Making excel models to track your level of trust in people should
stand out as unhinged behaviour.
Makes sense when you remember these people are entirely divorced from
their instincts, dissociated from their true selves, have neurotically
repressed their emotional experience, and retreat into quantification
and ‘rationalism’ as a crutch to make sense of a chaotic world they’re
frightened of.
One time I read "effective altruism" as "effective autism," which does fit the stereotype of autism. I could see them actually saying something (much more verbosly) like "we should adopt the thought processes of neurodivergent people because they are contrary to mainstream thinking!"
Also the approach of "the largest organization doing my ideas just collapsed, I can solve this by doing my ideas *even more*". At a certain point, you have to consider that maybe all the iconoclasm you're doing discarded some ideas that were worthwhile all along.
Scott's just desperate to make sure that his audience doesn't see that the emperor wears no clothes.
I see posts like this all the fucking time from leaders of companies that are going under. "Haha, we just laid off 50% of the workforce and lost our biggest clients, but our fundamentals are still good!!! Looking forward to doubling down to get out of this rut, I know that with teams this talented we can do anything!!"
Normally by the time you get to that level of depersonalization you've had the cult leader to fill in the void created with however they want to exploit you. Rationalists seem to not have that step outside of "maybe do crypto reactionary political things?" or "hey maybe we should build that basilisk after all."
I mean they’re already running sex cults (sorry “polycules”). [And there’s definitely no allegations of sexual misconduct against them ](https://deluks917.wordpress.com/2019/09/20/private-post/)
EDIT: [oh boy theres more](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WmscKHmyZvuRg48HL/women-and-effective-altruism)
I'm genuinely curious if Scott has any kind of friendly relations with people who would be his peers, and not just his starstruck followers or followers who are desperate to seem smart by association.
I touched on this in the thread about Yud’s tweets, but I’m legit mad
about how weak and weasely these clowns’ responses are.
The rest of the time they’ll tell you to be skeptical of experts and
popular consensus, but when their friend’s scam gets exposed, it’s all
“many others invested in this too and surely you couldn’t have been
expected to know better”. As if plenty more didn’t correctly call the
ponzi a ponzi and stay away.
Scott then goes even further to assure that he too had been on board.
Like if you had asked me if it was a smart move putting your money to a
wildcat bank in Bahamas that promised risk free double digit yearly
returns from unproductive assets, I would have told you that hell yeah.
I am very smart. Please follow my blog for more insights. This is not
financial advice.
How odd that in point 7 he talks a lot about SBF’s donations to the
Democratic Party but completely ignores Ryan Salame’s donations to the
Republican Party. You’d think that showing money flowing to both parties
would increase the strength of his point.
>make a list of everyone I’ve ever trusted or considered trusting, make prediction markets about whether any of them are committing fraud, then pre-emptively be emotionally dead to anybody who goes above a certain threshold
to me this sounds like 'neither serious nor joking but a secret third thing'. In any case this is clearly not 100% serious
Rationalists often remind me of the Stewart Lee bit about people making offensive jokes: “In addition to being a joke, it also happens to be their sincerely held belief.”
Which was an undertone of Scotts early writings (which were just anti-feminist writings in hindsight (or clearly when you arent a nerdy dweeb like me). So you are totally legit in just taking all jokes as also being true.
Isn’t the whole point of their preferred decision theoretic approach
to avoid having arbitrary probability thresholds and instead
marginalize-over-and-select-best?
I have no idea what’s going to happen with ACX Grants now. Some of
the infrastructure I was hoping to use was being funded by the FTX
Foundation and may no longer exist. It might or might not be more
important to use all available funding to rescue charities about to go
under from losing FTX support.
This was kind of super obviously tongue-in-cheek in context, it came
at the end of a long apologia about the FTX fiasco with respect to EA
charities that are now hanged out to dry.
It’s only objectionable in that it’s meant to underline how
supposedly impossible it was to not take SBF’s good intentions at face
value.
