20 ms·

A very interesting read. My idea of these self-proclaimed rationalists was fifteen years out of date. I thought they’re people who write wordy fan fiction, but

by pavlov 1y ago

A very interesting read. My idea of these self-proclaimed rationalists was fifteen years out of date. I thought they’re people who write wordy fan fiction, but turns out they’ve reached the point of having subgroups that kill people and exorcise demons. This must be how people who had read one Hubbard pulp novel in the 1950s felt decades later when they find out he’s running a full-blown religion now. The article seems to try very hard to find something positive to say about these groups, and comes up with: “Rationalists came to correct views about the COVID-19 pandemic while many others were saying masks didn’t work and only hypochondriacs worried about covid; rationalists were some of the first people to warn about the threat of artificial intelligence.” There’s nothing very unique about agreeing with the WHO, or thinking that building Skynet might be bad… (The rationalist Moses/Hubbard was 12 when that movie came out — the most impressionable age.) In the wider picture painted by the article, these presumed successes sound more like a case of a stopped clock being right twice a day.

qcnguy 1y ago
[flagged]
- skybrian 1y ago
  It was genuinely difficult to persuade people to wear masks before everyone started doing it and it became normal.
  - qcnguy 1y ago
    Nobody was persuaded, they were forced by law exactly because it was obvious to everyone with their brain switched on that masks didn't work. Remember how when the rules demanding masks on planes were rescinded there were videos of whole planes ripping off their masks and celebrating mid-flight? Literally the second the law changed, people stopped wearing masks. That's because masks were a mass hysteria. They did not work. Everyone could see it.
    - n4r9 1y ago
      As a counterpoint, myself and most people I know continued mask-wearing for many months after it stopped being a legal requirement in the UK.
      - qcnguy 1y ago
        Sorry to hear that. The people you know are not representative. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/26/the-great-cover-up-why-the-uk-stopped-wearing-face-masks?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/26/the-great-cove... "The psychology of masks: why have so many people stopped covering their faces? (This article is more than 3 years old) In England, masks are expected and recommended in crowded and enclosed spaces – but not legally required. Many have abandoned them altogether. What would convince everyone to put them back on?" That story opens with a vox pop from Dave The Normal Guy: Dave stopped wearing his face mask “the second I didn’t have to. I grudgingly wore it, because it was the right thing to do and because it was mandatory,” says the teacher from East Sussex. “But I felt, and still do, that the reason we were told to wear masks was to make scared people feel less scared.” He didn’t feel awkward abandoning his mask, he says, as “hardly anybody bothers”, but he will put one on when visiting the vet, pharmacist or doctor, because he knows they want him to. “I feel it’s the respectful thing to do, but it’s a bit of theatre.” Dave was 100% correct.
        n4r9 1y ago
        A quotation from someone named Dave in a Guardian article doesn't constitute a representative sample either. But that's beside the point. Your post said that "nobody" could be persuaded to wear masks and "everybody" could see that they didn't work. That's clear hyperbole.
- lexandstuff 1y ago
  The point of wearing a mask is to protect other people from your respiratory droplets. Please wear a mask when you're sick.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - ethbr1 1y ago
    It's still mind boggling to me that governments didn't say "Don't wear a mask for yourself -- wear one to save your neighbor." Sure, there would have been some people who ignored it because they're jackasses, but I can't believe we wouldn't be in a better place today. Both in terms of public scientific- and community- appreciation.
    - bnjms 1y ago
      They did in the US as well. It’s disappointing US leadership flip flopped on masks enough times that anti-mask started to make sense to people.
    - kimixa 1y ago
      > It's still mind boggling to me that governments didn't say "Don't wear a mask for yourself -- wear one to save your neighbor." I mean... they did? Like in the UK's guidance literally the second sentence is "Face coverings are primarily worn to protect others because they cover the nose and mouth, which are the main sources of emission of the virus that causes coronavirus infection (COVID-19)." https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/face-coverings-when-to-wear-one-and-how-to-make-your-own/face-coverings-when-to-wear-one-and-how-to-make-your-own https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/face-coverings-wh...
