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One of a few issues I have with groups like these, is that they often confidently and aggressively spew a set of beliefs that on their face logically follow fro
by JohnMakin 1y ago
One of a few issues I have with groups like these, is that they often confidently and aggressively spew a set of beliefs that on their face logically follow from one another, until you realize they are built on a set of axioms that are either entirely untested or outright nonsense. This is common everywhere, but I feel especially pronounced in communities like this. It also involves quite a bit of navel gazing that makes me feel a little sick participating in.
The smartest people I have ever known have been profoundly unsure of their beliefs and what they know. I immediately become suspicious of anyone who is very certain of something, especially if they derived it on their own.
- bobson381 1y agoThere should be an extremist cult of people who are certain only that uncertainty is the only certain thing
- mapontosevenths 1y agoThere already is, they're called "Politicians."
- ameliaquining 1y agoLike Robert Anton Wilson if he were way less chill, perhaps.
- rpcope1 1y agoMore people should read Sextus Empiricus as he's basically the O.G. Phyrronist skeptic and goes pretty hard on this very train of thought.
- bobson381 1y agoCool. Any specific recs or places to start with him?
- Telemakhos 1y agoIf I remember my Gellius, it was the Academic Skeptics who claimed that the only certainty was uncertainty; the Pyrrhonists, in opposition, denied that one could be certain about the certainty of uncertainty.
- arwhatever 1y ago“Oh, that must be exhausting.”
- saltcured 1y agoThere would be, except we're all very much on the fence about whether it is the right cult for us.
- hungmung 1y agoWhat makes you so certain there isn't? A group that has a deep understanding fnord of uncertainty would probably like to work behind the scenes to achieve their goals.
- card_zero 1y agoThe Snatter Goblins? https://archive.org/details/goblinsoflabyrin0000frou/page/109/mode/1up?q=%22snatter+goblins%22 https://archive.org/details/goblinsoflabyrin0000frou/page/10...
- pancakemouse 1y agoMy favourite bumper sticker, "Militant Agnostic. I don't know, and neither do you."
- bobson381 1y agoI heard about this the other day! I think I need one.
- jazzyjackson 1y agoA Wonderful Phrase by Gandhi I do dimly perceive that while everything around me is ever-changing, ever-dying there is, underlying all that change, a living power that is changeless, that holds all together, that creates, dissolves, and recreates
- tim333 1y agoSocrates was fairly close to that.
- freedomben 1y agoMy thought as well! I can't remember names at the moment, but there were some cults that spun off from Socrates. Unfortunately they also adopted his practice of never writing anything down, so we don't know a whole lot about them
- JTbane 1y ago"I have no strong feelings one way or the other." thunderous applause
- tomjakubowski 1y agohttps://realworldrisk.com/ https://realworldrisk.com/
- Viliam1234 1y agoYou mean like this? https://www.readthesequences.com/Zero-And-One-Are-Not-Probabilities https://www.readthesequences.com/Zero-And-One-Are-Not-Probab...
- ctoth 1y ago> I immediately become suspicious of anyone who is very certain of something, especially if they derived it on their own. Are you certain about this?
- JohnMakin 1y agono
- idontwantthis 1y agoSuspicious implies uncertain. It’s not immediate rejection.
- teddyh 1y agoAll I know is that I know nothing.
- adrianN 1y agoYour own state of mind is one of the easiest things to be fairly certain about.
- ants_everywhere 1y agoThe fact that this is false is one of the oldest findings of research psychology
- PaulHoule 1y agoMarvin Minsky wrote forcefully [1] about this in The Society of Mind and went so far to say that trying to observe yourself (e.g. meditation) might be harmful. Freud of course discovered a certain world of the unconscious but untrained [2] you would certainly struggle to explain how you know sentence S is grammatical and S' is not, or what it is you do when you walk. If you did meditation or psychoanalysis or some other practice to understand yourself better it would take years. [1] whether or not it is true. [2] the "scientific" explanation you'd have if you're trained may or may not be true since it can't be used to program a computer to do it
- jl6 1y agoI don’t think it’s just (or even particularly) bad axioms, I think it’s that people tend to build up “logical” conclusions where they think each step is a watertight necessity that follows inevitably from its antecedents, but actually each step is a little bit leaky, leading to runaway growth in false confidence. Not that non-rationalists are any better at reasoning, but non-rationalists do at least benefit from some intellectual humility.
