It seems like their problem is less their quack economics and overconfidence than that learning the basics is hard, practicing them requires self-discipline and willingness to fail, and they can always talk a friend into wiring them another $100,000. So they sling the lingo but generally know less than a high-school graduate who reads books on personal finance from the library and spent a few summers running a house-painting business.

I would be really really really surprised if, on average, LWers (et al.) performed better or worse than the average schmuck who decided to take a punt on proper investing or running a business or whathaveyou.

Beating the market is extremely hard. Riding the market is unbelievably easy, and gets easier constantly. Running a successful business is nearly impossible and gets harder all the time.

For these reasons most people don’t bother, take a job in somebody else’s company, and sometimes invest their savings in something very broad and shallow and safe like an index fund.

On the other hand, rationalism is an extremely well-funded cult, so it’s top-heavy with unbelievably bad decisions made with infinite thielbucks.

——-

Probably you can find a fair few good stories which are couched as “donations” because, again, rationalism is a cult, and investments in a business are framed in terms of “donations”, or tithes, to this or that cause within the movement. It may not offer a concrete return to the tither, but as with a tithe they do actually expect to get something in return.

If Scott Siskind Alexander very publicly kicks a few bucks to Max More’s cryonics scheme every now and then alongside human enhancement research to preserve a future for our white children, and makes sure he’s picked the RIGHT AI alignment protocol, he isn’t a neutral third party to the future those decisions are helping design.

The whole architecture of the group is a speculative ponzi scheme projected far off enough into the future that nobody can complain when their abstract ideas of expected return fail to come good after all.

Indeed on another level looking for good stories about bad investments is a bit of a contradiction in the sense that what you’re looking at to begin with is, for whatever else turns up in the ‘TESCREAL’ acronym, primarily a scam dreamed up by Eliezer Yudkowsky back in the early 2000s no different from scientology and L. Ron Hubbard.

I want to adapt a now deleted comment I originally framed as a “shortcoming”

I think more can be done with this adoptive parallelism between Manifest and Davos man, which risks being artificial. There is a risk of taking both parties too much at their own word, with the former in its pre-eminence and the latter as worthy successor. Capitalism, or the neoliberal system, or whathaveyou, is ambivalent about this kind of particular (there will always be some kind of conference, does it especially matter?), so what we really want to do is find out what independent work each of these is doing, and I think it is in their similarity to one another that the two differ.

——

Regarding the essay’s closing remarks:

“Manifest Man” doesn’t differ from Davos Man in regarding knowledge as a “positional asset”. In the example given to contrast, Manifest Man’s prediction markets externalise knowledge onto markets. But this is precisely the driving vision of the World Economic Forum, where it is regularly taken into equally science fictional scenarios. I don’t have to check to know how much Ray Kurzweil malarkey was on sale at the WEF 20-30 years ago. Nor does this translate into “they’re both versions of the same old capitalism”, in fact they’re both very closely related arms of the same highly specific model for doing capitalism.

Nor is there any particular difference in preferences for and against institutional affiliation, besides the accidental. Manifest theoretically aims at more direct affiliation away from explicitly state entities, but this is only indicative of the perception that states are over - a view also promulgated most famously at Davos. Both pursue a bracingly market-first approach to statecraft, with the difference emerging that Manifest has a classically more eccentric view of the role of the state (which with deepening context disappears into the imbrication of the modern techno-state with Silicon Valley, and Peter Thiel’s shitty data-aggregation software for gullible neoliberals).

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n13/peter-geoghegan-and-lucas-amin/this-looks-absolutely-rubbish

What should emerge here is a more equivocal conclusion about any comparison: is Davos like that because it’s BETTER at courting institutional favour? Had a better start in that area? Will Manifest REALLY take over the world, or will its attendees end up at Davos or Davos 2 when they eventually grow up to be as ancient Klaus Schwab?

Davos emerged at the tail-end of the post-war consensus and the collapse of the keynesian balance of payments model of international trade. Here amongst other places around the same time the idea began to take hold that governments should voluntarily abridge their own mandate to govern in matters of the economy. As we have learned thereafter, political history is often not cyclical - it does not tend towards the mean - so much as libidinal and plural: the right kind of trend will continue until it is halted or exhausts itself into something entirely different.