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
  - qcnguy 1y ago
    The point of masks, originally, was to catch saliva drops from surgeons as they worked over an open body, not to stop viruses. For COVID its use was novel. But having an intention isn't enough. It must actually work. Otherwise, you are just engaging in witchcraft and tomfoolery. The respiratory droplet model of how COVID spread was wrong, which was proven by lots of real world evidence. Look at how the Diamond Princess worked out and please explain how that was compatible with either masks or lockdowns working? SARS-CoV-2 spreads like every other respiratory virus, as a gaseous aerosol that doesn't care about masks in the slightest.
- komali2 1y ago
  > And masks? How many graphs of cases/day with mask mandate transitions overlayed are required before people realize masks did nothing? Whole countries went from nearly nobody wearing them, to everyone wearing them, overnight, and COVID cases/day didn't even notice. Most of those countries didn't actually follow their mask mandates - the USA for example. I visited because the PRC was preventing vaccine deliveries to Taiwan so I flew to the USA to get a vaccine, and I distinctly remember thinking "yeah... Of course" when walked around an airport of people chin diapering. Taiwan halted a couple outbreaks from pilots completely, partially because people are so used to wearing masks when they're sick here (and also because the mask mandate was strictly enforced everywhere). I visited DC a year later where they had a memorial for victims of COVID. It was 700,000 white flags near the Washington monument when I visited, as I recall it broke a million a few months later.
- tprice7 1y ago
  > AI is very friendly, even Very friendly until it reads in your email that you plan to replace it with a new model: https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment
- paradox242 1y ago
  I hope we never have to find out how wrong you are.
skybrian 1y ago
The WHO didn't declare a global pandemic until March 11, 2020 [1]. That's a little slow and some rationalists were earlier than that. (Other people too.) After reading a warning from a rationalist blog, I posted a lot about COVID news to another forum and others there gave me credit for giving the heads-up that it was a Big Deal and not just another thing in the news. (Not sure it made all that much difference, though?) [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7569573/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7569573/
- seanhunter 1y ago
  Do you think that the consequences of the WHO declaring a pandemic and some rationalist blog warning about covid are the same? Clearly the WHO has to be more cautious. I have no doubt there were people at the WHO who felt a global pandemic was likely at least as early as you and the person writing the rationalist blog.
  - goku12 1y ago
    This is going to be controversial. But WHO wasted precious time during the early phases of the pandemic. It could have been contained more effectively if they weren't in denial. And when they did declare a pandemic, it was all very sudden instead of gradually raising the level, leading to panic buying and anxiety. Are the WHO personnel rational and competent? I would like to believe so. But that isn't a given - the amount of nonsense I had to fight in institutions considered as pinnacles of rationality is just depressing. Regardless, WHO was encumbered by international policitics. Their rationality would have made no difference. That is why the opinion of rational outsiders matter - especially of those with domain expertise. The signs of an uncontained contagion were evident by the middle of December 2020, well before the WHO declared the pandemic in March 2021. They could have asked everyone to start preparing around then. Instead, there were alarming news coming out of Wuhan and endless debates on TV about the appeasement of the Chinese administration by WHO - things that started ringing the alarm bells for us. We started preparing by at least the middle of January. WHO chose to wait again till everything was obvious and a declaration was inevitable. People were dying by the thousands everyday and the lockdowns had already started by then. Their rubberstamp wasn't necessary to confirm what everyone knew already. That was one instance where waiting for the WHO wasn't a prudent choice. WHO is a critical institution to the entire world. Their timing can mean the difference between life and death for millions everywhere. These sorts of failing shouldn't be excused and swept under the rug so easily.
emmelaich 1y ago
I was reminded of Hubbard too. In particular the "[belief that one] should always escalate when threatened" strongly echoes Hubbard's advice to always attack attack. Never defend. The whole thing reminds me of EST and a thousand other cults / self-improvement / self-actualisation groups that seem endemic to California ever since the 60s or before.
- sitkack 1y ago
  Money and Heat has a strong ability to encourage crazy.
