The fact that a big chunk the rationalist community not only
considers being overly willing to accept loaded hypothetical scenarios
and premises “rational”, but also tries to present it as some sort of
innate mental ability, is one of the main reasons why I find it hard to
take the community seriously.
Sorry if it’s off topic, but it nicely captures in many words what
I’ve intuitively understood as “it’s okay to sometimes tell people to
get stuffed with their hypotheticals”.
decoupling as understood by Chivers and the blog Everything Studies
(which popularised the concept in the aftermath of a debate about the
relationship between race and IQ between Sam Harris and Ezra Klein)
A non-rationalist example of this sort of thing are revenge fantasies
where someone tries to construct a scenario where it’d be acceptable for
them to shoot a person. It’s common to take the position that
wanting to be in the scenario where killing someone in
self-defense in the moral option is a problem regardless of how
successful you are at constructing that scenario.
In the rationalist case, the fact that they’re looking for reasons to
justify being racist is itself a problem independent of the quality of
those justifications.
Breaking: Rationalist ias able to infer that people act based on
context, and on how context determines the most likely meaning (among
the many possible ones) of utterances.
How could the world do without this kind of insights?
Except that the dude in the blog doesn't seem like a normal rationalist?
Sure, he seems to be sorta involved in a community, but a quick look at [his gallery](https://atis.substack.com/archive?sort=new)shows that five out of his six most recent posts are specifically calling out dubious/reactionary arguments that are common in rationalist spaces. Hell, his post [on the gender wage gap](https://atis.substack.com/p/notes-on-the-gender-wage-gap) is one of the few I've seen that actually explains why the "just control for occupation/life choices" argument is missing the point.
That makes them seem much more like a normal rationalist to me - rationalists are about the only group I see who regularly correctly make that point when discussing the gwg.
True. The 'about' page is strange, he claims not to be a communist, and then just lists a bunch of reasons why Marx was right. Wonder if it's an attempt to convert Marx into a harmless icon.
That’s a very expansive idea of what counts as a reason Marx was right you have! Besides which, it seems much more likely that he just liked the phrase
Marx was right in a very expansive way, so it's not surprising that people can find many different reasons as to why he was right. I'm trying to give the blog writer more credit than just a mindless repetition of a phrase he liked the sound of. But hey, maybe to the blogger it's just a cool combination of phonemes.
I suppose this just highlights the dramatically different impression communities can give people - underscored by the way you see five posts like that in the last six, whereas I see three that are advancing positions I think of as standard among rationalists and two that seem mostly unrelated
I mean, I am sure not all Rationalists are wannabe Siskind, so happy he is more reasonable. Still, it's a bit funny (not wrong, just funny) that he needs to mint new words, (as an extension of the already overfitted newspeak of Rationalists), and reference podcast culture and cognitive tests, and decide that normal thought processes that most of us do subconsciously most of the time are "rituals", and write for quite a while, just to argue that ...
>If you agree with me that \[insert ethnic group here\] are geneticallyinferior and unable to learn how to drive safely, would you accept myproposal that they ought to be banned from driving taxis?’, and posedthis question completely seriously, I think most people (if they werewilling to engage with the taxi-driver at all) would reject theD-Decouple rather than accepting just because the ritual was performed.
MInd you, I totally agree with him. I just wish that he did not had to reinvent from first principles the obvious, which is the best case scenario with Rationalists.
Also, about the gwg, good for him! But really are our expectations are so low that are we now praising knowing econometrics 101 (or common sense)? That's a bit like when I start thinking that maybe twitter conservative XY is almost a serious thinker because he does not make attack helicopter jokes or does not always and unquestionably support Trump. Then I realize that yes, he's better than the average, but such a fact tells more about the average than about this particular guy,
Which is testimony of the fact that most people are perfectly able of "decoupling", perfectly willing to do so when the context shows that it could lead to a fruitful exchange of ideas, they just don't want to give obviously bad faith actors the benefit of implicitly accepting their motivated hypotheticals as worth considering.
Which is exactly what the author of the post seems to grasp, a lot of neologisms and irrelevant examples down the line! *That* was the point of my comment.
