Others reflect a near-pathological commitment to the reinvention of
the wheel, using the language of game theory to explain, with
mathematical rigor, some fact of social life that anyone trained in the
humanities would likely accept as a given.
tfw you pretend to include criticism but also drank the badmath
high-decoupling kool aid
Lots of rationalist stuff pretends to be grounded in mathematical rigor but really really isn't.
High-decoupling is a new popular phrase to describe the ability to ignore context and how people feel about something and pretend it's something that can be discussed in the abstract. Like, if you said "What if I wanted to murder every three year old" a normal person would go wtf and a "high-decoupler" would nod sagely and then start discussing the logistical challenge.
The "game theory" is anything but rigorous. It's just using mathy words to make you feel like you're smart.
"high-decoupling" is what they use to make their low empathy and a lack of knowledge sound like a good thing. "its not that I don't know shit, I am just very good at considering the question at hand separate from any relevant facts"
"drinking the kool aid" is an expression that means you accept anything a cult says at face value, no matter where it leads.
a Bay Area attorney whose Twitter bio reads “Into Stoicism,
engineering, blockchains, Governance Econ, InfoSec, 2A,” tweeted,
Edit: having finished the article, it is a pretty bad piece that
misses the major aspects of the story and takes the “I’m a tolerant
liberal” pablum at face value.
> Edit: having finished the article, it is a pretty bad piece that misses the major aspects of the story and takes the "I'm a tolerant liberal" pablum at face value.
As much as one can expect from The New Yorker.
The NYer is great, you just have to manage your own expectations:
* Most of their writers are incurable, dyed-in-the-wool liberals, with exactly the blind spots you'd expect (Adam Gopnik and William Finnegan exemplify this—wonderful writers and very decent human beings with a few strong, extremely annoying ideological biases).
* Some of their writers are just awful. Gideon Lewis-Kraus (author of this piece) is one of these! Malcolm Gladwell is another. (And they publish him all the fucking time, damn their eyes.) You can and should just skip their stuff!
* Almost all of the poetry is boring, and almost all of the short fiction, though expertly crafted, is practically identical to almost all of the other short fiction, which is boring.
* The cartoons are…an acquired taste. So are the horny-ass film reviews.
* About a quarter of every issue (everything up to and sometimes including "The Talk of the Town," plus much of the theater, dance, museum, etc. criticism) is only relevant to rich people who actually live in New York.
* The science writing is of variable quality. They tend to have actual doctors write about medicine and epidemiology, but many other subjects are covered by random nerds rather than subject-matter experts.
In spite of those many, many caveats, it's still worth reading because:
* The fact-checking (and editorial quality in general) beats the hell out of any other mainstream publication in this country.
* They do some genuinely groundbreaking investigative reporting (see recent work by Sarah Stillman and Ronan Farrow, for instance).
* Their ideological biases are less pronounced and less annoying than those of any other American publication with comparable distribution.
* Once you get used to them, there's nothing quite like the terrible cartoons and horny-ass film reviews.
I am a lifelong subscriber and probably have Stockholm syndrome, though, so…grain of salt!
I have a friend who has managed to sell some cartoons to the New Yorker so I've been forcing myself to like the cartoons for her sake. Horny film reviews are a given, it's why actors are hot.
> Horny film reviews are a given, it's why actors are hot.
True, but Anthony Lane brings a slightly demented sexually omnivorous elan to his craft that I just can't find anywhere else.
No, it's worth reading but as a part of the discourse instead of as an observer telling you what happened. (This is the correct way to read all new btw)
Lol stoicism... I’m into Greek philosophy, but when I see someone saying they’re into stoicism, it’s code for asshole. They’ve twisted it into basically ‘don’t give a shit about human beings’.
That’s how they take it. The real version is ‘the only thing that matters is being a moral person. Don’t get attached to stuff or things you cannot control.’ The internet nerd version is ‘having feelings is bad, and caring about anything is virtue signal. Be rational.’
> They’ve twisted it into basically ‘don’t give a shit about human beings’.
Not always! Sometimes it's a way of trying to make very ordinary right-wing politics sound like something super-erudite. It's basically the thinking man's, "I'm really more of a libertarian."
