What are the best blogs that is "opposed" to LW?

u/drcopus 27 points at 1629302283.000000

I’m a grad student in AI so I’ll stick with where I have the most expertise.

If you want to read a real expert’s views on AI and the possible future dangers I recommend the book “Human Compatible” by Stuart Russell. Russell is a professor at UC Berkeley and is one of the world’s top AI researchers. He wrote the internationally standard textbook on the subject.

His PhD student Rohin Shah runs a weekly newsletter called the Alignment Newsletter which is worth checking out. Finally, the Alignment Forum is a place that was specifically created to have a profession focus on AI as opposed to the mess of LW.

Now you will still find LW-adjacent ideas in these places. The thing is that they are not always wrong, but they tend to package real problems in AI with whacky ideas about “human nature” and bunk socioeconomic theory (I’m looking at you Rand).

I would also recommend reading about the more immediate issues in AI safety that are almost always unaddressed or brushed off by LW “longtermists”. For instance, fairness, accountability and transparency research. Brian Christian’s book “The Alignment Problem” does a great job at bridging the gap between the different scopes of AI safety problems. Also I have heard that Kate Crawford’s, “Atlas of AI”, Cathy O’Neil’s “Weapons of Math Destruction”, and Hannah Fry’s “Hello World” are great books, but I haven’t got around to reading them yet! Finally, Jordan Harrod is a great YouTuber who covers AI in short well-mad videos, and she often covers fairness and privacy issues.

Edit: also, this isn’t AI focused or a blog, instead it’s a podcast; listen to Philosophise This! It’s a show that covers a wide range of philosophers and really helped me personally to discover new perspectives.

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u/zero-fifteen 6 points at 1629578860.000000

Weapons of Math Destruction is great.

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u/thicknavyrain 22 points at 1629274804.000000

Some people take issue with his presentation but Nathan J. Robinson’s posts over at Current Affairs probably fit the bill for what you’re after (and has criticised bits of Rationalist/EA culture).

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u/Epistaxis 25 points at 1629302171.000000

[Robinson and Current Affairs are in disarray today](https://twitter.com/lyta_gold/status/1428011761635143681)

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u/thicknavyrain 12 points at 1629305926.000000

Wow, that's pretty bad. Well, I'm not prepared to bat for Robinson in the broader sense or defend his general integrity, only highlight the few articles of his which fit the bill of OP's description.

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u/eyemode 9 points at 1629307885.000000

[would you trust a 33yr old who dresses like this](https://img.thedailybeast.com/image/upload/c_crop,d_placeholder_euli9k,h_1217,w_2163,x_60,y_150/dpr_1.5/c_limit,w_1044/fl_lossy,q_auto/v1584854288/nathan-robinson_obnov7)

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u/jon_hendry 6 points at 1629586255.000000

Only if he has a Tardis.

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u/Citrakayah 7 points at 1629647694.000000

Honestly, probably, yeah.

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u/Arilou_skiff 2 points at 1629562164.000000

No.

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u/typell 11 points at 1629325688.000000

what the actual fuck, this is so disappointing

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u/Soyweiser 13 points at 1629289646.000000

Im not sure which article it was, but Current Affairs had a good article on the idea of how rightwing libertarianism defines freedom/liberty wrong. Which is a good thing to keep in mind when jumping into the right libertarian LW/ silicon valley headspace. Might have been [this one](https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/04/what-is-freedom) (not read this article so not sure). E: This however, is a bit of a disappointment from Nathan: https://twitter.com/lyta_gold/status/1428011761635143681 (But at least now we know why he dresses like a south american plantation owner).

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u/Cugel_the_Unclever 11 points at 1629300750.000000

I always recommend “The Enigma of Reason” by Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier.

Short summary: reasoning is a tool humans use to justify pre-existing beliefs to themselves and (more importantly) to others. Reason is not, in itself, useful for determining what is true or not; outside of a surprisingly narrow set of situations.

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u/Upper_Calligrapher25 3 points at 1629494081.000000

If I remember correctly they considered reason to work well in the context of argumentation because people are generally better at judging the quality of other people's reason than they are at coming up with good reasons of their own.

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u/yousefamr2001 2 points at 1629361749.000000

Thanks, That's exactly what i was looking for!

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u/MarxBroshevik 29 points at 1629273120.000000

A good thing to do might be to read a real book. Here’s a few off the top of my head:

Karl Marx - Capital Vol. 1

Eric Hobsbawm - The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848

Aime Cesaire - Discourse On Colonialism

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u/blakestaceyprime 14 points at 1629306187.000000

[Eugenia Cheng](http://eugeniacheng.com/) is a mathematician who writes books that all turn out good. In addition to being a better introduction to how mathematicians think about math than LessWrongosphere blogs are, they do intersect with the idea of "rationality", and more importantly, with what the limitations of "logic as a way of life" are. It's been a while since I did a careful reading of Richard Jeffrey's *[Subjective Probability: The Real Thing](https://www.princeton.edu/~bayesway/Book*.pdf),* and it might require a certain comfort level with algebra, but it does demonstrate the shallowness of LW'ers [literary Bayesianism](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/m8c0yp/julia_galef_spends_819_explaining_what_thinking_is/).

