5 ms·
They've certainly turned out different than Scott Alexander predicted, once the markets were opened up to people who are not in the wider rationalist community.
by red_admiral 7mo ago
They've certainly turned out different than Scott Alexander predicted, once the markets were opened up to people who are not in the wider rationalist community.
Not foreseeing the amount of sports betting that would take place, is kind of a failure of rationality in the first place, and I say this as someone who absolutely respects the community in general.
- MattGaiser 7mo ago[dead]
- Zigurd 7mo agoI would go with rationalism being a delusion of tech bros rather than blaming a failure of rationalism on those lumpen proles inventing silly sports propositions.
- SpicyLemonZest 7mo agoDo you know someone in particular who blamed sports betting on "lumpen proles"? It kinda seems like you're making up a person to get mad at here.
- SpicyLemonZest 7mo agoThey didn't foresee the amount of sports betting that would take place because sports betting was illegal almost everywhere in the US until 2018.
- thesquandered 7mo agoChristie's finest legacy. Not sure how accountability would even look on something like this.
- creatonez 7mo agoYou should have lost your respect for the "rationalist" "community" a long time ago. They are aggressively wrong about everything, and most of them are eugenicists.
- emsign 7mo agoThey WANT to think in absolutes which is a red flag in a person.
- Enginerrrd 7mo agoThat's not been my observation at all. Rationalists are some of the only people to really embrace fuzzy and probabilistic thinking. Am I missing something?
- danny_codes 7mo agoMaybe rationalists aren’t homogeneous? Unfortunately there are a rather concerning amount of news articles detailing cases where some subset of the rationalist community has gone off the deep end.
- unmole 7mo ago> most of them are eugenicists. [citation needed]
- creatonez 7mo agoCovered in detail here: https://reflectivealtruism.com/category/my-papers/human-biodiversity/ https://reflectivealtruism.com/category/my-papers/human-biod...
- wizzwizz4 7mo agoThey were right about Bitcoin getting big (though I'm not aware of anyone putting their money where their mouth was), and they were a decent source of information leading up to the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic (which probably saved a handful of lives). Just because they're almost always aggressively wrong, that doesn't mean they're aggressively wrong about everything.
- ModernMech 7mo agoThe failure of the rationalist community is they mistook rationalization for rationality.
- DonHopkins 7mo agoWhy make better predictions, when you can make better excuses, and be wrong in much more sophisticated ways?
- uoaei 7mo agoI may use different definitions than you, but I put it as "they conflate rationality and reason".
- lo_zamoyski 7mo agoIt really is a sad, provincial spectacle. Reminds me of the embarrassing "movement" where people called themselves "Brights". I expect we'll soon have a new movement called "The Smart People". A weird synthesis of the goofy, the immature, the delusional, and the grandiose shot through with mental illness.
- everdrive 7mo ago>once the markets were opened up to people who are not in the wider rationalist community. It's important to remember that for a brief time, people argued that gatekeeping was generally and usually a bad thing.