Incidentally, I've actually had a one-on-one conversation with this attorney guy about dungeons and dragons, and a couple minutes made clear what is probably obvious from his bio, that he is peak dumb-smart.
Yeesh, I can’t believe the article took the “blue tribe” and “gray
tribe”/conflict-mistake theories at face value. They are actually
dogshit baby theories, it’s okay to say that!
Members of the Grey Tribe have emphasized a kind of gladiatorial
approach, going out of their way to court risky and even offensive ideas
to signal their distance from more sentimental liberals. As primarily
“mistake theorists”
lmao sure
As primarily “mistake theorists,” they are not afraid of the sorts of
mistaken people or mistaken positions that “conflict theorists” find
definitively repellent. By their own logic of gamesmanship, some of the
positions they tolerate actually have to be extreme, because only a
tolerance of a truly extreme position is costly—that is, something for
which they might have to pay a price.
Are they wrong to worry that a reporter would want to make them pay
for it?
Amazing how Gideon sees this burst of apocalyptic paranoia about the
hIt PiEcE, explains that it’s overreactive conspiracizing, and still
proceeds to say that members of the Grey Tribe are primarily
“mistake theorists.”
Yes, mistake theorists, famously known for declaring that the Media™
is founded on a tyrannical culture and click-based business structure
that must be frozen out before it crushes us all.
Mistake Theorists...
You mean the people who are bravely putting their weight behind scientific racism, just because (a) no one in the 'blue tribe' (lol) believe in it anymore and (b) maybe there was something there!
There's something to be said about probing the edges of group think, but also sometimes everyone believes something because it's true! Would the mistake theorists jump off a bridge just to test gravity?
The conflict/mistake theorist thing is one of my favorite bits of Scott being dumb, because normally, when you identify two stupid false dichotomy positions no one actually holds the move is then to try to transcend both of them by putting yourself in a center position between the two obviously moronic falsehoods, but Scott decided that he actually identified with one of the two positions no one previously held and got other morons to agree with him.
I'd go as far as to call this article downright positive towards SSC:
>If one of the bedrock beliefs in Silicon Valley is that the future ought to be determined by a truly free market in ideas, one emancipated from the influence of institutional incumbents and untainted by the existing ideological polarities, **Slate Star Codex is often held up as an example of what the well-behaved Internet can look like—a secret orchard of fruitful inquiry.**
emphasis mine
Although, it \*does\* seem to have touched a nerve with the, "I'm really very progressive, guys, but don't you think anti-racism has gone to far?" crowd. They're apparently calling it a hit piece because in the most polite way possible it notes that Scott's comments were a fucking toilet of white supremacy.
For most people, taking the word of others at face value is the default, until given reason to do otherwise. I suppose most people in this sub have their reasons, and that's fine, but it seems weird to expect an exploritive / explanitive article to dismiss things out of hand. Like calling it a bad article because it doesn't arrive at the same conclusion that you do stinks of "how dare other people have different thoughts than I do?!"
Right, sorry. Sneering only, and also expressing disappointment about other people not sneering enough, apparently. Sneering at sneering? Meta-sneering? Get that shit outta here
Yes exactly! You’ll fit in fine here, most aren’t as quick studies.
Feel free to go to /r/sneersneerclub for your meta-sneering needs. (Not an endorsement but I try to give everyone what they want 😇)
I'm not new here. A lot of what gets posted here is genuinely gross and worthy of sneering at. You lads do good work, most of the time. But this ain't it, chief. I expect more from this sub than to just to link an article about something rationalist related and say "I dunno I think they're bad actually. Please clap". That's low effort garbage. You can do better.
> I expect more from this sub than to just to link an article about something rationalist related and say "I dunno I think they're bad actually. Please clap"
Excuse me, the technical term is applause lights, didnt you even read the sequences? ;) (dont)
I resent that I’m being serious in response to this but in short: to echo Elizabeth Sandifer, a piece on SSC that doesn’t cover its flirtations (or full on affairs) with neoreaction, fascism and race realists is going to only increase his audience and the associated cachet of people like Steve Sailer.
From the article:
>Alexander could have banned neoreactionaries from his comments section, but, on the basis of the view that vile ideas should be countenanced and refuted rather than left to accrue the status of forbidden knowledge, he took their arguments seriously and at almost comical length—even at the risk that he might lend them legitimacy.