- danaris 1y ago> I think it’s that people tend to build up “logical” conclusions where they think each step is a watertight necessity that follows inevitably from its antecedents, but actually each step is a little bit leaky, leading to runaway growth in false confidence. Yeah, this is a pattern I've seen a lot of recently—especially in discussions about LLMs and the supposed inevitability of AGI (and the Singularity). This is a good description of it.
- kergonath 1y agoAnother annoying one is the simulation theory group. They know just enough about Physics to build sophisticated mental constructs without understanding how flimsy the foundations are or how their logical steps are actually unproven hypotheses.
- JohnMakin 1y agoAgreed. This one is especially annoying to me and dear to my heart, because I enjoy discussing the philosophy behind this, but it devolves into weird discussions and conclusions fairly quickly without much effort at all. I particularly enjoy the tenets of certain sects of buddhism and how they view these things, but you'll get a lot of people that are doing a really pseudo-intellectual version of the Matrix where they are the main character.
- BaseBaal 1y agoWhich sects of Buddhism? Just curious to read further about them.
- ar-nelson 1y agoI find Yudowsky-style rationalists morbidly fascinating in the same way as Scientologists and other cults. Probably because they seem to genuinely believe they're living in a sci-fi story. I read a lot of their stuff, probably too much, even though I find it mostly ridiculous. The biggest nonsense axiom I see in the AI-cult rationalist world is recursive self-improvement. It's the classic reason superintelligence takeoff happens in sci-fi: once AI reaches some threshold of intelligence, it's supposed to figure out how to edit its own mind, do that better and faster than humans, and exponentially leap into superintelligence. The entire "AI 2027" scenario is built on this assumption; it assumes that soon LLMs will gain the capability of assisting humans on AI research, and AI capabilities will explode from there. But AI being capable of researching or improving itself is not obvious; there's so many assumptions built into it! - What if "increasing intelligence", which is a very vague goal, has diminishing returns, making recursive self-improvement incredibly slow? - Speaking of which, LLMs already seem to have hit a wall of diminishing returns; it seems unlikely they'll be able to assist cutting-edge AI research with anything other than boilerplate coding speed improvements. - What if there are several paths to different kinds of intelligence with their own local maxima, in which the AI can easily get stuck after optimizing itself into the wrong type of intelligence? - Once AI realizes it can edit itself to be more intelligent, it can also edit its own goals. Why wouldn't it wirehead itself? (short-circuit its reward pathway so it always feels like it's accomplished its goal) Knowing Yudowsky I'm sure there's a long blog post somewhere where all of these are addressed with several million rambling words of theory, but I don't think any amount of doing philosophy in a vacuum without concrete evidence could convince me that fast-takeoff superintelligence is possible.
- JKCalhoun 1y agoAn interesting point you make there — one would assume that if recursive self-improvement were a thing, Nature would have already lead humans into that "hall of mirrors".
- marcosdumay 1y agoWell, arguably that's exactly where we are, but machines can evolve faster. And that's an entire new angle that the cultists are ignoring... because superintelligence may just not be very valuable. And we don't need superintelligence for smart machines to be a problem anyway. We don't need even AGI. IMO, there's no reason to focus on that.
- ambicapter 1y agoOne of the only idioms that I don't mind living my life by is, "Follow the truth-seeker, but beware those who've found it".
- JKCalhoun 1y agoInteresting. I can't say I've done much following though — not that I am aware of anyway. Maybe I just had no leaders growing up.
- lordnacho 1y ago> I immediately become suspicious of anyone who is very certain of something Me too, in almost every area of life. There's a reason it's called a conman: they are tricking your natural sense that confidence is connected to correctness. But also, even when it isn't about conning you, how do people become certain of something? They ignored the evidence against whatever they are certain of. People who actually know what they're talking about will always restrict the context and hedge their bets. Their explanation are tentative, filled with ifs and buts. They rarely say anything sweeping.
- dcminter 1y agoIn the term "conman" the confidence in question is that of the mark, not the perpetrator.
- yunwal 1y ago> how do people become certain of something? They see the same pattern repeatedly until it becomes the only reasonable explanation? I’m certain about the theory of gravity because every time I drop an object it falls to the ground with a constant acceleration.
- JKCalhoun 1y agoYou're describing the impressions I had of MENSA back in the 70's.
