As an aside, how is the SSC community? Rewarding like HN? I accommodate irreverence well, but I don’t have a field guide for what this community might actually be about. Any tips from long time participants?
Anyway - I’ve lurked both for ~6-7 years. The best summary I can give is that Scott is an excellent and insightful author at his best, prone to certain idiosyncrasies, but who attracts a pretty thoughtful and generally pleasant commenter community.
The bias in astrange’s position is grounded in some factual truth, but I would argue that Scott’s commenter community is not entirely in the “rationality” camp, even if that’s a big part of how Scott reached his audience. The bigger part, imo, are the incredible series of articles he wrote circa 2014-2016 on a breadth of topics, many that still hold up.
I’d say check it out for the articles and see how you feel about the comments. Take astrange for what it’s worth, with a liberal dose of salt
It's part of "online rationalism" which is supposedly a community based around lesswrong where they practice thinking about things logically, with some techniques that work and some that don't.
More accurately it's a new religion that ascribes untrue magical powers to Bayes' theorem, probability theory, computers and AI research, gives people a life mission called "effective altruism", thinks if you program computers really well they'll become "superintelligences" and take over the world which needs to be stopped, and so on. This is why he says things about "rationality" in the post and is so approving about that Yudkowsky guy.
SSC years ago had some undeserved drama where the kind of online humanities-degree activist types who call you "tech bros" yelled at him, so I think the community also has people intentionally trying to make themselves into their image of a "tech bro" as a reaction to that.
(nb "religion" is not meant as an insult or a metaphor, starting new religions is what people do in Berkeley and this is just another one of them.)
Untrue magical powers? Just because people appreciate those things it doesn't mean they ascribe magical powers to them. That's like saying that HN ascribes magical powers to startups or chip architectures.
They invoke Bayes' theorem for its property of being optimal, but it's optimal (and trivial) when you know the priors. The hard part is knowing those, and they don't, so they just use it in a metaphorical/mindset way that doesn't actually mean anything, pretend they don't have actual beliefs so they don't need to take responsibility for them, and say "prior" a lot. (https://metarationality.com/bayesianism-updating)
In general, using probability theory as a way of thinking doesn't work because it can't reject infinitesimally likely but infinitely bad futures, which is why they're overly concerned with imaginary future AIs torturing them, and it ignores "unknown unknowns" and can only handle enumerated futures you already thought of, which is why they have that odd tendency to start polycules because it seems logical and then their girlfriends unexpectedly leave them.
(That's also how you know it's a Berkeley new religion - weird sex practices.)
>In general, using probability theory as a way of thinking doesn't work because it can't reject infinitesimally likely but infinitely bad futures
Another thing frequently discussed in those circles.
>(That's also how you know it's a Berkeley new religion - weird sex practices.)
Some people being sexually adventurous in California, the horror.
That’s the problem, they shouldn’t be discussing it ;)
> Some people being sexually adventurous in California, the horror.
I could’ve said “joining cults like Leverage” instead of polycules but that would be mean. However like I did say, the problem with being a young man who gets into an open relationship because you rationally determined it was optimal is, you’re wrong and your girlfriend is going to leave you.
If you’re going to have weird sex, at least have a more fun reason for it. (There’s a tweet I want to link here about a rationalist nude sex party where they all sat around discussing immigration politics instead of having said adventures, but unfortunately I can’t remember how to spell Aeolla to find it.)
If you had the right priors to start, you wouldn't need probability theory because you'd already know everything.
> it can't reject infinitesimally likely but infinitely bad futures
Sure it can, because that's value theory, not probability theory.
As the page I linked says, the real lesson is “don’t be too sure of stuff” but that doesn’t require pretending you’re doing math or joining any religions.
But I was going to build a custom religion designed to make motte & bailey arguments in favor of it easy, it would probably look a lot like "rationalism". "It's not a religion, we just apply these precepts of rationality rationally! Look, the rational application of rational principles, rationally, is all but in the name!"
I actually agree that not everyone there treats it like a religion. There are people like me who just cruise by, pick some fruit, learn some things, apply some useful things, and get on with it. But there are absolutely also people for whom it is their religion.
Ironically, as IIRC some of the thought leaders have themselves pointed out (usually in the form of an agonized, hair-pulling sort of "Why, Bayes, why?" sort of post), there is very little rational reason to believe that improving rationality will lead to a lot of massively better life outcomes; the evidence of this is thin on the field. (Picking up some things around the edges, absolutely. But the hope that you suddenly Solved Life because you're "more rational" seems to be pretty poorly founded in reality.)
> improving rationality will lead to a lot of massively better life outcomes
IMO, to defend this, I'd argue for most people there's maybe oom of ten decisions over a lifetime that in hindsight could turn out to be really important, and if you can keep a calm head and think about it in those moments, you can potentially get a lot of benefits. Now usually there'll be lots of advice for those, and the "rational" (in the advertised, not actual, sense) answer is not always the best one, but even just stepping back, thinking about it, trying to find out how to gather evidence about it, can already possibly help out a ton.
Most people get by fine doing well enough. And it doesn't take rationality to tell you not to invest your savings in scams, so the upside is limited. But for those few times where it really matters, there are some genuinely useful tools in there, IMO.
(Though personally, I'm in it for the philosophy.)
Unfortunately there isn't such a thing as an ideal thought process - that is, if you want to make a correct prediction about the world, there is no demonstratably correct method of doing that. This sort of thing has been tried before (logical positivism) and disproven (Wittgenstein and Gödel's theorem). It's notable that AI research is mostly getting places by just doing gigantic matrix multiplications instead of this.
It can be a useful exercise but it's not a good life philosophy - it's a bit robotic. And it gets cult-like if you add things on like "…and that's why you should live in our group home" or "…and that's why you should get rich and donate it all to evil AGI research".
This isn't very important to me though, it's just something I've noticed. It seem to come up a lot more lately because people reply to every ML story with "oh no the AIs are going to take our jobs" stuff, but still the largest impact it's had on the real world is Roko causing Elon Musk to date Grimes.
I think I meet more people who've developed life philosophies in reaction to knowing about LW ("post rats" or "meta rats") - mostly they explicitly decided to join religions instead of accidentally doing it - and for some reason all of them became Buddhists. That one surprises me.
AIXI has some correctness proofs. In an admittedly esoteric sense, it does make "optimal use of information". I do think those parts philosophically hold up.
For an interesting view on Gödel, see Garrabrant's logical induction paper; you can bypass some aspects of that by working probabilistically.
> "…and that's why you should live in our group home"
People try things because they think they work, and that's why LW is a cult.
> "…and that's why you should get rich and donate it all to evil AGI research".
People recommend things because they think they're correct, and that's why LW is a cult.
Also, anti-evil AGI-research. That's kind of an important aspect.
I don't know what's going on with the postrats either.