  - 77pt77 1y ago
    If that were the case you'd see this kind of crazy in Miami and you don't. You see other kinds though.
stickfigure 1y ago
You're falling into some sort of fallacy; maybe a better rationalist than I could name it. The "they" you are describing is a large body of disparate people spread around the world. We're reading an article that focuses on a few dysfunctional subgroups. They are interesting because they are so dysfunctional and rare. Or put it this way: Name one -ism that _doesn't_ have sub/splinter groups that kill people. Even Pacifism doesn't get a pass.
- pavlov 1y ago
  The article specifically defines the rationalists it’s talking about: “The rationalist community was drawn together by AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky’s blog post series The Sequences, a set of essays about how to think more rationally.” Is this really a large body of disparate people spread around the world? I suspect not.
  - animuchan 1y ago
    Not sure how to define "drawn together", but the anecdata is: about half of my friends love Yudkowsky's works; they live all across US, EU and Middle Eastern countries. So I suspect yes, it's a large body of loosely coupled people.
  - BlueTemplar 1y ago
    Define "large" : https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/fall-meetups-everywhere-call-for https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/fall-meetups-everywhere-cal... (One of the largest subgroups AFAIK ?) (They still seem to be leaning heavily USA-based, and in particular California-based.)
    - Viliam1234 1y ago
      Maybe a better link would be to the previous wave of meetups, because some places join the event at the last moment: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/meetups-everywhere-spring-2025-times https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/meetups-everywhere-spring-2...
  - 1y ago
TimByte 1y ago
I think the piece bends over backwards to keep the charitable frame because it's written by someone inside the community, but you're right that the touted "wins" feel a bit thin compared to the sheer scale of dysfunction described.
- pas 1y ago
  How that dysfunction compares to similar socioeconomic group(s' median) baseline?
azangru 1y ago
> Rationalists came to correct views about the COVID-19 pandemic while many others were saying masks didn’t work I wonder what views about covid-19 are correct. On masks, I remember the mainstream messaging went through the stages that were masks don't work, some masks work, all masks work, double masking works, to finally masks don't work (or some masks work; I can't remember where we ended up).
- rsynnott 1y ago
  > to finally masks don't work (or some masks work; I can't remember where we ended up). Most masks 'work', for some value of 'work', but efficacy differs (which, to be clear, was ~always known; there was a very short period when some authorities insisted that covid was primarily transmitted by touch, but you're talking weeks at most). In particular I think what confused people was that the standard blue surgical masks are somewhat effective at stopping an infected person from passing on covid (and various other things), but not hugely effective at preventing the wearer from contracting covid; for that you want something along the lines of an n95 respirator. The main actual point of controversy was whether it was airborne or not (vs just short-range spread by droplets); the answer, in the end, was 'yes', but it took longer than it should have to get there.
  - azangru 1y ago
    > In particular I think what confused people was that the standard blue surgical masks are somewhat effective at stopping an infected person from passing on covid (and various other things), but not hugely effective at preventing the wearer from contracting covid Yes, exactly. If we look at guidelines about influenza, we will see them say that "surgical masks are not considered adequate respiratory protection for airborne transmission of pandemic influenza". And as far as I understand, it was finally agreed that in terms of transmission, Sars CoV-2 behaves similarly to the influenza virus.
    - immibis 1y ago
      And any protection is better than no protection, even if it only reduces your chance by 30% or whatever - it's unlikely to make things worse.
torben-friis 1y ago
As someone who started reading without knowing about rationalists, I actually came out without knowing much more. Lots of context is assumed I guess. Some main figures and rituals are mentioned but I still don’t know how the activities and communities arise from the purported origin. How do we go from “let’s rationally analyze how we think and get rid of bias” to creating a crypto, or being hype focused on AI, or summoning demons? Why did they raise this idea of matching confrontation always with escalation? Why the focus on programming, is this a Silicon Valley thing? Also lesswrong is mentioned but no context is given about it. I only know the name as a forum, just like somethingawful or Reddit, but I don’t know how it fits into the picture.