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u/Mr_Manager- 13 points at 1629294578.000000

I'd like to second the Hobsbawm recommendation. He can be quite engaging too, imo.

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u/Jonzard 3 points at 1629342785.000000

Is the entire series implied reading here? Curious if the entire modern history collection is worthwhile. Not that I'm going to read them simultaneously😁

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u/dmlachap 3 points at 1629345684.000000

I enjoyed reading *The Age of Extremes*, in part because it deals with more recent - more "relevant" - history. Some parts of it are a bit dated or odd: for example, he describes [Kondratiev Waves](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave) as having some preditive power (they don't). I think its strength lies in its high-level view of 20th century movements and events as fundamentally interconnected across the globe, in comparison to the way history is often taught and understood as happening to individual countries.

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u/WikiSummarizerBot 1 points at 1629345705.000000

**[Kondratiev wave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave)** >In economics, Kondratiev waves (also called supercycles, great surges, long waves, K-waves or the long economic cycle) are hypothesized cycle-like phenomena in the modern world economy. The phenomenon is closely connected with the technology life cycle. It is stated that the period of a wave ranges from forty to sixty years, the cycles consist of alternating intervals of high sectoral growth and intervals of relatively slow growth. Long wave theory is not accepted by most academic economists. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)

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u/typell 16 points at 1629265770.000000

https://acoup.blog/ is a pretty good one by a historian

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u/Soyweiser 3 points at 1629408193.000000

A more tech related blog which might be interesting is Cory Doctorow blog (he also posts the same things on twitter I think, his blog can be a bit hard to read).

He from time to time goes into long form stuff like this article about the problems with machine learning. which should be interesting to read if you know the LW obsession with it. (And to notice the similar pattern which emerges here (not listening to experts, loving data, no matter how bad the data is, overconfidence in tech etc etc)).

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u/mtraven 3 points at 1629521653.000000

Not a blog, and not exactly opposed to LW, but I wrote some critical reviews of the recent LW book A Map That Reflects the Territory.

http://www.hyperphor.com/ammdi/pages/Review-__A-Map-That-Reflects-the-Territory__.html

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u/mokuba_b1tch 3 points at 1629746343.000000

Some of the reviews were quite good. One, on Holocaust rescuers, was not so good. Here are two bits that stuck out: >The world certainly could use more people like that, and it's hard to find fault with an effort to reverse-engineer heroism. And yet,something about it seems off to me. Is it attempting to measure something that shouldn't be measured? Or missing the point somehow?It's not even close to obscene, but maybe it's a bit crass? I can't really make a rational case for this, but that's the point, some things are simply beyond the grasp of rationality, and should be treated as such. This is poor thinking. An attitude like "some things are simply beyond the grasp of rationality" must be earned, not just asserted, in any given case. Moreover you seem to accept the rationalist notion of rationality at face value. On their view, values are taken as given and beyond rational critique, and rationality only concerns itself with the means to achieve these values. (This is not the only view they have on the matter but I think their thoughts on this front are confused.) As you correctly note elsewhere, the orthogonality thesis is incorrect. Don't, then, allow yourself to become a mysterian about morality. >We are basically robots (for better or worse), subject to the causality of physics and our programming. Freedom is illusory; people respond to their environment according to their natures, and so are not ultimately responsible for their actions... This stance, *while not wrong*... \[emphasis mine\]. This stance is silly. It relies on a notion of freedom as sui generis agent causation, which can of course be easily dismissed. But nobody who believes in free will (other than Chisholm) believes in that. The statement "People respond to their environment according to their natures" amounts to "We are not gods capable of unbounded spontaneity, but are rather thrown into an already-existing world." Again, *nobody denies this*. You have set up a contrast between the "sensation" of freedom and the truth of determinacy. This contrast is delusive. You should ask yourself, "How would it feel if it felt like we *didn't* have free will?". Additionally, I found some of the formatting choices odd and unpleasant. I would rather not see I hyperlink, than see a crossed-out hyperlink leading to a blank page. You occasionally insert underscores before or after words. I have no idea what this signifies. Your footnotes overlap your map. But overall, well done.

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u/mtraven 1 points at 1629759489.000000

Thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate it! The underscores are due to a bug that I will try to fix. The crossed-out hyperlinks mean "a link to a page that isn't written yet", but I can see that they might look unpleasant, I may get rid of those. Re the more content-based comments about free will and morality, I'm not sure exactly what you are objecting to. I'm not all that familiar with the philosophical literature on the subject (never heard of Chisholm ie) so might be rehashing old ground. As for the Holocaust being "beyond the grasp of rationality", this is a fairly common idea that I'm alluding to (not advocating it), with the mention of Claude Lanzmann at the start of the essay being an example. Just as some religions prohibit depictions of God, some people consider the Holocaust an event of such inverse sacrality that it shouldn't be represented or reasoned about.

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u/kulturkampf_account 1 points at 1630116486.000000

the rhizzone

https://rhizzone.net/articles/article-review-book-review-manufacturing-consent/

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u/phollda 1 points at 1638541433.000000

The Implausibility of Intelligence Explosion /u/yousefamr2001

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