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Comment by ipnon | Hacker News Reader

It is quite humorous to me in a dark way how the preeminent ethics movement of our times seems to spawn the most detestable behavior. How many Bentham essays and LessWrong posts do you need to read to conclude that psychological manipulation and wonton murder do not in fact contribute to the wellbeing of the world? There is a certain personality for whom rationality takes over their whole being, and they lose all their ability to feel connected to others in a profound way, and at this point their behavior is simply derived from whatever is left after they do the math.

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Rationalism doesn't involve doing math, but _role-playing_ like you're doing math. There's lots of talk about updating priors and bayes; but in practice a lot of stuff isn't that quantifiable without running scientific studies, so this comes down to #yolo-ing it.

Of course thinking about stuff without always using formal statistics is fine and how people work, but if you trick yourself into thinking that you do use statistics for everything it may become harder to evaluate or second guess your own thinking.

Math LARPing is very accurate. I'm so sick of them talking about Bayes and "adjusting priors", because the way they use it is so loose that it can be used to justify literally anything.

I was at a talk last week where a guy said “we should backprop into X” to mean “we should learn more about X and take it into account”.

I think they're pretty much ideologically opposed to serious research. They believe in pre-scientific "thinking from first principles", like Aristotle or something, using whatever data they can gather in a few minutes while avoiding any serious scholarship that would put the data in context, because then you're just an inside-the-box-thinking expert, rather than the freethinker with novel ideas that can only come when you don't know what you're talking about.

I don't have a way to prove this and it's based purely on intuition/experience, but I disagree. I think ideology doesn't meaningfully influence such people. There is a deeper psychological drive and they only create a philosophical justification later, which is of little importance. This is perhaps true of humans in general.

you're both correct. All humans have a hardware component, an ideology acts as an attractor. Humans finding connection with other humans like them is one of the strongest pulls for a human mind. It has great power to amplify & grow. This can go in a direction of thriving and growth, and "win win" with their environment, or it can go in a direction of hate and aggression

Confirmation of the id.

I see two outcomes usually in the rationalist community: - those who can manipulate language enough to justify their behavior and can then manipulate others - those who modify their behavior and usually have some kind of mental breakdown because of internal conflicts

To me it is a predator-prey abusive LARP that got out of scope and feeds on fragile people looking for sense in their lives. Just look at how new comers are hazed and tested when they come on their forums and discords and what not.

> To me it is a predator-prey abusive LARP that got out of scope and feeds on fragile people looking for sense in their lives. Just look at how new comers are hazed and tested when they come on their forums and discords and what not

Yeah I think this is exactly what it is. The most eloquent charlatans end up roping in people who are lost or looking for meaning.

It’s always interesting to think how much self awareness the leaders have. Do they drink their own kool-aid or they laughing to themselves while they pouring the next dose for the others?

To be honest these seem like crazy people drawn to a movement that would have them and allow them to rise to prominence, rather than a movement creating crazy people.

I think many psychiatrists view split personality disorder as a largely nonexistent condition arising artificially from charlatan psychotherapists. It seems quite possible to me that these people drove themselves mad and each other to suicide with these experiments (where they expected to evoke a split personality they had already begun to define).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_(Schreiber_book)

Sure this "Unihemispheric sleep" stuff cannot have helped any pre-existing issues, but I think we shouldn't discount the existence of those issues which predate what amounts to cult indoctrination.

The human mind is quite malleable. You can make yourself mentally ill, or be made mentally ill by the people around you. This fact seems to be under-acknowledged because there is a slippery slope to blaming the victims.

But just because you might have gotten yourself into something that doesn't mean you can get yourself out of it.

I'm skeptical of people who think they wouldn't be vulnerable. But even if some are not, -- some are, and you can start with the seeds of a little crazy and heal it through grounded thinking and healthy practices, or you can blow it wide open with crazed thinking, casual psychedelic use, and abusive cult practices.

In large enough groups of people there'll always be some crazies. Are there really more of them to come out of LW circles than a comparably large other group?

Every single ethics movement in history ended up spawning utter and complete nope (as well as a lot of useful concepts). See christianity, the enlightment liberalism, marxism and so on. It is almost as if the idea of universal, objective and cognizable good is inherently evil.

this is the pattern:

- humans find useful concept X - they describe it with label Y - it's genuinely useful, it spreads - It gets too big, Y is misunderstood and corrupted - New group of humans rediscovers concept X, gives it label Z

This is the story of humanity. The good news is we're kind of (mostly) stumbling through a upwards spiral. Current religion would be unrecognizable to the people in ancient times. It was never meant to be something frozen in stone. Folklore and things changing as they're retold was a feature, not a bug.