- Viliam1234 1y ago
  LessWrong was originally a personal blog of Eliezer Yudkowsky. It was an inspiration for what later became the "rationality community". These days, LessWrong is a community blog. The original articles were published as a book, freely available at: https://www.readthesequences.com/ https://www.readthesequences.com/ If you read it, you can see what the community was originally about; but it is long. Some frequent topics debated on LessWrong are AI safety, human rationality, effective altruism. But it has no strict boundaries; some people even post about their hobbies or family life. Debating politics is discouraged, but not banned. The website is mostly moderated by its users, by voting on articles and comments. The voting is relatively strict, and can be scary for many newcomers. (Maybe it is not strategic to say this, but most comments on Hacker News would probably be downvoted on LessWrong for insufficient quality.) Members of the community, the readers of the website, are all over the planet. (Just what you would expect from readers of an internet forum.) But in some cities there are enough of them so they can organize an offline meetup once in a while. And if a very few cities, there are so many of them, that they are practically a permanent offline community; most notably in the Bay Area. I don't live in the Bay Area. To describe how the community functions in my part of the world: we meet about once in a month, sometimes less frequently, and we discuss various nerdy stuff. (Apologies if this is insufficiently impressive. From my perspective, the quality of those discussions is much higher than I have seen anywhere else, but I guess there is no way to provide this experience second-hand.) There is a spirit of self-improvement; we encourage each other to think logically and try to improve our lives. Oh, and how does the bad part connect to it? Unfortunately, although the community is about trying to think better, for some reason it also seems very attractive for people who are looking for someone to tell them how to think. (I mean, we do tell them how to think, but in a very abstract way: check the evidence, remember your cognitive biases, et cetera.) They are a perfect material for a cult. The rationality community itself is not a cult. Too much disagreement and criticism of our own celebrities for that! There is also no formal membership; anyone is free to come and go. Sometimes a wannabe cult leader joins the community, takes a few vulnerable people aside, and starts a small cult. Two out of three examples in the article, it was a group of about five people -- when you have hundreds of members in a city, you won't notice when five of them start attending your meetups less frequently, and then disappear completely. And one day... you read about them in the newspapers. > How do we go from “let’s rationally analyze how we think and get rid of bias” to creating a crypto, or being hype focused on AI, or summoning demons? Why did they raise this idea of matching confrontation always with escalation? Rationality and AI have always been the focus of the community. Buying cryptos was considered common sense back then when Bitcoin was cheap; but I haven't heard talking about cryptos in the rationality community recently. On the other hand, believing in demons, and the idea that you should always escalate... those are specific ideas of the leaders of the small cults, definitely not shared by the rest of the community. Notice how the first things the wannabe cult leaders do is isolate their followers even from the rest of the rationality community. They are quite aware that what they are doing would be considered wrong by the rest of the community. The question is, how can the community prevent this? If your meetings are open for everyone, how can you prevent one newcomer from privately contacting a few other newcomers, meeting them in private, and brainwashing them? I don't have a good answer for that.
ItsMattyG 1y ago
FWIW, my rationalist friends were warning about Covid before I had heard about it from others, and talking about AI before it was on others radar.
- 77pt77 1y ago
  Covid specifically or a pandemic in general? Also AI doesn't really count because plenty of people have been riding that train for decades.
skrebbel 1y ago
Personally I feel like the big thing to come out of rationalism is the insight that, in Scott Alexander's words [0] (freely after Julia Galef), > Of the fifty-odd biases discovered by Kahneman, Tversky, and their successors, forty-nine are cute quirks, and one is destroying civilization. This last one is confirmation bias - our tendency to interpret evidence as confirming our pre-existing beliefs instead of changing our minds. I'm mildly surprised the author didn't include it in the list. [0] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-scout-mindset https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-scout-minds...