> A minority address issues that are contentious and at times offensive. These conversations, about race and genetic or biological differences between the sexes, have rightfully drawn criticism from outsiders. Rationalists usually point out that these debates represent a tiny fraction of the community’s total activity, and that they are overrepresented in the comments section of S.C.C. by a small but loud and persistent cohort—one that includes, for example, Steve Sailer, a peddler of “[scientific racism](https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/quillette-fascist-creep/).”
Given that it calls out Neoreaction and Steve Sailer by name and paints them negatively ("Vile ideas", "contentious and at times offensive", "rightly drawn criticism", etc), I don't think there's any danger of that.
So the author thinks they're covering both sides but focused on the wrong conflict. That between NYT/media and SSC/Tech folk rather than SSC vs people of all stripes who despise it.
You could argue that it's their prerogative but it really isn't, when the issue with the NYT only exists because of the threat of eugenics/racism/HBD blowing up and people realizing exactly what a dipshit scott alexander is.
So from that perspective, it shows Scott's side and the NYT's but not Scott's critics' side. Obviously a failure to be remotely balanced in a piece rushed to publication to "meet the moment".
It sounds like your problem with the article is that it isn't a totally different article on a different-but-vaguely-related subject, and all I can say to that is ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Why do you accept the narrative that the "real story" is (or was going to be) a secret-Nazi exposé? Sneering paranoia from concern trolls is not any more convincing than heartfelt paranoia from SSC fanboys was.
How do you do fellow sneerers? As you know we are quite logical sneerers so sneerers doing something and dweebs doing something are the same thing actually. This has been my yudkowsky talk.
You forget that we are fundamentally lazy and look to others to do the high effort sneers. Not to mention that discussion and forming opinions can take place elsewhere as well. This is community done stand up comedy and we treat it accordingly aka boo the hecklers unless they’re funny
Okay, that's fine, but "community done stand up comedy" is not a shield against jokes that just don't land. You can say "we are fundamentally lazy" but this falls short even if compared to other posts in the same subreddit.
You seem to think that you need to explain what it is that gets done here, you don't. I'm just telling you there's nothing here to sneer at. There is no content to your post besides "Look, a journalist published an article about the thing we hate and it's less than 100% condemnatory". Big fucking yawn.
Don't take this as a hated "rat" coming in here to piss in your Sneerios, take this as constructive feedback; You can do better.
My problem with you (in jest and in seriousness) is that you're being fundamentally dull in your "meta-sneering".
Putting zero effort into it and expecting people to come spoon feed things they find obvious to you.
> but "community done stand up comedy" is not a shield against jokes that just don't land
Have you ever been to community stand-up? Witnessed the horror, the vicarious cringe and embarrassment? Clearly not.
Paging /u/noactuallyitspoptart
Note that this is *not* a formal request signed in triplicate requesting defenestration of this interloper (colloquially referred to as "canceling").
firstly, i'm BAAAACKKK BITCHES (consider me to refer exclusively to those who identify as bitches, i would never *impose* such an identity on someone)
i'm glad this has provided some entertainment lol
>Putting zero effort into it and expecting people to come spoon feed things they find obvious to you.
I don't know where you got the idea that I want to be spoon fed anything. If anything, you seem to have an instinctive need to explain yourself even though I keep telling you there's no need to. I'm just telling you, the joke didn't land. There's no substance here. Explaining it won't make it funnier.
>Have you ever been to community stand-up? Witnessed the horror, the vicarious cringe and embarrassment? Clearly not.
Long ago, back in high school, over a decade ago. But even the parents that showed up to those sorts of things would have a hard time politely clapping along to something like your post.
while sneerers are often smug they, as a rule, are not smarmy.
For this violation I petition that we punt this one out. Also, I just don't like them? Yeah, definitely not a fan.
/u/completely-ineffable <3
> Also, I just don't like them? Yeah, definitely not a fan.
The feeling is mutual. We have so much in common, it turns out! I bet this becomes into one of those rivalries-turn-romances where we end up moving in together and buying a puppy.
Lack of effort isn't really seen as a flaw here from what I've seen. It's kind of encouraged actually, both because they don't want to legitimize rationalist arguments, and because they want to contrast with rationalists stylistically.