Per fortuna non esiste. Credo che abbia a che fare col fatto che qui la gente impara filosofia (intesa più come storia della filosofia che come glorified debate club) e critica letteraria al liceo, quindi è molto meno vulnerabile ai blogger che ripropongono idee ben oltre la loro data di scadenza con una nuova patina (come appunto fanno i razionalisti).
Poi abbiamo avuto cose simili eh. Ad esempio un tal Odifreddi ha essenzialmente portato in Italia il New Atheism quando questo impazzava nel mondo anglosassone. Il tutto era abbastanza cringe a essere sincero, ma almeno essendo Odifreddi un veterocomunista impenitente, non ci sono stati momenti in cui discutevano di frenologia o liberismo deteriore come è successo con Dawkins and Harris.
Più di recente c'è stato un movimento (in senso molto lasco, più un network di autori) che si propone come *scientista (*Simonetti, Burioni, Bressanini giusto per fare qualche nome). Per quanto mi dia parecchio fastidio il loro tono di supponenza e l'outrage porn che postano continuamente ("guardate questi idioti che non vogliono mangiare cibi GMO venir DISTRUTTI dai FATTI E LOGICA di un VERO ESPERTO!!111!"), non sono epistemicamente offensivi quanto i razionalisti. Sono più una via di mezzo tra Steven Pinker e i bluecheck di twitter che continuano a ripetere "trust the science" e a denigrare i deplorables direi.
Also abbiamo avuto un partito chiamato letteralmente "W la fisica" che era il non plus ultra del cringe di cui sopra e il cui intero programma politico era "applicare il metodo scientifico alle istituzioni" (qualunque cosa volesse dire), ma ha preso tipo 100 voti e ora viene nominato unicamente come burla.
>Ah.. mi sono chiesto perché il Rationalism (il movimento intellettuale, non solo Yudkowsky et cetera) è cosi Anglo
Per quanto adori gli americani (ho vissuto lì per un periodo, gli America-haters non li capirò mai), purtroppo il loro sistema scolastico li rende facili vittime dei venditori di fuffa. Non per dire che non esista opinionismo basato sulle deepities in Europa continentale (gli antenati intellettuali del movimento incel e dei nazbol erano entrambi francesi per dire), però ci devi mettere parecchio più impegno perché il pubblico di riferimento è oggettivamente più sofisticato.
Sulle buzzwords di Silicon Valley è una cosa diversa, il "sigma male grindset" purtroppo ha preso molto tra i giovani italiani ambiziosi, soprattutto quelli che si sentono repressi da una società troppo statica e dalla totale assenza di meritocrazia. Diciamo che è una combo di risposta pessima a doléances legittime e di mascolinità tossica mediterranea che porta ad idolatrare Elon Musk e simili. Still, è abbastanza l'opposto del Rationalism, nel senso che questo tipo di italiano non venera il nerd, ma al contrario il maschio alpha di successo. Non è un LARPing di Sheldon Cooper, è un LARPing di Don Draper e Harvey Specter.
In realtà sono arrivato a SA dai profili altright (che leggo in base alla massima "conosci il tuo nemico", e perché soffro di una grave forma di coprofagia intellettuale), dove viene linkato spesso, in genere con apprezzamento o al massimo critiche educate. Per la stessa forma di coprofagia intellettuale mi sono divertito a trollare un po' in themotte e SSC, e da lì l'algoritmo mi ha portato qui.
Of course there’s a difference between people who refuse to follow
certain lines of thinking for rhetorical reasons - say, because they
think an audience will get confused or mistake them for supporting the
hypothetical - and people who really act as if they were incapable of
doing so. “Yes, but I don’t accept your premise”, would have been the
answer I expected from most people to the last question. I don’t really
see how there’s another reasonable response.