by pavlov 1y ago

qcnguy 1y ago

[flagged]

skybrian 1y ago
It was genuinely difficult to persuade people to wear masks before everyone started doing it and it became normal.
- qcnguy 1y ago
  Nobody was persuaded, they were forced by law exactly because it was obvious to everyone with their brain switched on that masks didn't work. Remember how when the rules demanding masks on planes were rescinded there were videos of whole planes ripping off their masks and celebrating mid-flight? Literally the second the law changed, people stopped wearing masks. That's because masks were a mass hysteria. They did not work. Everyone could see it.
  - n4r9 1y ago
    As a counterpoint, myself and most people I know continued mask-wearing for many months after it stopped being a legal requirement in the UK.
    - qcnguy 1y ago
      Sorry to hear that. The people you know are not representative. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/26/the-great-cover-up-why-the-uk-stopped-wearing-face-masks?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/26/the-great-cove... "The psychology of masks: why have so many people stopped covering their faces? (This article is more than 3 years old) In England, masks are expected and recommended in crowded and enclosed spaces – but not legally required. Many have abandoned them altogether. What would convince everyone to put them back on?" That story opens with a vox pop from Dave The Normal Guy: Dave stopped wearing his face mask “the second I didn’t have to. I grudgingly wore it, because it was the right thing to do and because it was mandatory,” says the teacher from East Sussex. “But I felt, and still do, that the reason we were told to wear masks was to make scared people feel less scared.” He didn’t feel awkward abandoning his mask, he says, as “hardly anybody bothers”, but he will put one on when visiting the vet, pharmacist or doctor, because he knows they want him to. “I feel it’s the respectful thing to do, but it’s a bit of theatre.” Dave was 100% correct.
      - n4r9 1y ago
        A quotation from someone named Dave in a Guardian article doesn't constitute a representative sample either. But that's beside the point. Your post said that "nobody" could be persuaded to wear masks and "everybody" could see that they didn't work. That's clear hyperbole.
lexandstuff 1y ago
The point of wearing a mask is to protect other people from your respiratory droplets. Please wear a mask when you're sick.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- ethbr1 1y ago
  It's still mind boggling to me that governments didn't say "Don't wear a mask for yourself -- wear one to save your neighbor." Sure, there would have been some people who ignored it because they're jackasses, but I can't believe we wouldn't be in a better place today. Both in terms of public scientific- and community- appreciation.
  - bnjms 1y ago
    They did in the US as well. It’s disappointing US leadership flip flopped on masks enough times that anti-mask started to make sense to people.
  - kimixa 1y ago
    > It's still mind boggling to me that governments didn't say "Don't wear a mask for yourself -- wear one to save your neighbor." I mean... they did? Like in the UK's guidance literally the second sentence is "Face coverings are primarily worn to protect others because they cover the nose and mouth, which are the main sources of emission of the virus that causes coronavirus infection (COVID-19)." https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/face-coverings-when-to-wear-one-and-how-to-make-your-own/face-coverings-when-to-wear-one-and-how-to-make-your-own https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/face-coverings-wh...
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
- qcnguy 1y ago
  The point of masks, originally, was to catch saliva drops from surgeons as they worked over an open body, not to stop viruses. For COVID its use was novel. But having an intention isn't enough. It must actually work. Otherwise, you are just engaging in witchcraft and tomfoolery. The respiratory droplet model of how COVID spread was wrong, which was proven by lots of real world evidence. Look at how the Diamond Princess worked out and please explain how that was compatible with either masks or lockdowns working? SARS-CoV-2 spreads like every other respiratory virus, as a gaseous aerosol that doesn't care about masks in the slightest.
komali2 1y ago
> And masks? How many graphs of cases/day with mask mandate transitions overlayed are required before people realize masks did nothing? Whole countries went from nearly nobody wearing them, to everyone wearing them, overnight, and COVID cases/day didn't even notice. Most of those countries didn't actually follow their mask mandates - the USA for example. I visited because the PRC was preventing vaccine deliveries to Taiwan so I flew to the USA to get a vaccine, and I distinctly remember thinking "yeah... Of course" when walked around an airport of people chin diapering. Taiwan halted a couple outbreaks from pilots completely, partially because people are so used to wearing masks when they're sick here (and also because the mask mandate was strictly enforced everywhere). I visited DC a year later where they had a memorial for victims of COVID. It was 700,000 white flags near the Washington monument when I visited, as I recall it broke a million a few months later.
tprice7 1y ago
> AI is very friendly, even Very friendly until it reads in your email that you plan to replace it with a new model: https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment
paradox242 1y ago
I hope we never have to find out how wrong you are.

skybrian 1y ago

The WHO didn't declare a global pandemic until March 11, 2020 [1]. That's a little slow and some rationalists were earlier than that. (Other people too.) After reading a warning from a rationalist blog, I posted a lot about COVID news to another forum and others there gave me credit for giving the heads-up that it was a Big Deal and not just another thing in the news. (Not sure it made all that much difference, though?) [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7569573/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7569573/

seanhunter 1y ago
Do you think that the consequences of the WHO declaring a pandemic and some rationalist blog warning about covid are the same? Clearly the WHO has to be more cautious. I have no doubt there were people at the WHO who felt a global pandemic was likely at least as early as you and the person writing the rationalist blog.
- goku12 1y ago
  This is going to be controversial. But WHO wasted precious time during the early phases of the pandemic. It could have been contained more effectively if they weren't in denial. And when they did declare a pandemic, it was all very sudden instead of gradually raising the level, leading to panic buying and anxiety. Are the WHO personnel rational and competent? I would like to believe so. But that isn't a given - the amount of nonsense I had to fight in institutions considered as pinnacles of rationality is just depressing. Regardless, WHO was encumbered by international policitics. Their rationality would have made no difference. That is why the opinion of rational outsiders matter - especially of those with domain expertise. The signs of an uncontained contagion were evident by the middle of December 2020, well before the WHO declared the pandemic in March 2021. They could have asked everyone to start preparing around then. Instead, there were alarming news coming out of Wuhan and endless debates on TV about the appeasement of the Chinese administration by WHO - things that started ringing the alarm bells for us. We started preparing by at least the middle of January. WHO chose to wait again till everything was obvious and a declaration was inevitable. People were dying by the thousands everyday and the lockdowns had already started by then. Their rubberstamp wasn't necessary to confirm what everyone knew already. That was one instance where waiting for the WHO wasn't a prudent choice. WHO is a critical institution to the entire world. Their timing can mean the difference between life and death for millions everywhere. These sorts of failing shouldn't be excused and swept under the rug so easily.

