[deleted]

Human biodiversity. Pretty much anything about sex and gender. Those are the big ones.

Overestimation of the practicality of interplanetary (let alone interstellar) colonization, maybe? They seem to overlap with the space cadet crowd somewhat. Also a general knee-jerk technophilia.

They will wax on and on about biases yet they—as a group as well as as individuals—seem particularly incapable of introspection. Feelings are sinful and despicable, except their own feelings which are at worst righteous, secondary, and certainly always under their masterful control and never at risk of influencing their superior rationality.

They have a distinct taste for cheap evolutionary psychology and will latch on every just-so stories and bad metaphors it provides them. The more gender-conforming and misogynistic the story the better—unless they can use it to reinforce their polyamorous and very open-minded nice male stud perspective. If the story is rhetorically dangerous and too transparent they have a propensity to resort to equivocation as a mean to restore respectability.

Mathy is good. Bedazzlingly mathy is unquestionable. Everyone sucks at statistics except themselves. If someone can’t math it’s risible. If they are caught incapable of mathing it’s because their napkin was too small and they were in a rush or on their way to some important function. They are at the center of a pandemic of multiple degenerative engineer’s and physicist’s diseases. Everything has a magical technological solution, we just haven’t found the right objective function to optimize yet.

Everything wet or metaphysical can be very smartly distilled into a stupid dualistic metaphor involving hardware and software.

Thought experiments always weight more than empirical evidences because crusty old big brain physicists used them all the time or something. Hearing of anything remotely related to gender-nonconformity, feminism, historicity, or social justice, will whip them up into a jubilant frenzy at which point they will beg the question and collectively converge on a mediocre thought experiment that will serve forevermore as an irrefutable falsification of the aforementioned. They will then begin parroting the latter at the drop of a hat.

Bitcoin is big brain coin and therefore always good no matter what.

The cult of the solitary promethean genius runs deep.

IQ and racism and all that dung; they love debating metrics of happiness, utility, productivity, safety and whatever objective function they’re currently jerking themselves raw over, but metrics that, once again, reinforce their distaste if anything too brown and very scary and not suburbia and not North Shore Chicago is definitively very very empirical and truthy and never contentious indeed.

I’ll stop here because writing this made me sad.

The biggest misunderstanding of sience of rationalists is thinking that every phenomenon known to mankind can be explained by stuff that is taught in the first week of a statistics class.

I bring this quote out every time this comes up, but it’s still just absolutely shockingly bad an emblematic of Yud’s blindspots:

Riemann invented his geometries before Einstein had a use for them; the physics of our universe is not that complicated in an absolute sense. A Bayesian superintelligence, hooked up to a webcam, would invent General Relativity as a hypothesis—perhaps not the dominant hypothesis, compared to Newtonian mechanics, but still a hypothesis under direct consideration—by the time it had seen the third frame of a falling apple. It might guess it from the first frame, if it saw the statics of a bent blade of grass.

I did a whole post dissecting just how bad this quote is, and it’s actually a key part of his AI safety argument! He thinks that intelligence, on it’s own, gives you superpowers, without the need for evidence, or experimentation, or resources, which is a fundamentally anti-scientific point of view.

Maybe the central and fundamental flaws of the Rationalist community are the ways its adherents fail to practice their own methods.

Narrowly define Rationalism as an attempt to overcome human cognitive biases. Okay, then one of the worst families of cognitive biases involves ingroups vs. outgroups: racism, the -phobias, political tribalism, addressing the imaginary category instead of the real individual. Where are all the parables and exercises about those biases? Well, if anything that’s the project of the antiracism movement that’s gained so much momentum: raise awareness of and teach resistance to mental blocks like privilege, white fragility, systemic racism, the present-day legacies of slavery and colonialism, etc. Those are influences that cloud our judgment and affect all of us in varying degrees. (When I first came across the blog Overcoming Bias I thought that’s what it’s about because of the name. lol) But while Rationalists have elaborate games for overcoming the availability heuristic or the framing effect, on these issues they just throw in with the Gamergate lost-causers and blame it all on SJWs instead of System 1. They even bring tribalism into places where it wasn’t already, like inventing “conflict theorists vs. mistake theorists” to turn two situational behaviors into two irreconcilable categories of people.

In a sense Rationalism is almost a self-help exercise as an intellectual discourse. Yet instead of praising each other’s mastery of bias-denial, they jerk each other off about innate ability. A community of rationality-practicers fetishizing IQ is like a community of bodybuilders fetishing height: yeah, maybe it gives you more leverage on the weights, and it’s another factor in an imposing or attractive physical presence, but it’s not something you worked for or can help others attain for themselves? They have a philosophy built on the growth mindset and a community focused on a fixed mindset.

