why Sunni and Shia Muslims have issues with each other but neither group really cares about Indigenous American religions or whatever. * https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
Aurornis 1y ago
> They are a community—they have an in-group, and if you are not one of them you are by-definition in the out-group. The rationalist community is most definitely not exclusive. You can join it by declaring yourself to be a rationalist, posting blogs with "epistemic status" taglines, and calling yourself a rationalist. The criticisms are not because it's a cool club that won't let people in. > They have unusual opinions and are open about them. People tend not to like people who express opinions different than their own. Herein lies one of the problems with the rationalist community: For all of their talk about heterodox ideas and entertaining different viewpoints, they are remarkably lockstep in many of their opinions. From the outside, it's easy to see how one rationalist blogger plants the seed of some topic and then it gets adopted by the others as fact. A few years ago a rationalist blogger wrote a long series postulating that trace lithium in water was causing obesity. It even got an Astral Codex Ten monetary grant. For years it got shared through the rationalist community as proof of something, even though actual experts picked it apart from the beginning and showed how the author was misinterpreting studies, abusing statistics, and ignoring more prominent factors. The problem isn't differing opinions, the problem is that they disregard actual expertise and try ham-fisted attempts at "first principals" evaluations of a subject while ignoring contradictory evidence and they do this very frequently.
- gjm11 1y ago
  Lockstep like this? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-probably-not-lithium https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-proba... (a post on Less Wrong, karma score currently +442, versus +102 and +230 for the two posts it cites as earlier favourable LW coverage of the lithium claim -- the comments on both of which, by the way, don't look to me any more positive than "skeptical but interested") The followup post from the same author https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NRrbJJWnaSorrqvtZ/on-not-getting-contaminated-by-the-wrong-obesity-ideas https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NRrbJJWnaSorrqvtZ/on-not-get... is currently at a score of +306, again higher than either of those other pro-lithium-hypothesis posts. Or maybe this https://substack.com/home/post/p-39247037 https://substack.com/home/post/p-39247037 (I admit I don't know for sure whether the author considers himself a rationalist, but I found the link via a search for whether Scott Alexander had written anything about the lithium theory, which it looks like he hasn't, which turned this up in the subreddit dedicated to his writing). Speaking of which, I can't find any sign that they got an ACX grant. I can find https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-grants-the-first-half https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-grants-the-first-half which is basically "hey, here are some interesting projects we didn't give any money to, with a one-paragraph pitch from each" and one of the things there is "Slime Mold Time Mold" talking about lithium; incidentally, the comments there are also pretty skeptical. So I'm not really seeing this "gets adopted by the others as fact" thing in this case; it looks to me as if some people proposed this hypothesis, some other people said "eh, doesn't look right to me", and rationalists' attitude was mostly "interesting idea but probably wrong". What am I missing here?
woopwoop 1y ago
Agree, but I think there is another, more important factor. They are a highly visible part of the internet, and their existence is mainly internet-based. This means that the people assessing them are mainly on the internet, and as we all know, internet discourse tends to the blandly negative (ironically my own comment is a mild example of this).
- lukas099 1y ago
  Great point!
creatonez 1y ago
Nope. Has nothing to do with them being nerds. They are actively dangerous, their views almost always lead to extremely reactionary politics. EA and RA are deeply anti-human. In some cases that manifests as a desire to subjugate humanity with an iron fist technocratic rule, in other cases it manifests as a desire to kill off humanity. Either way, as an ideology it must be stopped. It should not be treated with kids gloves, it is an ideology that is actively influencing the ruling elites right now (JD Vance, Musk, Thiel are part of this cult, and also simultaneously believe in German-style Nazism, which is broadly compatible with RA). The only silver lining is that some of their ideas about power-seeking tactics are so ineffective they will never work -- in other words, humanity will prevail over these ghouls, because they came in with so many bad assumptions that they've lost touch with reality.
- Uhhrrr 1y ago
  In what specific way do you disagree with them?
  - creatonez 1y ago
    The support for eugenics and ethnic cleansing, the absolute obsession with strictly utilitarian ethics and ignorance of other ethics, the "kill a bunch of humans now so that trillions can live in the future" longtermist death cult, and the whole Roko's basilisk worship that usually goes like "one AI system can take over the entirety of humanity and start eating the galaxy, therefore we must forcefully jump in the driver seat of that dangerous AI right now so that our elite ideology is locked in for a trillion years of galactic evolution".
- therealdrag0 1y ago
  Huh? They give millions of dollars to global humanitarian development funds saving at least 50,000 lives per year. Maybe you’re taking a few kooks who have a controversial lecture somewhere as representing everyone else.
  - creatonez 1y ago
j_timberlake 1y ago
I think these are all true and relevant, but the main problem is that their thesis that "ASI alignment will be extremely difficult" can only really be proven in hindsight. It's like they're crying wolf but can't prove there's actually a wolf, only vague signs of one, but if the wolf ever becomes visible it will be way too late to do anything. Obviously no one is going to respect a group like that and many people will despise them.
at_a_remove 1y ago
I will throw in an additional factor: any group, community, or segmentation of the general population wherein the participants both tend to have a higher than average intelligence (whatever that means) and whose preoccupation revolves around almost any form of cogitation, consideration, products of human thought ... will invariably get hit with some form of snobbery/envy, even if no explicitly stated intelligence threshold or gatekeeping is present. Bluntly put, you are not allowed to be even a little smart and not all "aww shucks" about it. It has to be in service of something else like medicine or being a CPA. (Fun fact I found in a statistics course: the average CPA has about five points of IQ on the average doctor.) And it is almost justified, because you are in constant peril of falling down into your own butt until you disappear, but at the same time it keeps a lot of people under the thumb (or heel, pick your oppressive body part) of dumbass managers and idiots who blithely plow forward without a trace of doubt.