But there are certain scenarios where people genuinely refuse even
that, and not for rhetorical reasons. For example, think
everyone has had a moment where e.g. it’s 5 hours into a shift and you
think “did I leave the stove on?” and then just shove it out of your
mind. Or maybe you see a lump on your leg and you briefly think “is that
cancer?” before opting to ignore it because the follow-up thoughts are
very sad. Maybe you’ve even had a time in your childhood where you began
to suspect Santa wasn’t real, and you had been so inculcated with movies
about the power of belief that you refused for a while to consider the
implications of his nonexistence. The tendency to do D-decoupling as you
define it of course isn’t “genetic” like height or some prodigies’ chess
ability is genetic; it’s just a (perhaps strongly instilled) decision
not to think about what-ifs.
When people have a bad reaction to these hypotheticals it’s usually
because, on some level, they’re either
Intellectually scared/disgusted by the train of thought, and
thinking about it makes them uncomfortable, or
They don’t want to give others the impression that they are
comfortable thinking about such hypotheticals and thus might be
weirdos
Most of the time that’s not necessarily antisocial or going to get
people into trouble. The problem comes when people are trying to have a
discussion on political or social issues, where you often have to
contemplate weird or morally outrageous hypotheticals in order to piece
together consistent policy. If you refuse to consider scenarios where
you have to make hard tradeoffs between sacred values, or you can’t
separate mechanical discussions (is) from value or tribe affiliation
(ought), then having those discussions and building that accurate
worldview becomes much harder. If people can’t have discussions without
worrying about #2, they tend not to have them at all.
> For example, think everyone has had a moment where e.g. it's 5 hours into a shift and you think "did I leave the stove on?" and then just shove it out of your mind. Or maybe you see a lump on your leg and you briefly think "is that cancer?" before opting to ignore it because the follow-up thoughts are very sad.
I don't see how these are related to the idea of decoupling, besides in the very general sense that in both cases you're avoiding thinking about something.
Or, and here me out here, you aren’t a college sophomore (or acting as one), and you have actually “been around the block”, so to speak.
The “what if this notion is true” argument is usually *a scam*! It’s the traveling con man's way of selling you a good that you would never have considered otherwise. It’s rhetorical flim-flam.
From a Bayesian perspective, the empirically rooted prior is that arguments of this sort are not presented in good faith.
> it's just a (perhaps strongly instilled) decision not to think about what-ifs.
aka not being so open-minded that your brain falls out
> "genetic" like height or Magnus Carlsen [...]
Yikes...
tl;dr of your comment:
normies can't shake off their programming; only true independent Rational minds like mine can dispassionately contemplate morally repugnant issues.
I'm confused, why are several comments in this chain just waving towards Magnus Carlsen as some type of example? He's good at chess, but just uttering his name means next to nothing to me.
Mister Rogers, Terry Gilliam, Scrooge McDuck
I thought everyone was more or less agreed that along with everything else (physiological, social, whatever) genetic features of an individual could conceivably play some role in achievement when it comes to cognitive skills like playing chess, the problem is that this role is vastly overstated and conceptually misunderstood at a very basic level by eugenicists, fellow travellers of such, and other unsavoury bastards
At its most fruitful, accurate, and boring level this insight suggests that it’s not beyond the bounds of reason to wonder whether Carlsen got lucky with a packet of factors - genes included somehow, somewhere - that led to his playing chess at such a high level
At its most pointless, stupid, and (to contrarians and racists alike) flashiest, I guess this insight means Carlsen has a pure Aryan “chess gene” which makes him just better than the rest of us: I charitably take the original comment as erring on the side of the former rather than the latter
It just seems like a pointless hypothetical to entertain that only cedes ground to eugenicists.
"When you're really really good at something, to an arbitrary standard, then we can entertain genes being the cause. Then it's cool and innocent."
Edit: "hypothetically , let's say you are very good at Mario Party, super duper good, so good, that people are amazed, I think we all agree, all reasonable people, that it's because your parents had the right genes, which blessed you with the perfect Mario Party brain, and while we can't measure the extent to which this plays a part, or how, I think we can all just agree it's a thing, right? Right?"
I'm not trying to be uncharitable, I just think it's weird for everyone to just go "yeah, we accept the premise in this case, because he's real good at the board game."