To the extent that there's a link between them and autism it feels much more like it's repurposing toxic behaviors you can find in spaces with a heavy neurodivergent presence - or more generally just introverts and nerds. The Geek Social Fallacies article is almost two decades old at this point, this stuff isn't new.
What happened with the rationalist community was taking this nerd supremacy attitude, trying to expand and codify it into a general philosophy, and immediately descending into sci-fi crankery, reactionary politics and an even more grandiose self-image.
A lot of my friends are autistic and most of them went heavy leftist, the meme that autism somehow makes you a cold calculating machine without empathy is tiring. The rationalists don’t behave the way they do because of autism, they do it because they self cantered and arrogant
I'm in that case too, like probably a bunch of people in this sub. There's nothing specifically autistic about rationalists, but the kind of self-image they have of themselves is a tempting fiction that nerd spaces can sometimes cultivate.
>There's nothing specifically autistic about rationalists
I think it's a bit of both. You don't need to have autism to find rationalism appealing, but the whole "unified system of rational logic to explain a complex and ilogical world full of chaos, that completely misses any social context" is highly connected to people with autism.
My partner has autism and I heavily recognize the "everything you said is technically correct but completely misses the point" vibe.
I think if they're anything, they're narcissists - they check every item on the diagnostic list including ones that probably shouldn't be on the list.
Or I guess a good description could be narcissists doing "hey fellow nerds" to other neurodivergent types to take their money.
People who are bad at social interactions do not end up earning a living entirely out of being a flunky to a rich guy or some very customer facing job or the like.
I can see though how among the victims they would have people who are to some extent disabled when it comes to recognizing when you're getting taken advantage of, since that is done very ineptly.
I think we can do without imputing autism to large groups of people as a handicap of their social structure, especially in a place which takes it as read that that social structure is inherently faulty
Making excel models to track your level of trust in people should stand out as unhinged behaviour.
Makes sense when you remember these people are entirely divorced from their instincts, dissociated from their true selves, have neurotically repressed their emotional experience, and retreat into quantification and ‘rationalism’ as a crutch to make sense of a chaotic world they’re frightened of.
The solution is always prediction markets!
How is anyone actually friends with this guy? This is just exhausting.
I touched on this in the thread about Yud’s tweets, but I’m legit mad about how weak and weasely these clowns’ responses are.
The rest of the time they’ll tell you to be skeptical of experts and popular consensus, but when their friend’s scam gets exposed, it’s all “many others invested in this too and surely you couldn’t have been expected to know better”. As if plenty more didn’t correctly call the ponzi a ponzi and stay away.
Scott then goes even further to assure that he too had been on board. Like if you had asked me if it was a smart move putting your money to a wildcat bank in Bahamas that promised risk free double digit yearly returns from unproductive assets, I would have told you that hell yeah. I am very smart. Please follow my blog for more insights. This is not financial advice.
To paraphrase Keynes: The prediction market can stay irrational longer than you can stay emotionally solvent.
Ngl this almost made me feel bad for him but then considering all the race science these FTX guys were into, I don’t
How odd that in point 7 he talks a lot about SBF’s donations to the Democratic Party but completely ignores Ryan Salame’s donations to the Republican Party. You’d think that showing money flowing to both parties would increase the strength of his point.
So at least one person has claimed to me that this is self-parody or satire.
Isn’t the whole point of their preferred decision theoretic approach to avoid having arbitrary probability thresholds and instead marginalize-over-and-select-best?
he should distance himself from fascists rather than people his prediction markets think are untrustworthy.
fuckin ell scoot
I don’t get it. Anyone mind explaining?
This was kind of super obviously tongue-in-cheek in context, it came at the end of a long apologia about the FTX fiasco with respect to EA charities that are now hanged out to dry.
It’s only objectionable in that it’s meant to underline how supposedly impossible it was to not take SBF’s good intentions at face value.
Lol the internet can be rough sometimes, make a self-deprecating joke and people take it as a confession
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