teamonkey 1y ago

> This is vibe-based You mean an empirical observation

lowbloodsugar 1y ago
Three examples of feelings-based conclusions were presented. There is what is so, and how you feel about them. By all means be empirical about what you felt, and maybe look into that. “How this made me feel” describes the cause of how we got the USA today.

johnfn 1y ago

HN judges rationality quite severely. I mean, look at this thread about Mr. Beast[1], who it's safe to say is a controversial figure, and notice how all the top comments are all pretty charitable. It's pretty funny to take the conversation there and then compare the comments to this article. Scott Aaronson - in theory someone HN should be a huge fan of, from all reports a super nice and extremely intelligent guy who knows a staggering amount about quantum mechanics - says he likes rationality, and gets less charity than Mr. Beast. Huh? [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41549649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41549649

foldr 1y ago
Most people are trying to be rational (to be sure, with varying degrees of success), and people who aren't even trying aren't really worth having abstract intellectual discussions with. I'm reminded of CS Lewis's quip in a different context that "you might just as well expect to be congratulated because, whenever you do a sum, you try to get it quite right."
- throwaway314155 1y ago
  Being rational and rationalist are not the same thing. Funnily this sort of false equivalence that relies on being "technically correct" is at the core of what makes them...difficult.
  - foldr 1y ago
    There's more to the group identity than just applying logic and rationality, yes. But surely 'rationalists' of all people wouldn't want to take the position that some of their key ideas don't result primarily from applying rational thought processes. Any part of their worldview that doesn't follow immediately from foundational principles of logic and reason is presumably subject to revision based on evidence and argument.
    - throwaway314155 1y ago
      Right but their version of rationality is very much lacking in emotional and even social intelligence. In fact it seems those traits are discouraged in discussions. Instead things are viewed from a purely Bayesian/Spock/Sherlocke/Data style perspective. These arguments can only make sense by assuming far more predictive power (or far less accounting for chaos and hidden variables) and by developing blind spots not found in softer arguments which have their own problems but at least try to consider ethics and economics from more nuanced perspectives. Their core principle seems to be that many or even most answers to humanity's problems can be well defined in the first place and then solved by invoking Bayesian logic. This is only true in a frictionless vacuum.
creata 1y ago
The people commenting under the Mr. Beast post are probably different to the people commenting under this post. Anyway, Mr. Beast doesn't really pretend to be more than what he is afaik. In contrast, the Rationalist tendency to use mathematics (especially Bayes's theorem) as window dressing is really, really annoying.
- directevolve 1y ago
  What HN has for the rationalist movement isn’t just annoyance - it’s deep contempt and hatred.
sandspar 1y ago
Fittingly enough, the Rationalist community talks about this a lot. The canonical article is here ("I can tolerate anything except the outgroup").* The gist is that if people are really different from us then we tend to be cool with them. But if they're close to us - but not quite the same - then they tend to annoy us. Hacker News people are close enough to Rationalists that HN people find them annoying. It's the same reason why e.g. Hitler-style Neo Nazis can have a beer with Black Nationalists, but they tend to despise Klan-style Neo Nazis. Or why Sunni and Shia Muslims have issues with each other but neither group really cares about Indigenous American religions or whatever. * https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...

Aurornis 1y ago

> They are a community—they have an in-group, and if you are not one of them you are by-definition in the out-group. The rationalist community is most definitely not exclusive. You can join it by declaring yourself to be a rationalist, posting blogs with "epistemic status" taglines, and calling yourself a rationalist. The criticisms are not because it's a cool club that won't let people in. > They have unusual opinions and are open about them. People tend not to like people who express opinions different than their own. Herein lies one of the problems with the rationalist community: For all of their talk about heterodox ideas and entertaining different viewpoints, they are remarkably lockstep in many of their opinions. From the outside, it's easy to see how one rationalist blogger plants the seed of some topic and then it gets adopted by the others as fact. A few years ago a rationalist blogger wrote a long series postulating that trace lithium in water was causing obesity. It even got an Astral Codex Ten monetary grant. For years it got shared through the rationalist community as proof of something, even though actual experts picked it apart from the beginning and showed how the author was misinterpreting studies, abusing statistics, and ignoring more prominent factors. The problem isn't differing opinions, the problem is that they disregard actual expertise and try ham-fisted attempts at "first principals" evaluations of a subject while ignoring contradictory evidence and they do this very frequently.

