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Comment by hollerith | Hacker News Reader

Some of the attempts in this comment section to tar the entire rationalist community with the Zizian brush are ideologically motivated. The third most popular ideology in the US is the hope that technological progress will lead to a good future. (The most popular ideology is Christianity, with Leftism in second place. Note that a single person can subscribe to more than one ideology.) In contrast, the rationalist community grew around publications by Eliezer Yudkowsky written with the hope that they would help people realize that AI research is dangerous [1]. Of course, if technological progress is your ideology, then you are going to resist the idea that the most exciting and powerful technology of the decade is dangerous.

[1] More history here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42902731

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> the rationalist community grew around publications by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Rationalism (in its current form) has been around since long before someone on the internet became famous for their epic-length Harry Potter fanfiction, and it will continue to exist long after LessWrong has become a domain parking page.

The LessWrong affiliated "Rationalists" are to lower-case rationalism as the "People's Democratic Republic of Korea" are to democracy.

Please refrain from belittling the PDRoK with such comparisons, they do produce some extraordinary accordian players after all.

I love the Moranbong Band.

Sure, but currently we are discussing (inaccurate portrayals of) the community that grew starting in 2006 around Eliezer's writings. I regret that there is no better name for this community. (The community has tried to acquire a more descriptive name, but none have stuck.)

> the hope that technological progress will lead to a good future is the third-most popular ideology in the US

Hope is not an ideology, but I would be interested to see what kind of source you have on that.

Hope is not an ideology, but it can be deeply comforting for a person to identify with an entity or process bigger than any person. Some identify with our civilization's process of scientific discovery and technological development.

Ideology is not the only motivation: many here hope to profit personally from the continued rapid development of AI.

So, no source then. You cannot include everyone with “hope” or everyone with capitalist leanings as adherents of a relatively fringe belief system. Hoping for personal profit is again not an ideology.

"The Religion of Technology" by David F. Noble is a good historical summary of such ideology. The ideology has been around for a long time, the new phase with tech is just the latest iteration of it.

Totally recommend the read!

There's also the other time the rationalist community made national news, when a similar cult accidentally gambled away ten billion dollars in cryptocurrency.

Effective altruism has different roots than the rationalists (although, yes, the 2 communities have become close over the years). I have seen any statement by Sam Bankman-Fried where he identified as a rationalist.

Well, if we're ignoring everyone else's descriptions of SBF, Caroline Ellison had a tumblr on which she repeatedly self-identified as a rationalist: https://caroline.milkyeggs.com/worldoptimization

This isn't true.

https://maxread.substack.com/p/the-zizians-and-the-rationali...

What is not true?

And can you quote the part of the web page you consider relevant to the not-true thing?

My link is wrong, it's part of a longer series which documents in detail EA as arising directly from "rationalism".

Not saying you're necessarily wrong but can you provide a source on the list of most popular ideologies in the US you reference?

> The third most popular ideology in the US is the hope that technological progress will lead to a good future. (The most popular ideology is Christianity, with Leftism in second place

Eh? Can you link a source on this, preferably one that defines 'leftism' as well?

Leftism is the belief that society contains a system of oppression and that society's most pressing need is the dismantling of this system. For example, most Americans are opposed to racism IMHO, but being opposed to racism is not enough to qualify a person as a Leftist: the Leftist believes that dismantling the racist system almost always trumps other considerations whereas the non-racist non-Leftist tends to think that many thorny problems would remain in our society even if miraculously all racism, sexism, etc, were eliminated.

Ideology might be necessary for healthy human mental functioning. I'm not trying to make anyone feel bad for having a commitment to an ideology. But there is so much scorn of the rationalist community here in this comment section that rather than reply to every falsehood and every exaggeration, I thought it would be more effective to point out that a commitment to and identification with technological progress can rise to the level of an ideology.

I kind of wish I hadn't brought up ideology here: it would probably have sufficed for me to point out that many here on HN hope to strike it rich (and many who hope to make a career) in the AI boom and to point out why these many would see the rationalist community as an enemy.

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