Bit of a rant but I genuinely hate decision theory. At first it seemed like a useful tool to make the best long term decisions for economics and such then LessWrong, EA, GPI, FHI, MIRI and co needed to take what was essentially a tool and turn it into the biggest philosophical disaster since Rand. I’m thinking about moral uncertainty, wagers, hedging, AGI, priors, bayesianism and all the shit that’s grown out of this cesspit of rationalism.
What’s funny about all this is that there’s no actual way to argue against these people unless you have already been indoctrinated into the cult of Bayes, and even if you manage to get through one of their arguments they’ll just pull out some other bullshit principle that they either made up or saw somewhere in a massively obscure book to essentially say ‘nuh uh’.
What’s more frustrating is that there’s now evidence that people make moral judgements using a broadly bayesian approach, which I hope just stays in the descriptive realm.
But yeah, I hate decision theory, that is all.
there’s no actual way to argue against these people
On the contrary, they’re like an all you can eat buffet of internet arguments.
the Bristol LessWrong Scale
Through nootropics, they’re capable of making 1000 internet arguments per second and they’re all wrong
sounds like a good subject to write about. You should post an outline to https://awful.systems/c/morewrite
i had a previous rant about literary Bayesianism https://reddragdiva.dreamwidth.org/608652.html
@dgerard Thank you for “Garbage in, LessWrong out”, I’m going to use it *so* much 🤣
@utterfiction @dgerard
“I have Bayesian priors
YOU have cognitive biases
THEY are toxoplasmotic SJW filth”@billseitz @utterfiction @dgerard followed by
“Bayesian means the ingroup can do no wrong and the outgroup can do no right, and the more gooder the ingroup and badder the outgroup the more Bayesian it is.”
savage and true. Now THOSE are how to end a blog post.
@sb @utterfiction @dgerard Fuck Around and Update Your Priors
@billseitz @sb @utterfiction @dgerard Thanks for this, guys. All I can do is add this old, precious post by Stephen Bond.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130910231534/http://www.plover.net/~bonds/cultofbayes.html
the thing that pisses me off most is that bayesian probability is such an interesting field and in stripping the mathematical content out of it, they destroy what makes it so interesting.
this is a good analysis and I wholeheartedly agree.
I’m with you. MY LIFE HAS BEEN PROFOUNDLY WORSE since I learned about the prisoner’s dilemma. Specifically, any time some PD variant team-based exercise popped up, I just knew some MF on another team would think they were so clever and bring up the prisoner’s dilemma. Oh, we should defect every time, they’d say. Hey, buddy, we all know about the fucking PD! Just fucking cooperate! If you applied decision theory, you wouldn’t make everyone feel like shit, and you’d cooperate! Totally the same vibe, right?