emmelaich 1y ago

I was reminded of Hubbard too. In particular the "[belief that one] should always escalate when threatened" strongly echoes Hubbard's advice to always attack attack. Never defend. The whole thing reminds me of EST and a thousand other cults / self-improvement / self-actualisation groups that seem endemic to California ever since the 60s or before.

sitkack 1y ago
Money and Heat has a strong ability to encourage crazy.
- 77pt77 1y ago
  If that were the case you'd see this kind of crazy in Miami and you don't. You see other kinds though.

stickfigure 1y ago

You're falling into some sort of fallacy; maybe a better rationalist than I could name it. The "they" you are describing is a large body of disparate people spread around the world. We're reading an article that focuses on a few dysfunctional subgroups. They are interesting because they are so dysfunctional and rare. Or put it this way: Name one -ism that _doesn't_ have sub/splinter groups that kill people. Even Pacifism doesn't get a pass.

pavlov 1y ago
The article specifically defines the rationalists it’s talking about: “The rationalist community was drawn together by AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky’s blog post series The Sequences, a set of essays about how to think more rationally.” Is this really a large body of disparate people spread around the world? I suspect not.
- animuchan 1y ago
  Not sure how to define "drawn together", but the anecdata is: about half of my friends love Yudkowsky's works; they live all across US, EU and Middle Eastern countries. So I suspect yes, it's a large body of loosely coupled people.
- BlueTemplar 1y ago
  Define "large" : https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/fall-meetups-everywhere-call-for https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/fall-meetups-everywhere-cal... (One of the largest subgroups AFAIK ?) (They still seem to be leaning heavily USA-based, and in particular California-based.)
  - Viliam1234 1y ago
    Maybe a better link would be to the previous wave of meetups, because some places join the event at the last moment: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/meetups-everywhere-spring-2025-times https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/meetups-everywhere-spring-2...
- 1y ago

TimByte 1y ago

I think the piece bends over backwards to keep the charitable frame because it's written by someone inside the community, but you're right that the touted "wins" feel a bit thin compared to the sheer scale of dysfunction described.

pas 1y ago
How that dysfunction compares to similar socioeconomic group(s' median) baseline?

azangru 1y ago

> Rationalists came to correct views about the COVID-19 pandemic while many others were saying masks didn’t work I wonder what views about covid-19 are correct. On masks, I remember the mainstream messaging went through the stages that were masks don't work, some masks work, all masks work, double masking works, to finally masks don't work (or some masks work; I can't remember where we ended up).

rsynnott 1y ago
> to finally masks don't work (or some masks work; I can't remember where we ended up). Most masks 'work', for some value of 'work', but efficacy differs (which, to be clear, was ~always known; there was a very short period when some authorities insisted that covid was primarily transmitted by touch, but you're talking weeks at most). In particular I think what confused people was that the standard blue surgical masks are somewhat effective at stopping an infected person from passing on covid (and various other things), but not hugely effective at preventing the wearer from contracting covid; for that you want something along the lines of an n95 respirator. The main actual point of controversy was whether it was airborne or not (vs just short-range spread by droplets); the answer, in the end, was 'yes', but it took longer than it should have to get there.
- azangru 1y ago
  > In particular I think what confused people was that the standard blue surgical masks are somewhat effective at stopping an infected person from passing on covid (and various other things), but not hugely effective at preventing the wearer from contracting covid Yes, exactly. If we look at guidelines about influenza, we will see them say that "surgical masks are not considered adequate respiratory protection for airborne transmission of pandemic influenza". And as far as I understand, it was finally agreed that in terms of transmission, Sars CoV-2 behaves similarly to the influenza virus.
  - immibis 1y ago
    And any protection is better than no protection, even if it only reduces your chance by 30% or whatever - it's unlikely to make things worse.

torben-friis 1y ago

As someone who started reading without knowing about rationalists, I actually came out without knowing much more. Lots of context is assumed I guess. Some main figures and rituals are mentioned but I still don’t know how the activities and communities arise from the purported origin. How do we go from “let’s rationally analyze how we think and get rid of bias” to creating a crypto, or being hype focused on AI, or summoning demons? Why did they raise this idea of matching confrontation always with escalation? Why the focus on programming, is this a Silicon Valley thing? Also lesswrong is mentioned but no context is given about it. I only know the name as a forum, just like somethingawful or Reddit, but I don’t know how it fits into the picture.

