Comment by awanderingmind | Hacker News Reader

Comment by awanderingmind | Hacker News Reader

I have had zero real-life interaction with the rationalist space beyond exchanging some emails with people and reading numerous blog posts, reading lesswrong, and stuff like that, but this post seems to lean too far into drawing a conclusion about a very non-homogeneous group of people based on a few individuals that seem to be mentally unwell.

While I have become less enthusiastic about rationalism (in the sense of this post, not in the sense of the philosophical tradition) over time, the space seems to consist mostly of nerdy people who try really hard to reason properly. Sure, they sometimes come to absurd conclusions, but in general they have interesting perspectives and analyses. Without data on the percentage of people who reach the cult-like status referenced in the post, it seems premature to deride the entire enterprise; in any sufficiently large population group you will have that type of behavior.

On the other hand the point about them being related in spirit to the various 'self-improvement', 'New Age', or whatever movements in California surely isn't WRONG, but it feels a bit... underdeveloped? I'm sure there are loads of connections, simply because the movement seems to be centered (in meatspace, anyway) in California. A more scholarly analysis explicitly drawing the connections would be more useful (and interesting!) than an ad hominem comparison to Scientology and the Manson family(!).

There are different subgroups within the rationalist movement, just as there are different subgroups within many organized religions. It’s totally normal to have a movement with plenty of generally normal people, and also to have a committed and very opinionated subgroup within that movement that has access to resources and power. You might think of Scientology or the Catholic Church as examples of organizations where this is made very explicit, but it can happen organically as well. The main thing that makes the rationalist/EA groups worrying, in my opinion, is the massive access to money and resources that also tends to be concentrated in the hands of the people with the strongest beliefs (see TFA or, more importantly, the AI “doomer” folks.) We’re talking about groups of smart people who genuinely fear the world is going to end, have convinced themselves that stopping it is critical to saving future humanity, in some cases have access to capable scientists, and most critically: have resources ranging into the 10s and 100s of million dollars. This is potentially a very dangerous situation if the folks in charge make bad decisions.

I do agree with that.

Zizians are a subgroup of Rationalists in the same sense as Satanists are a subgroup of Christians, or Scientology a subgroup of Psychiatry.

Even the article says that Ziz has attended a Rationalist workshop... and was told that she was a "net negative". Then she (and her followers) spent the following years fighting against the Rationalist community in various ways: anonymously accusing its members of rape, organizing protests, calling them evil on her blog, etc.

And yet some people keep writing as if both are more or less the same thing, which is something that both groups would strongly disagree with.

> who try really hard to reason properly

Who are really big into talking about reasoning with formal tools which few of them make any effort to understand or use.

They might as well "try really hard to reason properly" with crystals and burning sage. I think actually I'd trust the results of a crystal-reasoner more... at least they're more likely to have a bit of self-doubt that the crystals are all nonsense.

Go ask one of them -- one without immediate access to an LLM-- what the conjugiate prior is for observations of a binomial trial (or the same question in lay language). You'll get blank stares, yet this should be a bread and butter question for exactly the kind of reasoning they (claim to) advance.

There is a level of mathematical reasoning that basically anyone can learn, such as multiplying payoff matrices with probabilities and getting expected values. But going beyond that (e.g. adding uncertainties and correlations, or reasoning backwards from observations to model parameters) being extremely mathematically complex very fast, and rapidly unreasonable to apply to most real situations. Even if you're comfortable with the required graduate level mathematics it just takes too much time. Maybe someone could make a handbook of shortcuts to do the math for many common cases, it's the sort of thing you might expect a "rationalist group" to do, but instead they spend their time making excuses for fringe edgelord politics disguised with a bunch of inapplicable formal language. Gotta eugenics the plebs for their own good and if you don't agree it must be because you reject MATH.

They use bayesian this and that as magic words and to put on a show of intellectual superiority. But for the most part they can't and don't use these techniques, and for perfectly good reasons-- too hard, pointless without better data, etc. But they endlessly talk about them. The whole community is a mix of larpers and people who feel inferior because they don't know the other people are larping.

In their original form, largely harmless larpers... other than the rejection of "cognitive biases" resulting in occasionally promoting gonzo policies and grifting/embezzling nonprofit monies (E.g. SIAI). But as of recent years they've metastasized into an anti-AI apocalypse cult. Their founder has been out in the media advocating the use of nuclear weapons against civilian populations to suppress AI development, so we should just be entirely unsurprised that there is a radical offshoot group out there murdering people.

My impression is quite different, not in the sense that your comment is incorrect but that the

> > Who try really hard to reason properly

is not in my opinion the distinctive element of the group.

I think that the parent would have been more correct had he written

> who try really hard to apply reasoning to areas people often don't reason about.

As this implies an entirely different class of actions.

Hm. So I think if you define reasoning broadly -- as in collecting relevant data, enumerating and raking priorities, thinking through expected consequences... people do engage in this quite often in all areas of life, far more often than lesswrongers would credit.

If you define it more narrowly, as in using particular techniques that are popular to talk about in that community like bayes theorem, updating priors and so on-- then indeed it's not common but it's also not practiced by practically any of the community members.

I would say that there is a mix of both definitions in use in those communities, but for the former people already do it often and for the latter not even the lesswrongers do (with a few exceptions).

The fundamental problem with rationalism and just using pure reason and logic in general is that logic has no (necessary) connection to reality. It's a game played with symbols, and how you choose to map concepts and things in reality to those symbols determines your conclusion. There's a lot of room to setup your predicates in a way that justifies any conclusion you care to reach, no matter how monstrous, and there are lots of ways to turn remote probabilities into near-certainties. Frequently where they go wrong is injecting infinities or near-infinities into their calculations and once you put the lives of billions of people up against one person almost anything is justified.

I couldn't have said this better.

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