I don't mean "effort" in the sense of a rationalist-style screed. I mean effort in the sense of low-effort memes. If OP wants to sneer, they're in the right place. Dismissive is fine. They want to be terse to contrast with the Hated Enemy, be terse! But be interesting. Do something, anything, with the source material. Something creative, something showing the barest shred of personality or, you know, effort.
I mean really. I'm getting accused of being dull, when my interlocutor has done nothing but post an article, say "I think this article is bad", and cry for mods when called out on it.
Yeah, weird that the trained journalist doesn't see eye to eye with this sub on that, huh? Since the reputation of internet circle jerks is unimpeachable, it must be that this is a Bad Article written by a Bad Journalist
It’s explicitly an internet circle-jerk here, which is good and fine, but there’s also a lot of practical knowledge of the cult around on the sub which a journalist only just diving in is going to miss
There’s nothing special about journalists *qua* researchers: journalists are employed to file copy
> It’s explicitly an internet circle-jerk here, which is good and fine
Of course, and I don't mean to imply otherwise (That it's not good and fine), apologies if it came off that way.
There's plenty of "reason to do otherwise" since the large majority of Scott Alexander's articles show a massive deficit in evidence, logic, reason and so on. Of course, since most journalists are also jocks lacking these critical skills it's no surprise that a journalist would be insufficiently clever to spot Scott Alexander's numerous mistakes.
Honestly this reads like the guy spent a great deal of time reading
Scott and taking him at more or less face value, maybe dived into the
comments once or twice, and never looked into the meetups, subreddit,
sex cults, twitter campaigns or math pets at all.
yud's a dom and story goes he would ask his subs math questions and delight in their inability to answer them, like intellectual dominance or something. and he'd call em math pets
I... Don't see a problem here? Sounds like pretty standard intelligence kink stuff. Not super weird or harmful, as far as such things go.
Hell, I like to (and let's just spoiler this for those not curious about my fetishes) >!hypnotize consensual partners into being very dumb, then mock them for not knowing what 2+2 is!<. Some people just get off on different stuff, and this feels kinda kinkshamey.
Hmm. Can't get spoilers to work.
this was from my fractured memory; looking more into it, there might have been more abusive elements to it. [this thread](https://redd.it/awvems) goes into pretty good detail about it.
but i think even if it isn't/wasn't abusive, it's at the very least pretty "of course that would be Eliezer Yudkowsky would be into", like even if it's perfectly fine and not abusive, it's kinda eye-rolly in the context of yud's personality imo
Yeah IQ play gets a bit more sinister when they actually believe in that shit in a similar way stepfordization gets a bit more sinister when they're actually a raging misogynist
and even worse in the context of a huge polyamorous subculture with EY as a sort of messiah figure, polyamory and cults generally end up as power-imbalanced polygyny, and that's a lot of what the girl in the thread seems to be saying she witnessed and unfortunately experienced
Yeah, i read somewhere that ssc isnt that into sex (some scott defenders were saying that), it is others who do the sexual abuse, scott just ignores it if it is in his tribe.
This is how most people interact with SCC, or any other peice of internet media up to and including reddit. Maybe they read the article/watch the video, but most likely skim it. Maybe they look at the comments once or twice before realizing that it's a terrible idea every time. Rarely do they hold the author personally responsible for the actions of every individual audience member. So far, so normal.
My point is that he isn't digging into Scott's explicitly stated but thinly veiled beliefs, not random commenters.
EDIT: TO MAKE THE SUBTEXT TEXT: My fundamental ire with Scott is not that he is polite to Steve Sailor. Being polite to Steve Sailor is stupid and pointless, but whatever. My ire with Scott is that he *fundamentally agrees* with Steve Sailor on certain questions relevant to Steve Sailor's interests but tries very hard to pretend that he does not. (Strictly speaking, this is somewhat better than not pretending, but only just.)
