It's shocking and wrong on so many levels. The fact that the preference of a random group of people for the faker version of chocolate could possibly make it the realer version of chocolate makes me question whether it was a good idea for us monkeys to ever climb down from the trees. Society was a mistake.
If you’re going to be a weird pedant about chocolate, then white
chocolate is just cocoa butter, milk and sugar. It doesn’t even contain
any cocoa solids which are, y’know, the thing from cacao beans that
tastes like chocolate…
Either Eliezer has realized what is wrong with the rationalist
community and engaged in brilliant self-parody, or he was quite a bit
more insane than I realized.
It’s a twitter poll about white vs dark chocolate, I don’t think even Yudkowsky is capable of deluding himself into deep philosophical conclusions based on that
"Aha! I will pwn those dark-chocolate-loving snobs by asking my twitter followers to vote on which chocolate is real. They will then surely agree with my tastes, which stopped developing at age 11. This will show that I am right, somehow.
"Oh no! It turns out my followers are about two thirds snobbish sheeple following the taste-making elite off the Cocoa Solids Cliff, and the remainder are happy-clappy all-chocolates-are-valid types who probably think a hot dog is a sandwich too! Time to shoot off my other foot in the replies, I guess."
Yeah, but it's worse than that. I don't think I've ever made chocolate mousse either and most people who haven't wouldn't make this mistake. On some level, there is a belief here that how much one likes something determines the degree to which it's real.
To be fair, i think he really is just messing with people here. Now if he starts writing a lw post about this i guess i was wrong(*). The post does show that all of his fans er super serious all the time
Liked your post title btw.
*: unless he adresses the real point, what we consider 'real choc' is a social construct and finally explains the concept of social constructs and how they are not 'fake' etc.
> *: unless he adresses the real point, what we consider 'real choc' is a social construct and finally explains the concept of social constructs and how they are not 'fake' etc.
Oh god I would _love_ to see their response to that.
I would have never guessed that this opinion on white chocolate would
be my shopping cart test, but it turns out that it is. There really are
two kinds of people in the world.
There's a real divide between American "milk chocolate" (which i am fond of, but it is very much its own thing) and what everyone else calls milk chocolate, too, which sometimes accounts for people's weird opinions about milk chocolate.
(If people aren't familiar: most American milk chocolate contains a small amount of butyric acid, which gives it an extra flavor note that non-Americans tend to find really odd and offputting.)
We discuss the parts(*) of the (nebulous) rationalist/[less wrong](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/LessWrong) movement, which we dislike, in a disapproving and sneering manner.
Our enemies call it a harrassment/hate sub, others would call it like r/badphilosophy but with rationalists as a target an not philosophy.
*: of which there are a lot.
E: also the rationalist movement shouldn't be confused with rationalism. It is a bit like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, it has democratic in the name, but it isn't that democratic.
E2: [the rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/91th1q/new_rules_for_sneers/) should provide a little bit of help understanding this place.
e3: [I should just delete what I wrote and link to this](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/8fyzct/on_the_purpose_of_sneerclub/dy7ig2w/)
interesting. do you guys for the most part think the Rationalist Community (capitalized) isnt very rational? i think they have some cool ideas but i do think they're complacent and insular
That kinda depends on who you ask.
Imho they just have the same irriational failings as all of us but they think they are aware of them so they dont apply. There also is an aversion to reading non stem fields which is bad, and an undercurrent of neofascism.
Several prominent rationalists also have weird hangups about feminism and progressive politics (socialism and communism is a huge blindspot for them). They are pretty conflict avoidant (so be mean to cryptofasc get banned).
And last but certainly not least they have a strange obsession with building a superhuman ai. (But not one who will kill humanity, in fact not building the ai from the terminator movies is the highest priority). Lot of the weirdness flows from the latter part.
yeah i noticed theyre super stem focused. es yudkowsky doesnt even realize tons of his super original ideas are not original at all in philosophy. its dumb as shit. his dust specks vs torture is just parfits repugnant conclusion
You can't really talk about rationality without talking about values, but they don't talk about them because most values sit on an ultimately irrational foundation. So they stumble around optimizing rationality with respect to their shared unexamined values, which leads to the kind of silliness in the OP twitter thread, except unironically.
well theoretically you can view value as subjective but still treat it like a formal element, in which case rationality does follow. I can just say "suffering is bad" and then figure out what would be rational to do to minimize it
Eliezer isn't enough of the right kind of clever to successfully pull off a dog-whistle like that. I think you're reading too much into it. Why I shared this tweet here is because I think it points to what determines why rationalists put out such atrocious takes on cultural or political topics that spread and believed widely could cause harm: their neglect of philosophy and other, more abstract ways of looking at the world (read: pretty much almost every intellectual domain). That is the same line of thinking that determines why someone would have such strong, weird opinions on what "real" chocolate is. The way that Eliezer in this tweet is talking about """real""" chocolate is meaningless. Everything about this, from how 'dark' and 'white' chocolate are just terms applied to indicate the different preparation and tastes of different kinds of "cocoa-based candy", to the substanceless notion that what defines "real" chocolate is not as a descriptor for a particular kind of edible object but the agent-driven behaviour of seeking the tastiest object of that kind, to the dubious implication there is an Ideal or Platonic form of "chocolate," is ridiculous.