Look, I get that there’s a rhetorical bait and switch often in play where the anodyne is elided with the flashy (and racist), but this shouldn’t mean that we still think we see it when it isn’t there, and especially not when somebody *goes out of their way* to repudiate that move
I'm saying it's odd for people to so readily accept and repeat this weird example of "genetic advantage" for no other reason than "he's real good at this game."
It'd be no different than me pointing to Mister Rogers and saying "he's genetically *nicer*, obviously!" Or saying I'm genetically fashionable. It's not that it's not *possible*, it's just a pointless hypothetical.
Magnus Carlsen emerged as a chess prodigy from the age of five having shown no previous interest in or capacity for chess, with no more educational background in the game than that his dad was an amateur player. This asks - again, only if you’re interested - for an explanation as to how at such an early stage of brain development he was able to follow the logico-deductive rules and strategies of the game (and in particular the kind of non-rote “creative” game favoured by the likes of other prodigies such as Fischer which abjure the book-learnin’ alternatives), and one such explanation may be found in the interaction of his genetic makeup with his overall physical and mental makeup and with his upbringing. This isn’t controversial stuff, it’s boilerplate and well within the bounds of respectable intellectual endeavour.
And moreover *fucking hell*, all of this over a throwaway fucking comment in a space where the suspicious eugenics stuff is already completely off the fucking table.
You seem so upset at the idea that I'd find it weird to say "he's real good at this game, so it's probably genetic."
It seems weird to me to be so bothered by this topic, especially when your explanation is literally just "he's really good at the game, so it could be genetic."
If I said it was his immortal soul or his diet, I'd expect people to also question it, but saying his genes do it is just boilerplate?
I have no clue why he's good at chess, I have no clue why *I'm* good at chess, but it just seems weirdly arbitrary to point to his level of skill as opposed to Kasparov or Fischer, and say "this one could be the genetic one, and we all know it."
Edit: it just seems like you're saying "it's obviously possible it's genetic, but we're not eugenicists, so accept the premise or you're stupid!" I don't really see why I have to accept that chess skill is genetic, that just seems weird.
Nobody said that.
I never said his talent “could be genetic” and went to enormous pains to be significantly more nuanced on the role of gene interactions and you’re ignoring that, so that’s one reason I’m so bothered: you’re being an asshole
> If I said it was his immortal soul or his diet, I'd expect people to also question it, but saying his genes do it is just boilerplate?
Fuck off, you gigantic asshole, because you and I both know as well as each other that I never suggested that in tha5 or any remotely similar way, stop spoiling for a fight
Jesus, do you have stock options in Carlsen's sperm or something?
You're getting unreasonably upset that I found it weird that people would all just nod along with a genetic argument for his boardgame skill.
It's not that I'm unwilling to accept it as a hypothetical for some moral reason, or because I don't like "where that argument leads."
It could be genetic, but I don't really understand why this example holds more water than any other genetic argument for a talent. It just seems like people are saying "usually, we wouldn't bother discussing genetic components because they're ill-defined and nebulous, but everyone has agreed unanimously, when you're as good as Magnus Carlsen, then it's a reasonable discussion."
I don't really understand why you're so angry, either. Do you have a genetic predisposition?
Edit: rereading the conversation, I'm still lost. It just feels like you're angry I don't automatically accept the hypothetical, which is funny, given the origin of the discussion
You explicitly said that accepting the hypothetical even as a defeatable premise was weird to you, so no, this is just a pointless argument I don’t give a shit about engaging beyond that you’re infuriating because you keep reducing everything back down to misunderstandings that I’ve already spent wasted effort accounting for and correcting
Magnus Carlsen is just an example of somebody with a particular set of circumstances (pick a different name if you like!) that make him an interesting candidate for speculating about the influence of genes for reasons given you’re just outright ignoring, that’s it
Your whole approach if I could be bothered to be charitable for a second, which I shouldn’t because you won’t read it anyway, is - no I was right the first time
Honestly, chill the fuck out.
You're getting so twisted up over a topic you profess is not a big deal, and it just seems absurd to me.
