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The Future Perfect 50: Julia Galef, co-founder, Center for Applied Rationalist (https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/y8w601/the_future_perfect_50_julia_galef_cofounder/)
posted on October 20, 2022 11:52 AM by u/ExampleOk7440
43

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23391917/future-perfect-50-julia-galef-cfar-rationalist

in which a reporter who lEaRneD TO ApplY BaYES’ THeorEM at least as far back as 2012 manages to get a mainstream publication to promote one of our usual suspects as if she’s just an interesting Serious Thinker

u/DELETED 45 points at 1666277500.000000

[deleted]

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u/JabroniusHunk 26 points at 1666278733.000000
I think so, too, although Vox's *Future Perfect* articles are explicitly vehicles for this stuff from what I can tell. They were big fans of that Democratic primary candidate entirely funded by Sam Bankman-Fried, whose platform was based on making Effective Altruism palatable to voters.
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u/ExampleOk7440 13 points at 1666280501.000000
it is not just you.
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u/Soyweiser 8 points at 1666539553.000000
It is 'interesting' to see how the Twitter user xriskology, who is successfully exposing a lot of the bad stuff from EA and longtermism is now being attacked and harassed. So in a way stuff seems to be ramping up.
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u/redmilkwood 2 points at 1667633874.000000
A dear friend recommended Ezra Klein’s column and podcast to me a couple of years ago: to my surprise, he has brought on a huge number of Rationalist-adjacent folks. Julia Galef hosted the podcast while he was on parental leave and asked Philip Tetlock fawning questions about superforecasting. It’s disconcerting.
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u/MadCervantes 25 points at 1666274491.000000

I know it has overlap with the effective altruism people but I actually like future perfect. Second season does a great breakdown on the problem with billionaire philanthropy.

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u/noactuallyitspoptart 20 points at 1666275344.000000
I mean you don’t need to go as far as links to EA, this article is about Julia Galef herself and *explicitly* draws attention to LessWrong
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u/MadCervantes 19 points at 1666279124.000000
True. I love snarking on less wrong rationalists but I actually have mixed feelings in some regards. Less wrong did help me rethink some key approaches to thinking. But that said the actual results of the community at large has mostly been silicon valley pseuds demonstrating their complete lack of education in the humanities.
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u/Taborask 35 points at 1666282715.000000
I think most of us ended up here because we stumbled on some rationalist-adjacent community and liked it at first. Maybe even got a lot out of it, before eventually realizing it was a big-brain circle jerk
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u/DELETED -5 points at 1666281327.000000
[deleted]
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u/MadCervantes 7 points at 1666282345.000000
Huh?
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 2 points at 1666282652.000000
You also seem to vaguely be under the impression SneerClub is about EAs with a side order of LessWrong? I could be misreading there
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u/MadCervantes 7 points at 1666282841.000000
Nah. I thought sneerclub was rationalists and ea and less wrong both fall under that umbrella.
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u/noactuallyitspoptart -5 points at 1666282594.000000
I don’t think that the actual results of “the community at large” are as mild as that, but you’re stating it as if it’s obvious
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u/MadCervantes 6 points at 1666282797.000000
I don't think I said it was mild? Maybe I made an understatement but I'm a little confused by the strong reaction I'm getting here from you. Feels like I've accidentally communicated something I did not intend.
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u/DELETED -2 points at 1666283068.000000
[deleted]
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u/MadCervantes 11 points at 1666284463.000000
I think you might have assumed more than necessary. I made no statements about your beliefs.
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u/ExampleOk7440 7 points at 1666280546.000000
some of its stuff is fine. that's why the rationalism laundering is so disturbing
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u/DELETED 10 points at 1666315973.000000

Can’t be a Thought Leader^^^^tm without being a Vox reader

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u/DELETED 13 points at 1666279892.000000

[deleted]