I was really just making a joke.
The part I find funny about his tweet is his insistence and ...anger(?) that people are factually incorrect for having a different opinion than him about what could obviously only be construed as an opinion poll (because many people can’t/don’t/won’t differentiate “reality” from their beliefs and opinions about reality in any meaningful way).
Is he doing a bit? I can never tell.
I thought you were joking and I was probably being pedantic. Yet I didn't want to take that risk. If this was a bit about race relations, that would be more morally repugnant but it would make some kind of sense. The logical implications for how his worldview operates are far direr. He appears to literally believe you can *empirically deduce* the *ontology* of chocolate. That's like saying that if there are two chairs, the comfier chair is the more real chair. He is perpetuating, like, the most mind-boggling nonsense I've read in at least...several months? And he's acting like this is an objective and rational thing all reasonable people would agree with.
Also, who gives a shit? Like, was this a debate raging over Twitter? Is there a bitter factional split between the "dark chocolate is real chocolate" people and the "white chocolate is real chocolate" people? Because this seems like the kind of question you discuss with your friends while bored, not the kind of thing you share with the entire world.
Sneering specifically because someone posted something stupid nobody else cares about on social media doesn't seem like the most legitimate form of sneering. All kinds of people who aren't rationalists or anything like them do that. What there is to sneer at here is how seriously Eliezer is taking himself, as many rationalists do much of the time, even for something so inane. Like, he seems quite convinced that white chocolate is really the more real kind of chocolate the same way that what chairs are really for is sitting in them.
Big Yud is too clueless to be that offensive. Also, while it's hard to tell under all the self-importance and lack of perspective, his heart does mostly seem to be in the right place on these types of issues. His problem is that he has confused the relative importance of "police murder black people" and "weird thought experiments", not that he's on the wrong side of the "should police murder black people" issue.
Iirc yud is on the side of blm. One quickly found example https://mobile.twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1272619133327138817 (here he tries to help the police abolishemtn/reform thing in his own weird way. Note the lacking of the 'aha'moment when his fans say basically killing unarmed people (who are more likely to be black) is fine) he also celebrated juneteenth.
E: yes shit example but im on my phone
Geez, this guy is a f***n moron. This is the most childish conclusion
conclusion ever. Makes me suspect that this is their “thinking” process
behind all of their great conclusions. Grab a kid, stick him in a echo
chamber until he’s an adult, grant him access to a relevant position,
and you get someone like this. God forbid they ever come in touch with
the real world. I bet that when reality doesn’t conform to his
“rational”, based on “bayesian method” predictions, he blames reality
for being dumb.
I’m sorry for the diatribe, but this type of tweet is the reason I
quit twitter. It actually made me have a physical reaction.
wtf this is the first time I’ve reacted with a literal, physical sneer to a post on this subreddit and I do NOT like it
I would eat a desiccated turd before I eat white chocolate do not @ me under any circumstances
The amount of people admitting that they prefer white chocolate to dark or even milk chocolate in the comments is unbelievable.
If you’re going to be a weird pedant about chocolate, then white chocolate is just cocoa butter, milk and sugar. It doesn’t even contain any cocoa solids which are, y’know, the thing from cacao beans that tastes like chocolate…
If I label a bowl “free candy” and put skittles, chocolates, and 00 bills in it, I’m pretty sure the 00 bills are going to go first.
Either Eliezer has realized what is wrong with the rationalist community and engaged in brilliant self-parody, or he was quite a bit more insane than I realized.
I fell into a deep fog reading this. For my life, what was the thought process here?
I think the correct sneerclub opinion is intuitively obvious:
White chocolate is best because it is evil
Somebody never made chocolate mousse and it shows.
I would have never guessed that this opinion on white chocolate would be my shopping cart test, but it turns out that it is. There really are two kinds of people in the world.
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Does he know this sub exists
Of course the white chocolate disappears first in all his experiments, they have himself as a common factor.
This poll is low-key about race and specifically about which races count as (ugh) “real people”. Change my mind.
Geez, this guy is a f***n moron. This is the most childish conclusion conclusion ever. Makes me suspect that this is their “thinking” process behind all of their great conclusions. Grab a kid, stick him in a echo chamber until he’s an adult, grant him access to a relevant position, and you get someone like this. God forbid they ever come in touch with the real world. I bet that when reality doesn’t conform to his “rational”, based on “bayesian method” predictions, he blames reality for being dumb.
I’m sorry for the diatribe, but this type of tweet is the reason I quit twitter. It actually made me have a physical reaction.
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What a surprise! Nobody wanted to claim a white thing’s superiority over a black thing? Inconceivable!