Comment by throwaway9274 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway9274 | Hacker News Reader

There is a particular flavor of writing common to those whose identity is bound up with the so-called “effective altruist” community and their various online forums.

It usually combines a reference to Bayes Theorem, a deep hubris, and a significantly misunderstood concept from mathematics or technology.

Here, for example, it is clear the author does not grok EMH which applies across the population of trades not traders.

Usually this is done to provide the author or community with some claim to an inherent and unearned extraordinary nature, which justifies greater personal power. (You only need 200:1 evidence you’re extraordinary being the takeaway here.)

It is unclear why certain SV cliques continue to grant these people power.

Their intellectual insularity means that whatever value they once added in bringing logical rigor to conversations is now far outweighed by the train of collective bad logic powering their groupthink.

It is increasingly dangerous to have such people steer important societal debates.

These debates include crypto regulation where EAs famously associated with SBF, to “AI safety”, a field that appears to be invented out of whole cloth to allow LessWrongers to LARP as ML ethics and fairness experts.

Part of the problem is how easy it is to logically and rationally convince yourself or others of something inaccurate, imprecise or just plain wrong.

There's a small, but important ego boost that comes along with thinking one has access to a clearer[1] view of reality. The LessWrong community gets this by way of "Bayesian thinking" and trying to subvert their own expectations.

For the general population though, you have the Freakanomics effect.

1. The intellectual mind's biggest motivator is certainty. This isn't necessarily a bad thing when certainty aligns with objective reality whatever that means, but then these folks get quite certain about how uncertain they are.

Thinking you're better than others because you're into LessWrong is no worse than thinking you're better than others because you're not into LessWrong!

LW is surprisingly decent at identifying errors, and calling out obvious flights of fancy, probably even better then the HN average of 2023. Though the popular HN discussions in any given week usually cover a much wider spectrum.

I would say at least 1 in 5 posts that get more then 100 karma are solid enough to stand up to ~1 hour of careful scrutiny, even by a reasonably well informed amateur.

It's the EA forum where things are a bit looser.

We are the product of the cultures with which we choose to engage.

Some communities have positive signal. Others have negative signal.

Your comment had more weight if you'd dropped the ad-hominem and kept just the specific critique about EMH.

I respectfully disagree.

The portion regarding the norms in EA communities argumentation habits is the most weighty part of the analysis. The EMH example is a supporting detail.

The thesis is this: EA communities are prone to insularity, hubris, and fabulism covered with a paper thin veneer of logic. The insularity generally means their arguments have not been subjected to even trivial scrutiny from non-EA communities. As a result, their arguments should as a first approximation be given no more weight than the average Reddit thread.

To be logically complete it would need to collect a variety of examples of hubris, fabulism, and insularity from EA arguments, which is left as an exercise to the reader.

Rhetorical fallacies are important to understand if you’re going to call them out. “Ad hominem” means attacking the argument by attacking the person.

Here I am attacking the general credibility of a community of people based on the example of one of their members’ arguments.

This is common in communities that are devoted to radical honesty and radical transparency, particularly those that actually have to hold these norms in high stakes market scenarios. It is called “believability weighting.”

For example, if the Norway Government Pension Fund historically provides poor logical arguments in their analysis of EU recessions, their arguments about EU recessions should be given less weight in the future.

Believability weighting is not the same as ad hominem.

It looks gpt-generated.

If you have good arguments to attack specific statements, methods, no need to attack people. Otherwise, it reminds me how tabacco / oil industry tries to discredit science (often successfully) by attacking individual scientists.

I see the effort to discredit EA lately (and given that I read about EA almost exclusively on HN, It says something). I wonder why.

“It looks gpt-generated.”

See, this is an example of a contentless ad hominem.

Believability weighting is when you say, “Here’s proof this argument is bad. The community from which this argument originates makes these types of bad arguments frequently. Therefore we should believe that community less often.”

EMH is the only relevant argument you made to support your claims. If you believe the community so bad, it should be easy for you to come up with at least couple dozen examples of "bad arguments."

Happy to do the research for you. My consulting rate is $500/hr.

As I see it there is nothing "rational" about rationalism at all, it is just something like Scientology or the Unification Church constructed for modern conditions. Back in the 1950s L. Ron Hubbard was interested in enslaving large numbers of people to take their money and labor.

By the late 1970s he was starting to regret it because he was now responsible for these people (one reason why slavery quit being economically viable.) Thus began David Miscavige's plan to bleed a few "whale" donors for all they are worth

https://tonyortega.org/2021/12/23/insider-how-scientologys-i...

Inequality has increased, you can't get blood from a stone, there is no point in a mass movement, so the goal has got to be target a few trust fund kids and get a whole lot out of them.

The Symbionese Liberation Army

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbionese_Liberation_Army

almost got it right by kidnapping Patty Hearst except they chose a method of mind control that gets you immediately in trouble with the state. Today you would camp out at Oxford or Stanford and develop a small movement not because you really want a movement but you need a movement for the whales to be a part of. In fact you'd develop a network of movements so you can market test ideas and see what works most effectively.

It is so ironic that this group first filters people for a lack of critical thinking skills, and then puts them through a crash course in rhetoric so they can quickly say things like "Ad Hominem!" and then stick like a pitbull. The best way to deal with them online is to snipe at them and not get caught in the tarpitting they'll try to trap you in.

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