The kolmogorov thing is also a bit of a 'this is a safe space for racists, as long as you dont reveal your power level' signal, add to that what you said about agreeing with sailer and it becomes a bit of a bad crowd.
it's vitally important that anyone who thinks even for a second about being sympathetic to good old scoot and his army of patoots that they all, 100 percent of them, absolutely agree, in every respect with racist scientists from 1917, calipers and all. you couldn't slide a piece of paper between their beliefs. if you shined a light on the seam, it would be so tight none would get through.
okay we expect a certain amount of bootlicking from newly participating "former" rationalists but swallowing the boot outright is a bit much even for us
Is there somewhere I could read more about this? I've been on this sub for months now, and while I love a good sneer at Robin Hanson,I'm still yet to be convinced that Scott is so terrible. His blog was still probably my favourite up until all the drama llama stuff lately (which I admit doesn't really help my view of him)
Read against murderism then kolmorgorov complicity in succession.
Read Scott's replies to his more controversial commenters. Or the SSC subreddit. Or how he talks about TheMotte vs how he talks about any mainstream center left person (or heaven forbid a "hostile feminist")
EDIT: Corrected second blog post title
Hey Chris, happy to point you to better sources on Scott's vileness.
I've been trawling through it along with others on the sub so might as well.
Just send me a pm
Second, he more than anyone has defined and attempted to enforce the
social norms of the subculture, insisting that they distinguish
themselves not only on the basis of data-driven argument and logical
clarity but through an almost fastidious commitment to civil discourse.
(As he puts it, “liberalism conquers by communities of people who agree
to play by the rules.”) If one of the bedrock beliefs in Silicon Valley
is that the future ought to be determined by a truly free market in
ideas, one emancipated from the influence of institutional incumbents
and untainted by the existing ideological polarities, Slate Star Codex
is often held up as an example of what the well-behaved Internet can
look like—a secret orchard of fruitful inquiry.
Unless you point out a member of the community is falsifying quotes,
at which point you will be banned. So much for the “free market of
ideas”.
Perhaps the largest share of its attention is devoted to
metacognitive elucidations of the tools of reason, and the heroic effort
to purge oneself of common biases and fallacies.
Double ugh, not only is the wording bad, but the journalist forgot to check if they actually applied the rules to make to purge themselves of bias consistently, which doesnt happen. As alicethewitch said better elsewhere in this thread.
Who needs apophallation of the personal and the political when you have instead a most reasonable, very dandy, very homogeneous infinite regress of hyperpriors.
Not super related to the article, but: God does Scott have bad
operational security. I emailed him a couple years ago (I used to be a
rationalist sorry) and he responded with his real name. I find it hard
to believe that someone who doesn’t bother to change their email name
would delete a blog they wrote on for years and obviously considered
dear to them over that name being on a newspaper. If someone wanted to
bring him down by means of doxxing it would have been exceedingly easy
already.
So conspiracy theory time what’s Scott’s real motivation? He doesn’t
strike me as the type who would do it for the attention, so he must be
doing it for some other type of clout. But what exactly? Attempting to
brand himself as a brave defender of free speech against the illiberal
NYT? But I’m afraid we’re going to find out in the end he just became
paranoid.
Personally I found his full name when he wrote a blog post about a seminar of some sort he attended, where he was publicly listed among the participants. Earlier some posters on this sub argued that revealing Scott's identity shouldn't count as doxxing because come on, short of putting it up on the blog you couldn't get any less secretive about it, and while I wouldn't go quite as far, I don't think that line of argument is entirely without merit.
What struck me about the email thing is that it would have been trivially easy for him to change it, even expected given that it was his blogging email address. Whereas it may have been expected of him to use his real name in the book chapters, conferences and the other things people mentioned. I keep imagining his correspondence with the NYT journalist must have included the pearl “from: Scott Realname: Nooo you can’t use my real name in the article nooo”
>So conspiracy theory time what’s Scott’s real motivation?
It's very simple. He's afraid of being fired/becoming unemployable. That's it. All that "death threats'' shit is red herring.
"But why does it matter if NYT publishes his name, if any random troll can find it and publish it right now?"
one word - SEO. He doesn't want his name to be linked to SSC by a high-SEO-juice site (NYT) so when his theraphy clients google him they don't get "$name $surname slatestarcodex" autocomplete or SSC as a Top3 result.