- Viliam1234 1y agoHe probably is describing Mensa, and assuming that it also applies to the rationality community without having any specific knowledge of the latter. (From my perspective, Hacker News is somewhere in the middle between Mensa and Less Wrong. Full of smart people, but most of them don't particularly care about evidence, if providing their own opinion confidently is an alternative.)
- jpiburn 1y ago"Cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who find it" - Voltaire
- paviva 1y agoMost likely Gide ("Croyez ceux qui cherchent la vérité, doutez de ceux qui la trouvent", "Believe those who seek Truth, doubt those who find it") and not Voltaire ;) Voltaire was generally more subtle: "un bon mot ne prouve rien", a witty saying proves nothing, as he'd say.
- inasio 1y agoSaw once a discussion that people should not have kids as it's by far the highest increase in your carbon footprint in your lifetime (>10x than going vegan, etc) be driven all the way to advocating genocide as a way of carbon footprint minimization
- derektank 1y agoSetting aside the reductio ad absurdum of genocide, this is an unfortunately common viewpoint. People really need to take into account the chances their child might wind up working on science or technology which reduces global CO2 emissions or even captures CO2. This reasoning can be applied to all sorts of naive "more people bad" arguments. I can't imagine where the world would be if Norman Borlaug's parents had decided to never have kids out of concern for global food insecurity.
- freedomben 1y agoIt also entirely subjugates the economic realities that we (at least currently) live in to the future health of the planet. I care a great deal about the Earth and our environment, but the more I've learned about stuff the more I've realized that anyone advocating for focusing on one without considering the impact on the other is primarily following a religion
- mapontosevenths 1y ago> It also entirely subjugates the economic realities that we... To play devils advocate, you could be seen as trying to subjugate the worlds health to your own economic well-being, and far fewer people are concerned with your tax bracket than there are people on earth. In a pure democracy, I'm fairly certain the planets well being would be deemed more important than the economy of whatever nation you live in. > advocating for focusing on one... is primarily following a religion Maybe, but they could also just be doing the risk calculus a bit differently. If you are a many step thinker the long term fecundity of our species might feel more important than any level of short term financial motivation.
- amanaplanacanal 1y agoIt's very tempting to try to reason things through from first principles. I do it myself, a lot. It's one of the draws of libertarianism, which I've been drawn to for a long time. But the world is way more complex than the models we used to derive those "first principles".
- BobaFloutist 1y agoIt's also very fun and satisfying. But it should be limited to an intellectual exercise at best, and more likely a silly game. Because there's no true first principle, you always have to make some assumption along the way.
- uoaei 1y agoThis is why it's important to emphasize that rationality is not a good goal to have. Rationality is nothing more than applied logic, which takes axioms as given and deduces conclusions from there. Reasoning is the appropriate target because it is a self-critical, self-correcting method that continually re-evaluates axioms and methods to express intentions.
- zaphar 1y agoThe distinction between them and religion is that religion is free to say that those axioms are a matter of faith and treat them as such. Rationalists are not as free to do so.
- EGreg 1y agoThere are certain things I am sure of even though I derived them on my own. But I constantly battle tested them against other smart people’s views, and just after I ran out of people to bring me new rational objections did I become sure. Now I can battle test them against LLMs. On a lesser level of confidence, I have also found a lot of times the people who disagreed with what I thought had to be the case, later came to regret it because their strategies ended up in failure and they told me they regretted not taking my recommendation. But that is on an individual level. I have gotten pretty good at seeing systemic problems, architecting systemic solutions, and realizing what it would take to get them adopted to at least a critical mass. Usually, they fly in the face of what happens normally in society. People don’t see how their strategies and lives are shaped by the technology and social norms around them. Here, I will share three examples: Public Health: https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/ https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/ Economic and Governmental: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362 https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362 Wars & Destruction: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=424 https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=424 For that last one, I am often proven somewhat wrong by right-wing war hawks, because my left-leaning anti-war stance is about avoiding inflicting large scale misery on populations, but the war hawks go through with it anyway and wind up defeating their geopolitical enemies and gaining ground as the conflict fades into history.
- projektfu 1y ago"genetically engineers high fructose corn syrup into everything" This phrase is nonsense, because HFCS is a chemical process applied to normal corn after the harvest. The corn may be a GMO but it certainly doesn't have to be.