gjm11 1y ago
Lockstep like this? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-probably-not-lithium https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-proba... (a post on Less Wrong, karma score currently +442, versus +102 and +230 for the two posts it cites as earlier favourable LW coverage of the lithium claim -- the comments on both of which, by the way, don't look to me any more positive than "skeptical but interested") The followup post from the same author https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NRrbJJWnaSorrqvtZ/on-not-getting-contaminated-by-the-wrong-obesity-ideas https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NRrbJJWnaSorrqvtZ/on-not-get... is currently at a score of +306, again higher than either of those other pro-lithium-hypothesis posts. Or maybe this https://substack.com/home/post/p-39247037 https://substack.com/home/post/p-39247037 (I admit I don't know for sure whether the author considers himself a rationalist, but I found the link via a search for whether Scott Alexander had written anything about the lithium theory, which it looks like he hasn't, which turned this up in the subreddit dedicated to his writing). Speaking of which, I can't find any sign that they got an ACX grant. I can find https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-grants-the-first-half https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-grants-the-first-half which is basically "hey, here are some interesting projects we didn't give any money to, with a one-paragraph pitch from each" and one of the things there is "Slime Mold Time Mold" talking about lithium; incidentally, the comments there are also pretty skeptical. So I'm not really seeing this "gets adopted by the others as fact" thing in this case; it looks to me as if some people proposed this hypothesis, some other people said "eh, doesn't look right to me", and rationalists' attitude was mostly "interesting idea but probably wrong". What am I missing here?

woopwoop 1y ago

Agree, but I think there is another, more important factor. They are a highly visible part of the internet, and their existence is mainly internet-based. This means that the people assessing them are mainly on the internet, and as we all know, internet discourse tends to the blandly negative (ironically my own comment is a mild example of this).

lukas099 1y ago
Great point!

creatonez 1y ago

Nope. Has nothing to do with them being nerds. They are actively dangerous, their views almost always lead to extremely reactionary politics. EA and RA are deeply anti-human. In some cases that manifests as a desire to subjugate humanity with an iron fist technocratic rule, in other cases it manifests as a desire to kill off humanity. Either way, as an ideology it must be stopped. It should not be treated with kids gloves, it is an ideology that is actively influencing the ruling elites right now (JD Vance, Musk, Thiel are part of this cult, and also simultaneously believe in German-style Nazism, which is broadly compatible with RA). The only silver lining is that some of their ideas about power-seeking tactics are so ineffective they will never work -- in other words, humanity will prevail over these ghouls, because they came in with so many bad assumptions that they've lost touch with reality.

Uhhrrr 1y ago
In what specific way do you disagree with them?
- creatonez 1y ago
  The support for eugenics and ethnic cleansing, the absolute obsession with strictly utilitarian ethics and ignorance of other ethics, the "kill a bunch of humans now so that trillions can live in the future" longtermist death cult, and the whole Roko's basilisk worship that usually goes like "one AI system can take over the entirety of humanity and start eating the galaxy, therefore we must forcefully jump in the driver seat of that dangerous AI right now so that our elite ideology is locked in for a trillion years of galactic evolution".
therealdrag0 1y ago
Huh? They give millions of dollars to global humanitarian development funds saving at least 50,000 lives per year. Maybe you’re taking a few kooks who have a controversial lecture somewhere as representing everyone else.
- creatonez 1y ago

j_timberlake 1y ago

I think these are all true and relevant, but the main problem is that their thesis that "ASI alignment will be extremely difficult" can only really be proven in hindsight. It's like they're crying wolf but can't prove there's actually a wolf, only vague signs of one, but if the wolf ever becomes visible it will be way too late to do anything. Obviously no one is going to respect a group like that and many people will despise them.

at_a_remove 1y ago

I will throw in an additional factor: any group, community, or segmentation of the general population wherein the participants both tend to have a higher than average intelligence (whatever that means) and whose preoccupation revolves around almost any form of cogitation, consideration, products of human thought ... will invariably get hit with some form of snobbery/envy, even if no explicitly stated intelligence threshold or gatekeeping is present. Bluntly put, you are not allowed to be even a little smart and not all "aww shucks" about it. It has to be in service of something else like medicine or being a CPA. (Fun fact I found in a statistics course: the average CPA has about five points of IQ on the average doctor.) And it is almost justified, because you are in constant peril of falling down into your own butt until you disappear, but at the same time it keeps a lot of people under the thumb (or heel, pick your oppressive body part) of dumbass managers and idiots who blithely plow forward without a trace of doubt.