My point was "wow, it seems weird everyone just accepts Carlsen as an example of there being a possible genetic link to skill, seems arbitrary."
And, I'm not trying to reduce your argument or anything, this is how I'm interpreting what you're saying, you seem to be rebutting with "Carlsen is so good at the game, without explanation, it seems obvious that it's reasonable to entertain his skill is genetic!"
To which I reply "sure, you can think that, but I don't see a reason to, any more than I would accept his skill has any other origin, it's not that it's not possible, it just doesn't seem worth thinking about."
Edit: “fuck you” downvotes are impolite too, and kinda pathetic
I already said why I’m getting twisted: I started out being very chill, you came back with a series of increasingly obtuse replies that heavily suggested you weren’t paying attention, and as it seems to me have gone on to deliberately just ignore anything I’ve actually said however clearly
If you don’t think it’s worth thinking about you can get out of the room where other people are having a conversation you don’t find interesting, but it’s impolite to pretend that you haven’t also said that those people are making room for eugenicists especially when they’ve taken pains to avoid doing so - not to mention dishonest
Some people are interested in what makes Carlsen so special and unexpected - which he is - what of value then are you contributing?
Edit: pissing and shitting yourself
Your own farts really smell that good?
I'm interested in what makes Carlsen so special and unexpected, but the hypothetical regarding his genetics seems to hold as much water as his diet, or to be less charitable, divinity.
I was just pointing out that I thought it was weird and arbitrary for a lot of people to just accept Carlsen as an example worth pondering.
I didn't realize I had to submit my formal essay on why I think Carlsen is the specialest boy, or how I can somehow disprove his genetics playing a part in him being the specialest boy.
I didn't mean to intrude on your sacred space reserved for people who are investigating his brain folds.
You don’t have to submit a formal essay, but you do have to at least read the reasons people give you, and admit it when you know you were doing a lot more than just asking whether or not there’s this or that reason
I honestly wasn't trying to piss you off, initially, I was just having fun talking about the topic.
Of course, now I'm being inflammatory, because you've gotten so upset and started name calling and acting like a fucking lunatic.
Your reasons seemed to be "he's good at chess to a degree I find unreasonable without genetic origins."
And you said, repeatedly, that you thought this was *so obvious, boilerplate, agreed upon.*
And I was pointing out that I had no idea it was just something everyone just accepted. And it still seems fucking weird to me.
And you seem to be casting the discussion as you in a room with a bunch of other dorks saying "we're investigating Carlsen's boardgame aptitude! It could be genetic! If you don't agree, you're useless to this committee!!"
And it feels laughable, in that light.
>Your reasons seemed to be "he's good at chess to a degree I find unreasonable without genetic origins."
They’re not my reasons, I personally don’t think genes play a very interesting role in Carlsen’s case, but thanks for asking. What’s boilerplate is that unexpected or unusual gene *interactions* with all of the other factors in play (hell, diet is certainly in there somewhere) are a perfectly reasonable thing to go looking for. And I’ve already said all this, which you keep boiling down even after you said you weren’t doing that.
I’m not acting like a psycho, I’m acting like a normal person who’s sick of trying to hold up a conversation with somebody who’s refusing to hold up their end.
You think we shouldn’t accept the possibility that something anodyne and not very interesting might be true, given the possibility that if might in a not very interesting way be true, in case it cedes ground to eugenics?
> Yikes...
Don't get me wrong, I don't think """intelligence""" is genetic, but you have to be reasonable and say that some chess prodigies are just gifted and that's that. Most people cannot beat grandmasters at age 12 no matter how much they practice. That or Magnus Carlsen got bit by some sort of radioactive spider 🕷️
> normies can't shake off their programming; only true independent Rational minds like mine can dispassionately contemplate morally repugnant issues.
Don't be disingenuous. You know that's not what I said. It's a pretty level explanation of why the concept exists. Take it or leave it.
I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that genetics could contribute to the exceptional abilities of some prodigies. I don't think there's any upbringing that would have turned me into Ramanujan.