Davos man seeds more aggressive children like Manifest man all over in the hope of encouraging some grim process of natural selection which will produce the most virulent next strain. What happens next is up to what people do about that

hey, that rando sure seems humble!

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Frustratingly even-handed on Razib Khan and Steve Hsu

Neither of these guys was fired because of public outcry at their views, or because of perceptions of their views

They got fired, especially Khan, for being insanely dumb, and the outcry generated by that fundamental lack of being even a little bit smart about their racist opinions

People noticed that Razib Khan was unbelievably far out over his professional skis on fucking VDARE (Hsu was blogging his shit I think?) and mouthing off about racial intelligence using the standard kindergarten collage of smarmy doggerel and, like, somebody else’s GWAS scatterplot or whatever

Hsu is just a bigot, like he doesn’t even have anything to say, he’s not even passionate about it in the frightening way people like Khan project, like his opinions are cartoonish and cartoonishly under-derived

“a range of negative experiences” on our EIGHT YEAR PROJECT

nobody has “a range of negative experiences” over eight years

you have “a range of negative experiences” over about a week maybe, a month tops

when you leave a job after a year you leave with “a bunch of” or “a lot of” negative experiences, minimum, and that’s EVEN IF it was more good than bad

on an EIGHT YEAR TIMELINE you have well exceeded a “range” if things went fucking BRILLIANTLY, let alone if you got within about two hairs of jonestowning your way out of the whole thing

I think you and the replies are overthinking it, because mindfulness and meditation (not to mention yoga, which she also mentions) have been hugely influential on the entire Western/global middle class for 20-50 years

fwiw her writing here seems to me to comport with some level of undiagnosed OCD or similar as well, which doesn’t strike me as unusual for rationalist circles

The essay will include a short section at the beginning acknowledging that lots of self-identified YIMBYs are good people with some sensible ideas about getting hold of the right things, followed by a long explanation of why the essay will not allow this fact to be used to once again derail its point, already stated in the title (“NIMBYism does not exist”), that they have carted together a massive swathe of different ideas and motivations into a single huge distraction from actually thinking about politics

i very much enjoy that that quote is literally the first thing that you find when you search “zack rosen politics” to differentiate from the basketball guy, and also ain’t it a thing how goddamn these conceited assholes always sound so fucking lame / identical to one another / literally never change

One day I am gonna write my essay “NIMBYism does not exist” outlining the way that self-professed YIMBYs have carted together a massive swathe of different ideas and motivations into a single huge distraction from actually thinking about politics

ah, i see the other person already made the some point

There is only one means: by commenters pointing out all the places where a post says something wrong—anything wrong. If the error wasn’t “load-bearing for your argument”, it’s still worth pointing out in the comment section, for the benefit of readers who might otherwise be deceived. (We’re not going to run out of paper.)

one day you are gonna run out of adderall

lol

I hadn’t even been aware of this community until someone in FuckAI said I should x-post here

that’s good advertising

oh im in favour of both, see here from the above:

This is all fine, by the way. I think it’s actually good to miss the point of Roko’s Basilisk and just laugh at it. However, it’s also useful to have a deeper theory.

what you’re describing is the old SneerClub method, whose effectiveness was proven in the subreddit’s height with a large number of (some quite significant) testimonials

my point is that there is something deeper at work here as well, namely a political economy of virtuous selfishness which latches on to ideas like Roko’s Basilisk to give itself an eschatology and therefore meaning

I found myself using this as an opportunity to write a commentary on commentaries on Roko’s Basilisk at large, summarising some thoughts that I’ve had for years about how people read it. I was surprised that I found myself even wanting to! So ahead of my disagreements below, thank you for the essay.