- EGreg 1y agoAgreed, that was phrased wrong. The fruits across the board have been genetically engineered to be extremely sweet (fructose, not the syrup): https://weather.com/news/news/2018-10-03-fruit-so-sweet-zoo-stopped-feeding-them-to-animals https://weather.com/news/news/2018-10-03-fruit-so-sweet-zoo-... While their nutritional quality has gone down tremendously, for vegetables too: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10969708/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10969708/
- gen220 1y agoStrongly recommend this profile in the NYer on Curtis Yarvin (who also uses "rationalism" to justify their beliefs) [0]. The section towards the end that reports on his meeting one of his supposed ideological heroes for an extended period of time is particularly illuminating. I feel like the internet has led to an explosion of these such groups because it abstracts the "ideas" away from the "people". I suspect if most people were in a room or spent an extended amount of time around any of these self-professed, hyper-online rationalists, they would immediately disregard any theories they were able to cook up, no matter how clever or persuasively-argued they might be in their written down form. [0]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/curtis-yarvin-profile https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/curtis-yarvin-...
- trawy081225 1y ago> I feel like the internet has led to an explosion of these such groups because it abstracts the "ideas" away from the "people". I suspect if most people were in a room or spent an extended amount of time around any of these self-professed, hyper-online rationalists, they would immediately disregard any theories they were able to cook up, no matter how clever or persuasively-argued they might be in their written down form. Likely the opposite. The internet has led to people being able to see the man behind the curtain, and realize how flawed the individuals pushing these ideas are. Whereas many intellectuals from 50 years back were just as bad if not worse, but able to maintain a false aura of intelligence by cutting themselves off from the masses.
- wussboy 1y agoHard disagree. People use rationality to support the beliefs they already have, not to change those beliefs. The internet allows everyone to find something that supports anything. I do it. You do it. I think a fascinating litmus test is asking yourself this question: “When did I last change my mind about something significant?” For most people the answer is “never”. If we lived in the world you described, most people’s answers would be “relatively recently”.
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- ratelimitsteve 1y agoAre you familiar with ship of theseus as an arugmentation fallacy? Innuendo Studios did a great video on it and I think that a lot of what you're talking about breaks down to this. Tldr - it's a fallacy of substitution, small details of an argument get replaced by things that are (or feel like) logical equivalents until you end up saying something entirely different but are arguing as though you said the original thing. In this video the example is "senator doxxes a political opponent" but on looking "senator" turns out to mean "a contractor working for the senator" and "doxxes a political opponent" turns out to mean "liked a tweet that had that opponent's name in it in a way that could draw attention to it". Each change is arguably equivalent and it seems logical that if x = y then you could put y anywhere you have x, but after all of the changes are applied the argument that emerges is definitely different from the one before all the substitutions are made. It feels like communities that pride themselves on being extra rational seem subject to this because it has all the trappings of rationalism but enables squishy, feely arguments
- ratelimitsteve 1y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui-ArJRqEvU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui-ArJRqEvU Meant to drop a link for the above, my bad
- GeoAtreides 1y agoEpistemological skepticism sure is a belief. A strong belief on your side? I am profoundly sure, I am certain I exist and that a reality outside myself exists. Worse, I strongly believe knowing this external reality is possible, desirable and accurate. How suspicious does that make me?
- NoGravitas 1y agoIt means you haven't read Hume, or, in general, taken philosophy seriously. An academic philosopher might still come to the same conclusions as you (there is an academic philosopher for every possible position), but they'd never claim the certainty you do.
- GeoAtreides 1y agowhy so aggressive chief I am certain that your position "All academic philosophers never claim complete certainty about their beliefs" is not even wrong or falsifiable.
- antisthenes 1y agoIt's crazy to read this, because by writing what you wrote you basically show that you don't understand what an axiom is. You need to review the definition of the word. > The smartest people I have ever known have been profoundly unsure of their beliefs and what they know. The smartest people are unsure about their higher level beliefs, but I can assure you that they almost certainly don't re-evaluate "axioms" as you put it on a daily or weekly basis. Not that it matters, as we almost certainly can't verify who these people are based on an internet comment. > I immediately become suspicious of anyone who is very certain of something, especially if they derived it on their own. That's only your problem, not anyone else's. If you think people can't arrive to a tangible and useful approximation of truth, then you are simply delusional.
