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Comment by twic | Hacker News Reader

It's not just that they aren't free of bias. They appear to incubate truly wacky stuff - Leverage Research [1], the Zizians, all the AI/x-risk stuff. I am not the only person to have noticed this [2]. There's something about their approach that appears to actually make people more susceptible to nonsense, not less.

[1] https://lydialaurenson.substack.com/p/the-inside-story-of-le...

[2] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/11/why-are-there-so-many-rati...

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The problem is the whole idea of working from first principles to try to discover the actual truth, rather than just going along with other ideas that other people have created through history. The benefit of going along with other peoples' ideas is that they've been tested out for hundreds or thousands of years and been found to not be that destructive.

If you start reasoning from first principles you can very easily make an incorrect assumption somewhere down the line that snowballs until you're talking about shrimp welfare, or making decisions based on the potential sextillion humans that exist in 1,000,000 AD, or planning to convert the entire universe into unthinking organic matter that can only experience bliss.

>There's something about their approach that appears to actually make people more susceptible to nonsense, not less.

It would be highly surprising if an open-access online community with the kind of slogans that might be particularly appealing to somewhat spectrumy individuals did not occasionally attract some eccentrics. The point I am trying to make here is that these are pretty fringe offshots and are far from the representative views of the community as a whole. Appeals to reason don't make any community immune to human nature. After all, their main place of gathering is named "less wrong", not "correct".

What would you say are the views of the community as a whole, those shared by most of its members?

I gave an example elsewhere in the post and I was accused of dishonesty and strawmanning — even though it's obviously something that everyone in that community is expected to believe, because it's true (in the same way that 2 + 2 = 4 is true) and because it's specifically highlighted as a fundamental truth in the Sequences.

There was also someone else ITT pointing out that the community are not at all uniform, and that got a pithy response about it being largely "childless white male Americans" as if that is supposed to matter (and disregarding that fully 5% of survey respondents consider themselves not cis, and 19% not straight, which are both way above baseline).

So pardon me if I don't consider this sort of question to be in good faith.

>appears to actually make people more susceptible to nonsense

I think it is more that teenagers and very young adults and people high in the trait of "openness to new experiences" are more susceptible to nonsense and more attracted to new intellectual movements, of which the rationalist community is one.

Also, I expect a rationalist to be lower in conscientiousness than average (because the conscientious people are too busy to devote a lot of time to reading long intellectual texts) and low conscientiousness makes violence and other transgressive behavior more likely.

I guess people who are high in both openness and conscientiousness and who like to read long texts prefer to read them through books over online forums and social media.

Regarding the Zizians, I recommend the Behind the Bastards series on them and the rationalist community. People involved with the rationalists will want to distance themselves from it of course, but the series makes a decent argument that the Zizians were simply the result of taking the ideology to its rational conclusion, that there is a definite throughline from one to the other in terms of philosophy and ideals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mJAerUL-7w

The author here clearly is extremely superficially familiar with the writings of rationalist people and views them from a preconceived standpoint. Comparing beliefs of Yudkowsky to dianetics is nothing short of misguided, whether you like him or not. This is a textbook study of motivated reasoning.

Aren't rationalists supposed to be objective and motivate their claims, rather than belittling any critic with unsubstantiated statements?

> This is a textbook study of motivated reasoning

What would be his motive, why would he have preconceptions about you?

Could it be that it's your messages here that are motivated, and with scarce reasoning?

>What would be his motive

A libertarian socialist podcaster tries to discuss an online culture that is adjacent to Silicon Valley tech scene. He then proceeds to take movement’s worst manifestations as its essence. One would have to be naive to miss the source of his bias.

My feeling is that he understands your "online culture" much better than you, is very balanced and careful in the video, and you're probably a lot younger, inexperienced with internet groups and impressionable than him.

Take his advice to talk with (and listen to!) people outside your cadre, and to consider the possibility that you're entirely in the wrong. And maybe to touch grass.

Cheers

>is very balanced and careful in the video

A part of me somewhat wishes I was this easily swayed by YouTube smooth talkers.

taking what ideology to the conclusions? The zizians throught some truly bizzare things, most of which are in no way representative of the rationilst community.

Rationalists should really watch this video

I’ve interacted with a number of rationalists that are just as crazy as Ziz but managed to not implode with the help of money (either lucking into it via family/crypto or a tech job). My personal hot take is that if she’d been cis a number of people would still be alive.

Raising existential risk from AI in the same sentence as "rationality demands we murder our landlord" is a bit weird a grouping.

Asking "why are there so many rationalist cults?" (as the URL does) in this context is kind of like asking "why are there so many mathematical cranks?", and then holding forth that this somehow demonstrates a fundamental problem with mathematics.

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