Viliam1234 1y ago
LessWrong was originally a personal blog of Eliezer Yudkowsky. It was an inspiration for what later became the "rationality community". These days, LessWrong is a community blog. The original articles were published as a book, freely available at: https://www.readthesequences.com/ https://www.readthesequences.com/ If you read it, you can see what the community was originally about; but it is long. Some frequent topics debated on LessWrong are AI safety, human rationality, effective altruism. But it has no strict boundaries; some people even post about their hobbies or family life. Debating politics is discouraged, but not banned. The website is mostly moderated by its users, by voting on articles and comments. The voting is relatively strict, and can be scary for many newcomers. (Maybe it is not strategic to say this, but most comments on Hacker News would probably be downvoted on LessWrong for insufficient quality.) Members of the community, the readers of the website, are all over the planet. (Just what you would expect from readers of an internet forum.) But in some cities there are enough of them so they can organize an offline meetup once in a while. And if a very few cities, there are so many of them, that they are practically a permanent offline community; most notably in the Bay Area. I don't live in the Bay Area. To describe how the community functions in my part of the world: we meet about once in a month, sometimes less frequently, and we discuss various nerdy stuff. (Apologies if this is insufficiently impressive. From my perspective, the quality of those discussions is much higher than I have seen anywhere else, but I guess there is no way to provide this experience second-hand.) There is a spirit of self-improvement; we encourage each other to think logically and try to improve our lives. Oh, and how does the bad part connect to it? Unfortunately, although the community is about trying to think better, for some reason it also seems very attractive for people who are looking for someone to tell them how to think. (I mean, we do tell them how to think, but in a very abstract way: check the evidence, remember your cognitive biases, et cetera.) They are a perfect material for a cult. The rationality community itself is not a cult. Too much disagreement and criticism of our own celebrities for that! There is also no formal membership; anyone is free to come and go. Sometimes a wannabe cult leader joins the community, takes a few vulnerable people aside, and starts a small cult. Two out of three examples in the article, it was a group of about five people -- when you have hundreds of members in a city, you won't notice when five of them start attending your meetups less frequently, and then disappear completely. And one day... you read about them in the newspapers. > How do we go from “let’s rationally analyze how we think and get rid of bias” to creating a crypto, or being hype focused on AI, or summoning demons? Why did they raise this idea of matching confrontation always with escalation? Rationality and AI have always been the focus of the community. Buying cryptos was considered common sense back then when Bitcoin was cheap; but I haven't heard talking about cryptos in the rationality community recently. On the other hand, believing in demons, and the idea that you should always escalate... those are specific ideas of the leaders of the small cults, definitely not shared by the rest of the community. Notice how the first things the wannabe cult leaders do is isolate their followers even from the rest of the rationality community. They are quite aware that what they are doing would be considered wrong by the rest of the community. The question is, how can the community prevent this? If your meetings are open for everyone, how can you prevent one newcomer from privately contacting a few other newcomers, meeting them in private, and brainwashing them? I don't have a good answer for that.

ItsMattyG 1y ago

FWIW, my rationalist friends were warning about Covid before I had heard about it from others, and talking about AI before it was on others radar.

77pt77 1y ago
Covid specifically or a pandemic in general? Also AI doesn't really count because plenty of people have been riding that train for decades.

skrebbel 1y ago

Personally I feel like the big thing to come out of rationalism is the insight that, in Scott Alexander's words [0] (freely after Julia Galef), > Of the fifty-odd biases discovered by Kahneman, Tversky, and their successors, forty-nine are cute quirks, and one is destroying civilization. This last one is confirmation bias - our tendency to interpret evidence as confirming our pre-existing beliefs instead of changing our minds. I'm mildly surprised the author didn't include it in the list. [0] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-scout-mindset https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-scout-minds...