This could impair his work as psychatrist and definitely would make him a less appealing therapist for clinics.
comrade we all were rationalists once.
okay i was never a rationalist in the sense of believing in AI wank but i did read HPMOR cover to cover so kill me
I think there's at least a few people here who were always critical of the Rationalist movement and saw that the Emperor had no clothes as soon as we encountered them. I'm one, dgerard I'm sure is another, probably the mods here too and other longterm users. As far as I can tell this was always an oppositional sub, not really a place for ex-Rationalists although some moved here eventually.
Yes and no. I think the better division is people who detoxxed from rationalism via sneerclub and those who found their own way out of the hellhole or were never in it to begin with. (I think people who found their own way out were generally less deep in it (i.e. not a big part of the community IRL) than people who got out later on via sneerclub or after seeing the horrific treatment of sexual assault by rationalists. )
This is not a moral judgment, just speculating that the people who were never in rationalist social circles would find it easier to see the bullshit for what it is)
I was a lurker here for a while but I've been more active in the last year or two (you can see it in my past account activity). I haven't written a post like this because I know sappy ex-rationalists (am ex-rationalist myself, but not sappy about it) posting here looking for guidance like u/noactuallyitspoptart will become their new thought leader in their new community tend to be frowned upon. Yet it comes up frequently enough I'd thought I'd offer some testimony. I might be one of the more involved ex-rationalists who is active on r/SneerClub. Here are some factors that contributed:
* A couple of friends of mine who got befriended some rationalists because we were the rare ones interested in genuine philosophy exposed me to how poor and limited the understanding of epistemology, history and other research disciples outside of STEM fields are.
* Regarding STEM fields and current events, this sub exposed me to info that the selective application of STEM knowledge many rationalists without degrees in a respective field apply to issues like identity politics that they learned in an internet vacuum are pretty gross.
* Their virtual indifference to the resurgence of extreme racism and their historical treatment of sexism in their own community solidified for me that much of their talk of differences between races and sexes was maximized from whatever slight reality there is to that notion (e.g. black people have a higher chance of being lactose-intolerant, cis women tend to be have less absolute bone and muscle mass than cis men, etc.) and applied to every case of real oppression as a form of mental gymnastics.
* It wasn't only the sexual assaults, but learning on this sub the deep precursors in rationalist culture that enable it that was a nail in the coffin for me about the rationality community as a society was totally broken. It wasn't that the internet losers and lurkers skulking in the comments sections at the periphery of their blogosphere were giving a sometimes quote eccentric but acceptable and sincere human community a bad name. That was the community too. They just don't bring up skull sizes at conferences because it's uncouth. Seeing on social media among dozens (hundreds?) I know give so much whataboutism regarding Brent Dill and Michael Vassar and Kathy Forth's suicide was more than shocking. They talked as though how not judging strange behaviour and being charitable may have been taken smidge too far as a mere mistake, as opposed to making the community systemically vulnerable to exploitation by predators and parasites that's happened countless times by now.
* Chances are another unidentified sex pest (read: creep who gets cover because he made friends by being clever) is among their ranks and it could blow up in a year. It was taken to the point many (even most?) men and even some women in the community seemed to express sympathy for this or that misunderstood Beast who had struck bad luck in trying to find his Beauty. Maybe that has to do with how many of have similarly suppressed urges from being pent up for years without much in the way of relationships that they chalked up anything other than a need to change themselves, their outlook and environment. Maybe it's got something to do with how instead of changing all that they found each other in a toxic echo chamber that claims to be sexually liberated while inverting so much of what that's supposed to be about. If you can tell this is the problem with them I'm most bitter about it's because I was friends with Kathy; I knew which rationalists were friends with predators they defended and how they did it and for how long; and I knew friends who I thought I knew well enough, could trust and respect enough, to not stay silent, equivocate or slip into rape apologia. The rationalizations after each incident showed me their walled garden was built to keep the eyes of a prying public away from a community who wanted to never have to let go of a culture in some ways deeply anti-rational. Once I recognized that pattern I started seeing bits of it in everything they do.
* I got tired of the nerd persecution complex years ago but I developed an animus towards it as it just kept getting worse. As things got more polarized politically they stuck to the centre until it became a meaningless label for nerds who freeze in the face of tension and mask their hyper-aversion to conflict with incoherent narratives of half-truths that when questioned by a tone that had a left of centre whiff to it cried wolf.
