One of the most common arguments against rationality is “something something white males”. I have never been able to entirely make sense of it, but I imagine if you gave the people who say it 50 extra IQ points, they might rephrase it to something like “because white males have a lot of power, it’s easy for them to put their finger on the scales when people are trying to do complicated explicit computations; we would probably do a better job building a just world if policy-makers retreated to a heuristic of ‘choose whichever policy favors black women the most.’”

Groan.

Latter-Day Calvinism. If “rationalists” knew any history or sociology they might be dangerous

“Diogenes, you wouldn’t have to live on lentils if you learned to flatter Thiel.”

One of the most common arguments against rationality is “something something white males”. I have never been able to entirely make sense of it, but I imagine if you gave the people who say it 50 extra IQ points,

“if you can’t make sense of something, it must be the other person who needs the IQ points.” Incredible. A man with a neutron star for a brain

Is Scott now just stealing sneerclub content? Didn’t we talk about this tweet before. (E: talking about the actual article here btw)

Of course our content was wittier. (and we can grok the difference between rationality and LW Rationality).

E: his reference to posting predictions is funny, according to some people of r/ssc who did the math, he is getting worse over time, and he is nearing the 50% mark on his predictions.

When LW just became a thing, some commenters criticized the Rationalist project as contradictory/hypocritical: “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich”. If, by definition, instrumental rationality is about achieving goals in most efficient way possible, why can’t you efficiently and rationally make tons of money, when money is a problem? See, for example, Rationality is Systematized Winning.

What Scott is doing is lampshading this criticism, noticing the skulls, if you will. This of course isn’t a rebuttal to criticism, so they way Yudkowsky weasels out of it is usually through “every second I spend getting a Ph.D., making tons of money to not rely on donations, fixing PR problems is a second I could be spending on solving the friendly AI problem”. Of course how watching anime all day long, ruining orgasms, and writing horny fiction helps with friendly AI is a mystery.

I struggle to understand how they don’t realise that for the vast, vast majority of the world that means the “rational” answer is “Murder all the rich people and redistribute their stuff.”

Man, this guy would fuckin’ hate Aristotle.

subservience to the status quo. the path of least resistance. this is what rationality means to these people.

theyve pioneered an entire intellectual philosophy predicated upon taking dominant power structures at face value.

Oh shit we doing Prosperity Gospel now boys, buckle in.

I’ll just say I agree with about a third of your point but somehow you’ve managed to take the one sensible kernel of an idea in an otherwise intensely sneerable post and fuck up the landing

Yeah, they worship cash in the worst possible way but not only is that an absurdly literal reading of your specific quote, he’s not doing the Greed Is Good thing here more generally at all

There are so many laughable bits of that review: why pick this one?

This last decade has been good for intuition, because we’ve finally been able to teach it to computers. There are now AIs that can tell dogs from cats, previously an impossible task for a machine. There are style transfer AIs that can make a painting feel more like a Van Gogh, or “more cheerful”, or various other intuitive things. Even text generation programs like the GPTs are conquering intuition - Strunk & White aside, there’s no ruleset for how to write, just better or worse judgment on what word should come next. Since these AIs are just giant matrix multiplication machines, “intuition” now has a firm grounding in math - just much bigger, more complicated math than the usual kind that we call “logical”.

Ex-cuuuuse me? Lmao current AIs are about as good at being intuitive as rationalists are at reading comprehension.

Lame midwit neckbeards fiddling with elementary logic and economics, these guys suck so much

number go up

If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use is the rule? - Anton Chigurh, Rationalist

It’s the unit of caring!

Doesn’t he argue that this isn’t what rationality is actually about in like the very next paragraph? Seems sarcastic

“This has the happy side effect that it’s impossible to be against rationality. But it also has the more concerning implication that it’s vacuous to be in favor of it. If rationalists were people who really liked explicit chains of computation, we could print out cool “TEAM EXPLICIT CHAIN OF COMPUTATION” t-shirts and play nasty pranks on the people who like heuristics and intuition. But if it’s just about preferring good things to bad things, it doesn’t really seem like a method, or a community, or an ideology, or even necessarily worth writing books about.”