At the same time, one thing that never seems to get mentioned in the nature-nurture discussions about geniuses is just straight up chance, independent of genes or what we think of as environment, at any level at which we can measure or link it. Maybe during the developmental process one baby in a billion grows finger whorls that happen to spell a Hamlet passage in Morse, and another's neurons connect in just such a way that it's primed to learn chess better than anyone else.
> If you refuse to consider scenarios where you have to make hard tradeoffs between sacred values, or you can't separate mechanical discussions (is) from value or tribe affiliation (ought), then having those discussions and building that accurate worldview becomes much harder
See, the problem here is that hypotheticals are, by definition, *not* truths. They're proposals that amount to "*what if* this is true?" In order for something to even be a hypothetical, it has to *not* yet be established as a fact. This means a hypothetical is not actually an "is" that can even be separated from an "ought" in the first place, it's a conditional statement predicated on a truth that has yet to be sufficiently established.
That's not to say that hypotheticals don't have a place in discourse, it's just that they have a different function from what you're describing here. They're best used to explore the logical implications of someone's pre-existing values based on established facts. What they're *not* best used for is to pretend like something is a fact when its actual status as a fact is in dispute (as is the case with the race-IQ connection mentioned in the article)
The fact that a big chunk the rationalist community not only considers being overly willing to accept loaded hypothetical scenarios and premises “rational”, but also tries to present it as some sort of innate mental ability, is one of the main reasons why I find it hard to take the community seriously.
Sorry if it’s off topic, but it nicely captures in many words what I’ve intuitively understood as “it’s okay to sometimes tell people to get stuffed with their hypotheticals”.
So that’s where it comes from, huh.
How in the world did I misread that as “conscious uncoupling” and make the logical leap to Chris Martin/Goop Paltrow
I need more sleep
A non-rationalist example of this sort of thing are revenge fantasies where someone tries to construct a scenario where it’d be acceptable for them to shoot a person. It’s common to take the position that wanting to be in the scenario where killing someone in self-defense in the moral option is a problem regardless of how successful you are at constructing that scenario.
In the rationalist case, the fact that they’re looking for reasons to justify being racist is itself a problem independent of the quality of those justifications.
Breaking: Rationalist ias able to infer that people act based on context, and on how context determines the most likely meaning (among the many possible ones) of utterances.
How could the world do without this kind of insights?
But what if we kill all the poor?
https://youtu.be/owI7DOeO_yg
Edit: Ah, I see that was already posted as a comment on the video. Truly there is nothing new under the sun.
Of course there’s a difference between people who refuse to follow certain lines of thinking for rhetorical reasons - say, because they think an audience will get confused or mistake them for supporting the hypothetical - and people who really act as if they were incapable of doing so. “Yes, but I don’t accept your premise”, would have been the answer I expected from most people to the last question. I don’t really see how there’s another reasonable response.
But there are certain scenarios where people genuinely refuse even that, and not for rhetorical reasons. For example, think everyone has had a moment where e.g. it’s 5 hours into a shift and you think “did I leave the stove on?” and then just shove it out of your mind. Or maybe you see a lump on your leg and you briefly think “is that cancer?” before opting to ignore it because the follow-up thoughts are very sad. Maybe you’ve even had a time in your childhood where you began to suspect Santa wasn’t real, and you had been so inculcated with movies about the power of belief that you refused for a while to consider the implications of his nonexistence. The tendency to do D-decoupling as you define it of course isn’t “genetic” like height or some prodigies’ chess ability is genetic; it’s just a (perhaps strongly instilled) decision not to think about what-ifs.
When people have a bad reaction to these hypotheticals it’s usually because, on some level, they’re either
Most of the time that’s not necessarily antisocial or going to get people into trouble. The problem comes when people are trying to have a discussion on political or social issues, where you often have to contemplate weird or morally outrageous hypotheticals in order to piece together consistent policy. If you refuse to consider scenarios where you have to make hard tradeoffs between sacred values, or you can’t separate mechanical discussions (is) from value or tribe affiliation (ought), then having those discussions and building that accurate worldview becomes much harder. If people can’t have discussions without worrying about #2, they tend not to have them at all.