I used to be a rationalist community organizer (outside the U.S., so not super connected to the core of the community) for a few years. I'm still involved in effective altruism, a community to which I've been closer, and my degree of involvement waxes and wanes. The pollution of effective altruism by the typically problematic mindsets of rationalists has caused me to lose some affection for it as well. I'm a CFAR workshop alumnus and I've been to a couple of their reunions. I don't know if I'll ever go to another one. I don't know if someone from r/SneerClub would ask me to make this a top-level post for posterity. I might do a bit of that on request on another account. I don't want to deal with the ensuing flak as this account and this post probably already telegraph my identity. If someone on the fence about exiting the rationalist community reading this has more questions about any of this, I'm happy to answer some in the comments, and sensitive ones privately.
Here is my take on how they treat AI alignment, even as someone in effective altruism who is somewhat sympathetic to significant parts of AI safety as a field overall.
Sneer at me if you like, but I've always been a tad bit more bullish on AI alignment than this sub. I believe a weak or moderate version of it is logically valid and potentially plausible (I've never been conviced it's sound or more true than not and I've always found the aversion to doing empirical science to verify or falsify their claims at all to be highly specious). I think "smarter-than-human" machines, whatever that notion means and if science ever cracks it, has a significant yet minor change of being dangerous and that's a point of tech development we can't rule out reaching within a century (or two).
If tech billionaires are going to have their money untaxed and their industry uncontrolled by a corrupt government anyway, I don't mind if they spend a few million on engineering failsafe protocols to ensure the security AIs they're building to control the masses or leave us in the dust or whatever, on the (maybe unknowable, maybe very slim) chance they someday become super weapons like nukes. I think the kind of research on ethical theories of future generations and mathematical models of global catastrophe and transhumanism, like the Future of Humanity Institute does, at the very least has intellectual value for its applicability to pressing global problems like ecological catastrophe and multipolar arms races and maybe genetic engineering in coming decades.
Yet my kind of nuanced takes you'd think rationalists would use to juxtapose as a welcome refrain in contrast with belligerent criticism they receive don't hold water in their circles. The biggest takeaway for r/SneerClub from my testimony as it pertains to AI alignment is that, even if one takes for granted like I did that much of the premise is valid, the general approach to reducing this ostensible x-risk is still full of holes. Mostly being outsiders, sneerers may not recognize it's worse than they know from blog posts alone. Many rationalists talk as though it's a virtual guarantee that super-AI will with near-certitude extinguish life in the ways they predict unless their exclusive yet ever-changing model of how to prevent that is centered at the heart of industry. They don't think about how putting that confidence in unaccountable corporations they hope enough of their friends end up working for to one day, what?, slip MIRI-style programs into Google systems might bite them in the ass.
The idea that academia could be an ally is written off because they still think, like journalism, academia is a corrupted and crestfallen institution that seeks to suppress those outsider intellectuals who'd reveal academic fraud with their own excellence. That their half-baked polls show something like 50% of academic AI researchers have come around on AI safety anyway has little softened the one-way holy war of epistemology or whatever they wage on academia. Not that I personally trust world governments with dangerous technology in general, but they write off the question of democratic accountability because "politics is the mind-killer."
Rationalists envy how they feel effective altruism stole their thunder by laundering their AI eschatology into a niche professional field that at least now has a degree of mainstream credibility. They pay lip service to the notion Nick Bostrom and his actually accomplished academic peers, or the ML Ph.D.s who associate with them, are doing them a great service year over year by being the public face of their (pseudo-)intellectual movement they see as beneath themselves to be. They feel that all the original work of geniuses like Yudkowsky and his fellow travellers have been almost nothing but slam dunks the whole time and that FHI is fortunate to be trusted to water it all down for the plebs. They don't care for the Open Philanthropy Project's approach of stringing CFAR and MIRI along with conditional multi-million dollar(!!!) grants instead of writing them blank checks to accelerate their research programmes with hundreds of millions they'd doubtlessly mismanage. While effective altruism often fails to ensure its own charities are accountable and transparent like they said they would as movement aimed at avoiding the pitfalls of conventional charity, CFAR and MIRI jumping through the minimal hoops of scrutiny effective altruism levels at them has rationalists brimming with chagrin. The narcissism of small differences that draws those in effective altruism like me here is more than paid back for by how some of them despise how the rest of effective altruism apparently undermines their plans at every turn.