What most people don’t understand is that Roko’s Basilisk was such an effective argument because Yudkowsky had strenuously argued for cryonics in the Sequences on the grounds that if you were revived after death, any repetition of your brain’s underlying quantum pattern would be consciously continuous with you

It isn’t thrown into Roko’s Basilisk at random, nor is it thrown into LessWrong theology at random, it’s a metaphysical cornerstone of their ethics and practical philosophy

The reason that it’s incorrect is also boringly philosophical: the argument relies for one of its premises on denying continuity of consciousness; therefore, the conclusion is inconsistent with its own premises and the argument is invalid.

It COULD be rescued pragmatically by rendering the NEW commitment to continuity of consciousness in different terms as, for example, an issue of subjective probabilities (like Pascal’s Wager, “between definitely dying and maybe achieving continuity, what do I have to lose?”) and I suspect that this what a lot of people who notice the problem do, wittingly or not. This solution is also built into Yudkowsky’s practical philosophy, which is replete with wagers of this kind.

In any case, large enough numbers of people evidently buy large enough chunks of LessWrong metaphysics to also buy this aspect of Roko’s Basilisk, to the point of framing it as a genuine infohazard (and then pretending not to have done so later on).

So I think Galileo’s Basilisk is off the mark, and the way that it’s off the mark is illuminating about rationalist philosophy.

2a.

There is a stroke of real genius to the way that Roko constructed his Basilisk out of some of the metaphysical toys he had just lying around near to hand, and most crucially shared in common with other LessWrongers. Indeed, the most glaring logical problem (which I articulated above) is off-loaded onto Yudkowsky, and the rest of the logic is basically acceptable to LWers and extremely simple to follow.

Galileo’s Basilisk, however, asks us to add EXTRA premises to this simple formula. And this works if we think that the continuity of consciousness idea the original relies on is just unmotivated woo (it is woo, but it isn’t unmotivated), the way that G’s interlocutor introduces an unmotivated auxiliary hypothesis to save the old theory of the spheres, permitting G to satirically repeat the same move. But from the perspective of rationalist metaphysics, it is GALILEO who first introduces an unmotivated auxiliary hypothesis, because we do not know how a superintelligence would emotionally handle its intelligence.

Meanwhile, the inferential logic of Roko’s Basilisk is comparatively bounded and secure.

The same problem emerges with Comrade Basilisk: we have to take several inferential steps along the way, through speculations on the value of experience, before we EVENTUALLY get to the classical wager ‘or you’ll burn in hell for eternity’. Rather than playing on beliefs that are ALREADY THERE, it burdens that wager with supporting those inferences (“believe or burn in hell”), whereas in the original the wager leaps naturally out of existing premises (“ACT on your beliefs, or burn in hell”). More on this in 2b.

(As an aside, I think the emphasis on WORKS over FAITH plays an important role in triggering the guilt reflex).

2b.

All of this finally triggers an important distinction to be made with respect to Rationalist vs Christian eschatology, and your treatment of Pascal’s Wager. In effect, LessWrongism logically constrains the kind of God implied by Roko’s theory, so there’s nothing arbitrary going on in deciding what God.

Rationalist sociology is essentially Mandevillian (or Clintonian, for that matter). Their essential model of social justice is that greed (along with other low motives) either produces good outcomes by itself or can/should be leveraged to produce good outcomes. Secondary to this (and emerging chronologically later within the movement) is altruism, which unlike greed has to be properly channeled from the very start, lest any charity be misplaced - a line of thought which progresses rapidly to Building God as the highest ideal in its own way. (by contrast, greed tends to at least create wealth even when unchanneled)

From this point of view, Roko’s Basilisk comes up trumps once again for sheer simplicity. The first human instinct is self-preservation. The second human instinct is altruism.

Contrasted with Comrade Basilisks’s burdening problem, the logic is crystalline. I already believe that my life could be almost infinitely extended by simulations in a superintelligence, all it takes now is for somebody to point out that that superintelligence has an arithmetically plausible reason to throw me in helljail if I don’t put in the work while I’m mortally living. This particular God springs fully formed from rationalist metaphysics plus the Mandevillian see-saw between self-preservation and altruism which insists that the greatest good comes from the leveraging of that instinct for self-preservation.