- mapontosevenths 1y ago> If you think people can't arrive to a tangible and useful approximation of truth, then you are simply delusional Logic is only a map, not the territory. It is a new toy, still bright and shining from the box in terms of human history. Before logic there were other ways of thinking, and new ones will come after. Yet, Voltaire's bastards are always certain they're right, despite being right far less often than they believe. Can people arrive at tangible and useful conclusions? Certainly, but they can only ever find capital "T" Truth in a very limited sense. Logic, like many other models of the universe, is only useful until you change your frame of reference or the scale at which you think. Then those laws suddenly become only approximations, or even irrelevant.
- antisthenes 1y agoThere is no (T)ruth, but there is a useful approximation of truth for 99.9% things that I want to do in life. YMMV.
- JohnMakin 1y ago> It's crazy to read this, because by writing what you wrote you basically show that you don't understand what an axiom is. You need to review the definition of the word. Oh, do enlighten then. > The smartest people are unsure about their higher level beliefs, but I can assure you that they almost certainly don't re-evaluate "axioms" as you put it on a daily or weekly basis. Not that it matters, as we almost certainly can't verify who these people are based on an internet comment. I'm not sure you are responding to the right comment, or are severely misinterpreting what I said. Clearly a nerve was struck though, and I do apologize for any undue distress. I promise you'll recover from it.
- SLWW 1y agoA logical argument is only as good as it's presuppositions. To first lay siege to your own assumptions before reasoning about them tends towards a more beneficial outcome. Another issue with "thinkers" is that many are cowards; whether they realize it or not a lot of presuppositions are built on a "safe" framework, placing little to no responsibility on the thinker. > The smartest people I have ever known have been profoundly unsure of their beliefs and what they know. I immediately become suspicious of anyone who is very certain of something, especially if they derived it on their own. This is where I depart from you. If I say it's anti-intellectual I would only be partially correct, but it's worse than that imo. You might be coming across "smart people" who claim to know nothing "for sure", which in itself is a self-defeating argument. How can you claim that nothing is truly knowable as if you truly know that nothing is knowable? I'm taking these claims to their logical extremes btw, avoiding the granular argumentation surrounding the different shades and levels of doubt; I know that leaves vulnerabilities in my argument, but why argue with those who know that they can't know much of anything as if they know what they are talking about to begin with? They are so defeatist in their own thoughts, it's comical. You say, "profoundly unsure", which reads similarly to me as "can't really ever know" which is a sure truth claim, not a relative claim or a comparative as many would say, which is a sad attempt to side-step the absolute reality of their statement. I know that I exist, regardless of how I get here I know that I do, there is a ridiculous amount of rhetoric surrounding that claim that I will not argue for here, this is my presupposition. So with that I make an ontological claim, a truth claim, concerning my existence; this claim is one that I must be sure of to operate at any base level. I also believe I am me and not you, or any other. Therefore I believe in one absolute, that "I am me". As such I can claim that an absolute exists, and if absolutes exist, then within the right framework you must also be an absolute to me, and so on and so forth; what I do not see in nature is an existence, or notion of, the relative on it's own as at every relative comparison there is an absolute holding up the comparison. One simple example is heat. Hot is relative, yet it also is objective; some heat can burn you, other heat can burn you over a very long time, some heat will never burn. When something is "too hot" that is a comparative claim, stating that there is another "hot" which is just "hot" or not "hot enough", the absolute still remains which is heat. Relativistic thought is a game of comparisons and relations, not making absolute claims; the only absolute claim is that there is no absolute claim to the relativist. The reason I am talking about relativists is that they are the logical, or illogical, conclusion of the extremes of doubt/disbelief i previously mentioned. If you know nothing you are not wise, you are lazy and ill-prepared, we know the earth is round, we know that gravity exists, we are aware of the atomic, we are aware of our existence, we are aware that the sun shines it's light upon us, we are sure of many things that took debate among smart people many many years ago to arrive to these sure conclusions. There was a time where many things we accept where "not known" but were observed with enough time and effort by brilliant people. That's why we have scientists, teachers, philosophers and journalists. I encourage you that the next time you find a "smart" person who is unsure of their beliefs, you should kindly encourage them to be less lazy and challenge their absolutes, if they deny the absolute could be found then you aren't dealing with a "smart" person, you are dealing with a useful idiot who spent too much time watching skeptics blather on about meaningless topics until their brains eventually fell out. In every relative claim there must be an absolute or it fails to function in any logical framework. You can with enough thought, good data, and enough time to let things steep find the (or an) absolute and make a sure claim. You might be proven wrong later, but that should be an indicator to you that you should improve (or a warning you are being taken advantage of by a sophist), and that the truth is out there, not to sequester yourself away in this comfortable, unsure hell that many live in till they die. The beauty of absolute truth is that you can believe absolutes without understanding the entirety of the absolute. I know gravity exists but I don't know fully how it works. Yet I can be absolutely certain it acts upon me, even if I only understand a part of it. People should know what they know and study it until they do and not make sure claims outside of what they do not know until they have the prerequisite absolute claims to support the broader claims with the surety of the weakest of their presuppositions. Apologies for grammar, length and how schizo my thought process appears; I don't think linearly and it takes a goofy amount of effort to try to collate my thoughts in a sensible manner.