They pay little more than the same lip service to all the AI scientists who have accepted the diagnosis of the AI alignment problem but dare try pursuing a diversity of solutions in the face of all kinds of directions AI could take and the still very incomplete understanding science has of intelligence. When I bring this up with a rationalist, there's usually some hand-waving about how the gaps in academic knowledge because of their simple failure to solve major research problems in neurology and cognitive science will be solved by rationalists later with whatever galaxy-brained model they'll generate as necessary. Those in effective altruism with other priorities or even other rationalists with divergent opinions on AI alignment steer clear of that rationalist nucleus and quietly let them keep pretending they're the masters of the universe.
If I said this most of this more publicly on one of their fora, I'd be at best written off as a hater driven loony by his vendetta against their imagined evils (I've had a rationalist friend negatively compare me to Alex Kruel). When I express in private to even sympathetic rationalists that a big chunk of this nascent field might be self-deceptive fugazi, they get all awkward and quiet and their habit of arguing disappears. They worship the ground Peter Thiel and Elon Musk walk on, even though the former abandoned them for being Luddites and the latter makes AI safety look more like a domain of crackpots than Yudkowsky ever did. They minimize any other potential x-risk for undermining global attention focused on their pet world-saving projects while deflecting questions they might be confused on some level about the severity AI risk. To them truth-seeking is only a friendly collaboration on the surface and is tacitly a 4-D chess competition of peacocking who is the most earnestly bull-headed about wrenching the narrative of reality to fit the contours of their preconfigured maps of it. The evidence and citations they try to back that up with when serious people are watching are afterthoughts.
I think that the core premise of AI-alignment - that machine “intelligence”, whatever it may be, is an important concern for humans and the planet in general - is one shared by most people here, insofar as they are acquainted with the idea
Financial regulation and disseminated of financial information by automated systems is a pet peeve/worry of mine, for example
Really the major distinction is between those worried about runaway technology growth in general, and those worried about speculative robot-god fantasies (where even the “respectable” Nick Bostrom at Oxford is full of sci-fi shit backed by dodgy numbers)
tfw you pretend to include criticism but also drank the badmath high-decoupling kool aid
Edit: having finished the article, it is a pretty bad piece that misses the major aspects of the story and takes the “I’m a tolerant liberal” pablum at face value.
Yeesh, I can’t believe the article took the “blue tribe” and “gray tribe”/conflict-mistake theories at face value. They are actually dogshit baby theories, it’s okay to say that!
lmao sure
Amazing how Gideon sees this burst of apocalyptic paranoia about the hIt PiEcE, explains that it’s overreactive conspiracizing, and still proceeds to say that members of the Grey Tribe are primarily “mistake theorists.”
Yes, mistake theorists, famously known for declaring that the Media™ is founded on a tyrannical culture and click-based business structure that must be frozen out before it crushes us all.
Some good sneers but overall a bad article, spends too much time on exposition of their nonsense and accepts it at face value instead of mocking it.
Honestly this reads like the guy spent a great deal of time reading Scott and taking him at more or less face value, maybe dived into the comments once or twice, and never looked into the meetups, subreddit, sex cults, twitter campaigns or math pets at all.
Edit: He took Scott literally, but not seriously.
Unless you point out a member of the community is falsifying quotes, at which point you will be banned. So much for the “free market of ideas”.
ugh
Not super related to the article, but: God does Scott have bad operational security. I emailed him a couple years ago (I used to be a rationalist sorry) and he responded with his real name. I find it hard to believe that someone who doesn’t bother to change their email name would delete a blog they wrote on for years and obviously considered dear to them over that name being on a newspaper. If someone wanted to bring him down by means of doxxing it would have been exceedingly easy already.
So conspiracy theory time what’s Scott’s real motivation? He doesn’t strike me as the type who would do it for the attention, so he must be doing it for some other type of clout. But what exactly? Attempting to brand himself as a brave defender of free speech against the illiberal NYT? But I’m afraid we’re going to find out in the end he just became paranoid.