Whereas Comrade Basilisk does the same on one level (helljail), it still faces the burdening problem, of which some more detail:

Part of the genius of Roko’s Basilisk is that the work the sociology does is loaded on the world BEFORE heaven: we live in an imperfect world whose imperfections we can EXPLOIT (leverage) to get to heaven.

Comrade Basilisk’s eschatology frames the imperfections of our world AS the problem. For Roko, you CAN get to heaven through the eye of a needle, in fact it probably helps to be very rich to build the superintelligence. There is no such easy route in Comrade Basilisk’s world, since part of the very PROBLEM is the great hoarding of wealth.

This is also what distinguishes Roko’s / America’s Jesus (who wants you to be rich, fat, and happy) from (Classical) Christian Jesus (a messianic Jew arguing the virtues of poverty).

Plausibly, there ARE parodic versions of Roko’s Basilisk with more competitive claims on Ockham’s Razor, but I haven’t seen any.

This is all fine, by the way. I think it’s actually good to miss the point of Roko’s Basilisk and just laugh at it. However, it’s also useful to have a deeper theory.

I think that this ultimately points to a more complex engagement with political reality when it comes to the “what do we do” question. LessWrongians have a theory of political economy, which I described above at the three levels of greed, greed leveraged, and altruism, in descending levels of importance. The crucial and most deeply appealing feature of this vision is that it is virtue minimalist, and at the base layer essentially indulgent and even encouraging of a wide array of baser impulses.

Rival visions demand a bit more. They demand, for example, giving up your free time in comradeship and some of your secular ambitions in a recognition that the private accumulation of wealth is bad for the wider public and the world. For the fanatics, of course, Roko’s requirements are a bit stronger, but that is - of course - why they are the elite, and for the great majority of people the Basilisk is nothing but an infohazard.

Maybe you’re beginning to see where I’m coming from, so I’ll just say that it would take a whole other essay to outline that the problems with Roko’s Baslisk are less problems with LessWrong than they are the with political economy of liberalism. That’s an absolute clanger to finish on but I really don’t have any more space or time. A next line of thought would be to outline how any of this ties to the dream of immortality.

For what it’s worth, my personal preference is for a virtue maximal anarchist solution. Clean your soul!

If somebody talks very bluntly without caveats about a wide range of intellectually demanding subjects, and has a tendency to explain themselves with links to wikipedia articles (whether that’s about Mythbusters, psychoacoustics, or “High Modernism”*) I tend to get about as suspicious of that person and their motives as I do of other types of people who do similar stuff, from Eliezer Yudkowsky to Christian Revivalists, even if those motives boil down to nothing more threatening than an unchecked need to show off

*Come on man, you really should have read that one to check that it wasn’t a creepy screed that should have been deleted a long time ago

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i don’t know why people think your comment is good, because it doesn’t actually add anything about the numbers, even though you pretend to link to mistakes (actually the wikipedia pages for mythbusters and spiders georg)

i’ve never heard of benn jordan before, i’m just suspicious of your self-confidence in general

the last time i replied to something you said it was because you were astonishingly wrong about 20th century marxist (and post-marxist) theory, and you had the same air of breezy knowledgeability back then as well, even though you had evidently not read a single word of the names you dropped

https://awful.systems/post/6533847/9681534

i was much nicer than i should have been about it at the time, but The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is an EXTREMELY short work. and you think it’s about “groups of artists”? Are you SURE?

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as Soyweiser points out above: noted harsh critic of rationalism and AI (the guy who makes) SMBC is a “bold choice”

surprised that CCP Grey guy is still around - the asshole who refuses to post corrections to factual errors in his infotainment videos? can you imagine a more perfect fit?

re: The Last Psychiatrist, is he a postrationalist? The impression I have always had is that rationalists read HIM, not the other way around. His odious Hunter Thompson impression is more appealing to them than is possible to generate from within the movement, I think

By all means try to use this blog post to hold onto whatever community you happen to find yourself in. It is a toolkit for strangling a scene to death and feeling good about it. The gamergate handbook for smearing people (not Shermer, just women) you happen to want out of your company.