- positron26 1y agoAny theory of everything will often have a little perpetual motion machine at the nexus. These can be fascinating to the mind. Pressing through uncertainty either requires a healthy appetite for risk or an engine of delusion. A person who struggles to get out of their comfort zone will seek enablement through such a device. Appreciation of risk-reward will throttle trips into the unknown. A person using a crutch to justify everything will careen hyperbolically into more chaotic and erratic behaviors hoping to find that the device is still working, seeking the thrill of enablement again. The extremism comes from where once the user learned to say hello to a stranger, their comfort zone has expanded to an area that their experience with risk-reward is underdeveloped. They don't look at the external world to appreciate what might happen. They try to morph situations into some confirmation of the crutch and the inferiority of confounding ideas. "No, the world isn't right. They are just weak and the unspoken rules [in the user's mind] are meant to benefit them." This should always resonate because nobody will stand up for you like you have a responsibility to. A study of uncertainty and the limitations of axioms, the inability of any sufficiently expressive formalism to be both complete and consistent, these are the ideas that are antidotes to such things. We do have to leave the rails from time to time, but where we arrive will be another set of rails and will look and behave like rails, so a bit of uncertainty is necessary, but it's not some magic hat that never runs out of rabbits. Another psychology that will come into play from those who have left their comfort zone is the inability to revert. It is a harmful tendency to presume all humans fixed quantities. Once a behavior exists, the person is said to be revealed, not changed. The proper response is to set boundaries and be ready to tie off the garbage bag and move on if someone shows remorse and desire to revert or transform. Otherwise every relationship only gets worse. If instead you can never go back, extreme behavior is a ratchet. Ever mistake becomes the person.
- Animats 1y agoMany arguments arise over the valuation of future money. See "discount function" [1] At one extreme are the rational altruists, who rate that near 1.0, and the "drill, baby, drill" people, who are much closer to 0. The discount function really should have a noise term, because predictions about the future are noisy, and the noise increases with the distance into the future. If you don't consider that, you solve the wrong problem. There's a classic Roman concern about running out of space for cemeteries. Running out of energy, or overpopulation, turned out to be problems where the projections assumed less noise than actually happened. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discount_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discount_function
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- mensetmanusman 1y agoAnother issue with these groups is that they often turn into sex cults.
- UltraSane 1y agoA good example of this is the number of huge assumptions needed for the argument for Roko's basilisk. I'm shocked that some people actually take it seriously.
- niplav 1y agoI don't believe anyone has taken it seriously in the last half-decade, if you find counter-evidence for that belief let me know.
- konfusinomicon 1y agoall of science would makes sense if it wasn't for that 1 pesky miracle
- DirkH 1y agoRationalists and effective altruism have reasoning under uncertainty as cornerstones of their respective movements. There is an entire philosophical theory called deep cluelessness which is far more nuanced than just "unsure" which was built on by an Oxford EA philosopher. I personally know multiple people in the movement who say they are deeply clueless on matters where they can altogether affect where hundreds of thousands of dollars under their care is directed. And guess what, it does give them pause and they don't just follow some weird entirely untested or nonsense set of axioms. They consider second order effects, backfire risk and even hedging interventions in case their worldview is incorrect. All this careful reasoning I just never ever see in any any other social movement that has money it can direct where there is clear uncertainty with how best to allocate it.