Stumbled upon this sub and spent some hours reading through some old posts and feeling all warm and fuzzy inside. Then I recalled a story and decided to make an admittedly tiny sneering contribution. Story needs some background, apologies for length.
Years ago I got hooked by arguments over the coming Singularity and AI-pocalypse. I read Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence and got together with some friends to pick it apart. After contemplating the book for a while, I realized more and more how much of a garbled piece barely-even-thought it was. The extent to which it this confident-yet-confused garbage was celebrated stunned me a fair bit, since his book became the fulcrum that ultimately propelled me away from all that nonsense (after some more meanderings).
Some people in our group had a LW/MIRI/Rationalist background and were open to these criticisms. Someone had connections to a LW-aligned software dev turned millionaire who was hitting the Superintelligence pipe heavily, giving money, promoting etc. We orchestrated a conversation style meeting to test some of these critical questions on him.
So here I was, a 20-something sitting down with this older and arguably bright and successful dude, shooting my barbed questions and it wasn’t long until he replied: “Does not compile.” I blinked and figured I had somehow mangled the question, so I rephrased. “Does not compile” came the reply, like a malfunctioning computer.
The conversation came to somewhat of a halt as I tried to ‘compile’ whether he was actually telling me that he - a Rationalist - was unable to engage with a question that undermined his beliefs and that his only way of communicating this fact was to act as if he was a broken machine. He was. I was floored. I didn’t realize this frustration still dwelt within until I read this sub.
Question: Have you met people like this in an offline setting, talked to them face to face and witnessed what Rationality hath wrought - like when a person begins impersonating a computer to escape thinking? What’s your worst encounter?
PS. Years later, he’s still talking about AI turning us into fucking paperclips or whatever.
Edit: got confused when recalling CS terminology, he actually said ‘compile’, which is arguably even stranger.
Rationalism + neurodiversity produces an unholy offspring whereby logic is subsumed within the final argument: sorry, that’s just how my brain works.
now trying to work out who this is
Where is the rest of it? This fits neatly on one page.
And lol what a story.
But this sounds like somebody who learned to argue by watching Molyneux (not the game dev, but the white nationalist/sexist). He tells his audience to say ‘not an argument’ because it isn’t your job to create sound arguments in reaction to somebody trying to discuss things with you. This can (and has) been abused in the same way you mentioned above. And eventually you will notice this ‘type’ of person, there is a type of people (or sometimes a certain group of subjects with certain people) where you simply can’t reach them at all, and they either shut down by repeating the same shit over and over, or go into gish gallops (being drunk also doesn’t help).
(It also goes to show that you don’t need normal conversation abilities, nor coherent logic to be either succesfull, or a Rationalist).
E: Rationalwiki has an article about this style. To quote it ‘Stefan Molyneux, the creator of the phrase, wrote a book on logic that confuses logical validity with logical soundness (and contains numerous fallacies throughout)’.
You probably forgot the semicolon, it happens to everyone.
You’re actually very lucky he didnt start saying “fnord” out loud.
I refuse to believe this is real, and yes, I get the irony.
What I wouldn’t give to be unable to compute (I touch computers for a living)
Like Soyweiser said, this is endemic to a certain style of internet debater, and is amplified when one person believes that they’re inherently smart and rational, like a computer, and that the people who disagree with them are not only wrong, but dumb, too.
I mean, they needed to reinvent the idea of good faith and taking the most charitable view of a question or argument as “steelmanning”, so it’s clearly something they struggle with it as a group when it comes to facing those with opposing views.
This reminds me of those Star Trek episodes where Kirk would break computers by talking to them for about five minutes.
This gives me copypasta vibes but I believe it. The thing where rationalists talk like Star Trek characters as a display of their rationality is something that wouldn’t be possible if the subculture was born anywhere but in America. I’m not in the Anglosphere so I never had the chance to get personally involved like that.
Somewhat related: back when I was seriously considering the 80,000 Hours thing I checked if there were any native Effective Altruists in my country and found a single guy trying to start a Facebook group. IIRC a tech worker in the capital, as you’d expect. This is in spite of Peter Singer having given lectures in fairly prestigious universities in recent years, so I guess either the cultural gap is too large for it to take or we’re not yet enlightened enough to receive the gospel.
Literally thinking of yourself as the computer
Tangent:
I’ve told this story a million times now, but since you’re new I’ll tell it again
A few years ago, when I was a graduate student in philosophy of science, I met and got drunk with the wonderful Adrian Currie (his book Rock, Bone, and Ruin is one of my favourite history and philosophy of science books, and he plays a mean banjo). At the time he was working as a post-doc at Cambridge, at what he described as the rival to Bostrom’s institute over at Oxford. You know, existential risks stuff.
When I raised an eyebrow at how this otherwise super grounded guy could work on that kind of nonsense, he replied - in his mellifluously New Zealand accent - words to the effect that:
“Oh no, we’re a bit more sane”
I thought that was funny
While I studied philosophy in San Francisco, I graduated just before LessWrong launched and ‘rationalist community’ was a thing. I have stories of comp sci dudes with bad philosophical takes, though, but internet ‘rationality’ was always a thing I encountered via fellow ‘very online’ folks, never in person.
Oh the old paperclips thing that’s fun. Point out that it is a pretty good description of the dangers of unregulated capitalism and watch them squirm.
did you ask “are you a human” and get him to pick all the pictures of boats
What criticisms of it were you making?
https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1372403551285080066