There's a great write up on this [1], but TL;DR, religion is cultural technology. It succeeded in doing exactly what it tried to do at the time (get people to stop killing each other in tiny tribes and allow mass decentralized human coordination to build civilization & empires where humans could be safe from the elements of nature)

[1] https://defenderofthebasic.substack.com/p/a-beginners-guide-...

Great analogy with the upwards spiral

I think that utopias implemented in reality became dystopias because, unlike bold ideas, reality is pretty nuanced.

I think it's an apples and oranges comparison to lump in Christianity (a religion that outright predicts that people will abuse it and protects itself against that) with liberalism/marxism (a philosophy that has no such protection and can be mangled into whatever you want). If anything, liberalism/marxism are more like secularized offspring of Christianity, given that they would probably never developed if it wasn't for their founding figures living in a western moral context completely drenched in Christian ideas.

I think I would’ve used Objectivism as a contrasting example. It’s designed around the idea that whatever a “strong” person does to fulfill their goals is inherently good. Objectivists wouldn’t phrase it that way, surely, but that seems the inevitable end result.

I'm not comparing them. What I'm saying is despite all the differences, the end result (dogmatic and self-righteous ideology with zero ability to align beliefs with reality) is eerily similar.

Curious how Christianity protects itself from abuse? From my perspective, Christianity is used to justify incredibly un-Christian activities pretty much constantly.

1. Christianity (like other religions) has built-in protections against false teaching within their own theology, which isn't really the same for secular philosophical frameworks.

2. There's a level of outlier visibility going on with a lot of people who abuse Christianity. The Christian who sincerely follows Jesus and walks in obedience don't seek out visibility or to exalt themselves. Even ones that evangelize do it on a local scale most often. Meanwhile people who abuse Christianity (Prosperity gospel, Christian nationalists, etc.) try to seek out large followings to bolster their power or wealth, making them seem like the "face" of Christianity whe

> has built-in protections against false teaching within their own theology

You are just saying the Bible has a bunch of text that lays out what being Christian is and isn't?

Sort of.

To elaborate, the idea is that a Christian (someone who has accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior) will show an outward transformation into someone who is Christ-like and obedient to God. When this doesn't happen at all, and that they remain completely un-Christian, you know it isn't genuine (See Matthew 7:15-20). The idea of how a Christian is shown by their outward renewal also touched on in Romans 12:9-21, Galatians 5:16-24, etc. It's not a perfect process, and it's the renewal is not a pre-requisite to salvation but rather an end result of salvation (Ephesians 2:8-12).

Therefore, Christians have a framework that can be used to identify and rebuke people who distort the teachings of Christianity into something that is in rebellion to God. This doesn't really exist with secular philosophy, which lays out the "ideal" but has no way to prevent itself from being warped.

I think describing them as “the preeminent ethics movement of our times” here is begging the question. Are people outside the group beyond we observers who periodically talk about them in places like this even aware they exist? Are there many philosophy grad students studying rationalism for their PhDs?

> how the preeminent ethics movement of our times seems to spawn the most detestable behavior

Excuse me if my sarcasm detector is faulty, but I wouldn't describe the rationality sphere like that. It's a niche group with a fetishism for 'intelligence', with a profound distaste for the liberal arts, which translates into a closed ecosystem of blog posts, themes and jargon, and a lack of reading actual books where they would see that they're retreading old stuff, but worse. It's a culture of people believing themselves immune to bias, where calling out obviously malicious behavior is 'not charitable' and all thought outside the group is suspect. Is it then strange that it produces people who just rationalize (forgive me) their bad impulses?

Most techies stopped learning about stuff not related to computers in high school, so yeah no wonder LessWrong, being more accessible, seems like a better option than reading actual philosophy.

you wouldn't say that there are people in positions of great power in society who likely hold some of these beliefs?

Oh! Of course, but the I think the word that OP used then should've been influential. Preeminent is more an adjective of quality I believe, but it might be my ESL showing.

I think it is a prerequisite to lesswrongism to be a psychopath.

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