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u/DELETED 47 points at 1666284263.000000
[deleted]
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u/DELETED 13 points at 1666285559.000000
[deleted]
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u/julry 23 points at 1666307637.000000
Didn’t CFAR have an explicit bent toward funneling people into AI safety research? And the “rationality camps” seemed a lot weirder than basic Kahneman and her book stuff. First hand tales from there are extremely odd. She clearly knows how to make things sound reasonable to normie audiences but she was deep in that culture for a long time
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u/niplav 3 points at 1667472595.000000
I don't know whether that was the initial goal, but that has been quite explicitely the goal for the last 5 years.
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u/birdcontent 21 points at 1666295589.000000
"wow this gateway drug sure goes down easy"
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u/dingledog 2 points at 1666371157.000000
that's like calling intermittent fasting a gateway drug to anorexia.
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u/Soyweiser 12 points at 1666458181.000000
Which is a thing that can happen yes. People actually have warned people for that.
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u/birdcontent 8 points at 1666558440.000000
yeah this is accidentally a halfway decent analogy but not in the way they thought lol
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u/Soyweiser 5 points at 1666559795.000000
Yeah was thinking about it and it is actually a good analogy, as intermittent fasting can trigger eating disorders if you are already susceptible to them. In the same way that being into LW can open you up to various issues if you are susceptible to them. See how some people go 'lol the basilisk, that is silly' after reading Rokos basilisk story, and how it fucks other people up mentally (which also means that in a way you can't 100% fault Yud for taking it as a serious threat, of course the reasons why he took it as a serious threat is because he thought it was serious because he believes his own TDT bullshit (which he later denied of course)). E: I focus here only on the basilisk story of course, but it is one of the many memetic threats posed to people from the cult incubator Lesswrong. (like putting families at risk because one of them is convinced they should donate more money to MIRI, and their partner disagrees). A reason why I always like the SCP foundations stance to not roleplay that shit on the forums and that is just creative fiction writing.
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u/dingledog 1 points at 1667057084.000000
I'm on ya'lls side and am genuinely worried about how many people on this subreddit think biting the bullet on this analogy is the correct response, instead of... you know... pointing out that it's a disanalogy for a gazillion potential reasons. The fact that people with pre-existing mental illness or eating disorders might react to intermittent fasting by becoming anorexic is not an indictment of the health benefits of intermittent fasting... it's an argument about why intermittent fasting is perhaps not for everybody. Or it's an argument about why we should be vigilant and concerned when someone appears to be anorexic but is insisting they're just intermittently fasting (e.g. when the basilisk rears its ugly head). But that's not what is happening in this subreddit. Both the IF'ers and the anorexics are getting sneered at with equal vitriol and the lack of distinction makes me feel a little uneasy (because I don't think good people with good intentions should be ridiculed). But if you don't like the IF analogy, here are some other bullets you can bite: * Vaping is a gateway drug to meth * Eating meat is a gateway drug to psychopathy * Saturday morning cartoons are a gateway drug to hentai --- In any case, I do think it would be an interesting and useful project to see if the ideas taught by the rationality community are uniquely 'triggering' to people with pre-existing vulnerability to basilisk-like concern. I've seen a ton of posts on the LW and SSC subreddits about people having genuine panic attacks about the prospect of X-risk, or having decision paralysis because of a felt need to apply Bayes-style reasoning to every decision (e.g. dating). It's unclear if these people would just be having panic attacks about something else if it wasn't X-risk, but it would be useful to quantify the gateway-druggedness of rationality ideas in a empirical way. Let me know if you got any ideas.
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u/Soyweiser 2 points at 1667058082.000000
The diff between if and lw is that with if they warn against you getting an ed, or at least dont support it actively. If also has slighlty fewer crypto fascists.
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u/birdcontent 2 points at 1667095380.000000
genuinely curious to hear what you think "biting the bullet" means
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u/dingledog 2 points at 1667098229.000000
I meant accepting the analogy, despite the obvious differences between the two things
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u/birdcontent 2 points at 1667106082.000000
OK, I get the sense that you might not be a native English speaker, but FYI "biting the bullet" means "accepting the painful **truth** of a situation" and thus is probably not the idiom you want to use when you mean "accepting something that I personally believe to be false" anyway, there are several premises here I don't accept: * the purported benefits of gateway rationalism-lite are analogous to the purported benefits of IF * things that make you personally uneasy are therefore ipso facto bad * she is a good person with good intentions your entire last paragraph sounds like a navel-gazing waste of time to me and I doubt you would want to pay my going rate for "consulting on shit I have absolutely no interest in"
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 2 points at 1667130864.000000
If you forget about the analogy, you can sit back and see with remarkable clarity that the rationalist “community”, such as it is, consists of a highly networked group of people who take LessWrong seriously That itself is an indictment of the whole space
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u/julry 5 points at 1666463372.000000
Confirm
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u/AlienneLeigh 3 points at 1666588884.000000
More often orthorexia, I think, but yes, IF is in fact very definitely a gateway to eating disorders.
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u/dgerard 1 points at 1667044428.000000
which it is
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u/Soyweiser 8 points at 1666458057.000000
Another person recreating object/meta level like distinctions is pretty sneerworthy imho. Ribbonfarm already innovated it into 2d grids ages ago.
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u/VersletenZetel 12 points at 1666429936.000000
>the least sneerworthy person in She wrote the The Scout Mindset - a binary classification to reifify Elon Musk, wow. She thought people how to do Bayes math 'in the head' which is insane. She podcasts in favor of Uber. [https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/nmwv6v/comment/gzs7lo6/?utm\_source=reddit&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/nmwv6v/comment/gzs7lo6/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
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u/VersletenZetel 5 points at 1666437144.000000
Wait, all those things are mentioned in the article lmao
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u/imperiouscaesar 11 points at 1666343924.000000
She's actually a GOOD cult leader, guys!
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u/acausalrobotgod 3 points at 1666556546.000000
Wrong.
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u/dgerard 3 points at 1667044385.000000
She actively promotes and creates the material for the dumb bullshit, "entirely unobjectionable" is nonsense
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u/DELETED -1 points at 1667055257.000000
[deleted]
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u/dgerard 3 points at 1667065805.000000
no, but do feel free not to expect everyone else here to do the reading for you
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u/sissiffis 8 points at 1666297609.000000
Agreed. This sub doesn’t reliably differentiate between the absurd, stupid and racist EA, rationality people and the much more respectable thinkers like Galef, who is, at worst, maybe not everyone’s cup of tea.
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u/DELETED 33 points at 1666302726.000000
[deleted]
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u/NoahTheDuke 30 points at 1666311584.000000
I hope to one day be so publicly annoying to have an entire subreddit spinoff.
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u/Soyweiser 6 points at 1666487325.000000
/r/Sneersneerclub exists
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u/saucerwizard -7 points at 1666289788.000000
Isn’t she like a TERF or something?
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u/sexylaboratories 3 points at 1666337569.000000
Is she? I see that Richard Dawkins [brought](https://twitter.com/Artistphilb/status/1386372387499876358) her up after being [transphobic](https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1380812852055973888), and she has one (1) bad [tweet](https://twitter.com/juliagalef/status/904449450797547520), but I don't think that's clear enough to be a smoking gun.
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