And then there’s the way they selectively choke themselves off from the fresh air of outside ideas. Scott Siskind might have the most extreme examples. On one hand, he “steelmans” in great length and detail the neoreactionary philosophy, which is the political equivalent of flat-earthism discussed only by weirdo assholes nobody in the mainstream has heard of (partly because they don’t want their real names used). On the other hand, he can spill thousands of words complaining that “you are still crying wolf” without even specifying who you is. That’s his worst essay not just because of the conclusion (Trump isn’t a racist and you’re a bad person for saying so), but because of how he gets there: by not citing or responding to any specific arguments from any specific people, by ignoring the most obvious and discussed-to-death counterexamples (e.g. housing discrimination case, Central Park Five, birtherism), by playing down other counterexamples with the dumbest possible context-free literalism that couldn’t possibly stand up to the slightest dialogue or editing, by pointing out that previous candidates like Clinton and McCain used similar language as if everyone everywhere agrees they’re not racist, by using David Duke as a reference point without even taking ten seconds for an internet search that would show Duke already proved he’s totally not a racist in exactly the same way Siskind is proving Trump is totally not a racist. It’s an extraordinary work of intellectual introversion, written as if he not just failed to anticipate counterarguments but actively covered his ears to avoid hearing the ones that were already ubiquitous. Fringe nutjobs with no influence get the steelman treatment, while the most talked-about issues involving the most powerful man in the world for four years are only worthy of shouting angrily at some very naughty strawmen. I’m not sure someone could have written such a weak argument without first being convinced of their rationality, beyond any self-doubt, by Rationalism.

They disregard many fields of study as too ambiguous to be taken seriously yet they can’t stop talking about those subjects, so it becomes an excuse to only listen to rationalist blog posts talk about those things, but in different lingo.Stuff like:

“Experts disagree on ethical theories and its way too broad a subject to be a true expert on, but obviously consequentialism is correct”

“Psychology papers don’t replicate, but here’s a theory about what motivates people to do X”

“This type of analysis is just motivated speculation. Anyways, here is a fable of a merchant trying to ford the Nile as a metaphor of my feelings on the matter”

So they often use the excuse of having high standards for evidence and rigor to …. lower the standards for evidence and rigor.

i’m trying to think of one thing they’ve gotten right. they’re wrong about ai - just ask any reputable ai researcher you can find. they’re wrong about women - just ask any woman you can find. they’re wrong about epidemiology- just ask everyone who has ever laid eyes on dominic cummings. they’re wrong about bayes - just ask any reputable mathematician. they’re wrong about logic - just ask any reputable logician. they’re wrong about socialism - just ask any reputable socialist. they’re wrong about history - just ask any high schooler who’s read a history book not written by a white supremacist. they’re wrong about race - just ask any scholar of race. i literally can’t think of anything they’re right about. this is why you should never argue with them and just sneer and make fun of them.

I wouldn’t be able to speak to their perspective on hard science, but I think they chronically underestimate the degree to which “human nature” (and so on) is a metastable hyperobject and not a solely intrinsic property of a human being.

Or in less jargon: even when they’re not blatantly misusing statistics in order to prop up scientific racism, they still love to make sweeping proclamations about human nature and culture as if they’re measuring the properties of a chemical, when in reality they’re just speculating on a shifting system for which their own speculation will also play a part in influencing.

Their biggest and most foundational misunderstanding: they conduct science like it’s a philosophy, and philosophy like it’s a science.

The Bayes thing stands out to me. Here’s a fun game: ask a rationalist why they haven’t graduated to using Kalman updating yet.

The entire community is chock-full of “scientific racism”. I had Richard Lynn papers quoted at me as though they were real sources.

[deleted]

ATC (formerly SSC): 1. Unjustified certainty that the brain implements Bayesian statistics in processing sensory inputs ( e.g. vision). 2. Overinflating the importance of certain GWAS results (though as a group ATCers are hardly alone here).

There is no kind of smart that makes you uniformly good at everything. Rationalists place far too much weight on general intelligence as opposed to domain specific knowledge.

intelligence, and no enough on specific knowledge and skills.

Aumanns theorem doesn’t work in the simplified form “rationalists should agree”

Bayes doesn’t work as sole epistemology. It can’t generate hypotheses, or backtrack. Rationaliss make very little use of it in practice.

SI doesn’t work as a generator of realistic theories/truth.

There’s nothing about AI that allows you to transcend ordinary computational complexity. Yet rationalists keep obsessing about uncomputable things like AIXI, which are of no relevance to AI.

Utilitarianism works much better as a theory of charity or voluntary donation than as a general theory of morality.

Yudkowskys writings on QM are confused about what MWI and Copenhagen even are.

MWI is not obviously simpler. Particularly the decoherence based form.

its perfectly logical that people who misunderstand AI must also misunderstand statistics.

Use of neuroscientific evidence (often, abstract of fMRI papee) to “prove” some other point. As if this magic sciency method automatically and majestically reveals exactly what the brain is doing.

Goes double if they invoke St Friston

everything that is justified with “evolutionary psychology”

[deleted]