Comment by khazhoux | Hacker News Reader

Comment by khazhoux | Hacker News Reader

I would love a link to anything that could convince me the Rationalist community isn't just a bunch of hoo-haw.

I read the first third of HPMOR. I stopped because I found the writing poor, but more importantly, it didn't "open my mind" to any higher-order way of rationalist thinking. My takeaway was "Yup, the original HP story was full of inconsistencies and stupidities, and you get a different story if the characters were actually smart."

I've read a bunch of EY essays and a lot of lesswrong posts, trying to figure out what is the mind-shattering idea.

* The map is not the territory --> of course it isn't.

* Update your beliefs based on evidence --> who disagrees with this? (with exception on religion)

* People are biased and we need to overcome that --> another obvious statement

* Make decisions based on evidence and towards your desired outcomes --> thanks for the tip?

Seems to me this whole philosophy can be captured in about half page of notes, which most people would nod and say "yup, makes sense."

Self-help books are useful, not because they have "mind-shattering ideas", but because they collect a lot of self-consistent and reasonably coherent advice into the same place.

In this same way, the rationalist knowledge seeking strategies are not "mind-shattering" but simply reasonable. It presents a set of rules to follow to be more effective in the world around you.

The parts of rationalism that stretch past the half page of notes mainly concern all the downstream conclusions that pop up from this reasonable set of epistemological rules.

> Update your beliefs based on evidence --> who disagrees with this?

Like, dozens of comments in this thread?

For example, people expressing strong opinions on what Effective Altruism is actually about, when https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities is just one google search away... but why would anyone bother checking before they post a strong opinion?

The #1 comment says that the rationality community is about "trying to reason about things from first principle", when if fact it is the opposite.

A commenter links a post by Scott Alexander and claims that Scott predicted something and was wrong, when if fact in the linked article Scott says he gives it a probability 30% (which means he gives probability 70% to that thing not happening). Another commenter defends that as a "perfectly reasonable but critical comment".

And hey, compared to most of the internet, HN is the smart place, and the local discussion norms are better than average. But it still doesn't seem like people here actually care about being, uhm, less wrong about things, even ones that are relatively trivial to figure out.

So basically, the mind-shattering idea is to build a community that actually works like that (well, most of the time). Where providing evidence gets upvoted, and unsubstantiated accusations that turn out to be wrong get downvoted, and a few more things like this.

Plus there is the idea of trying to express your beliefs as probabilities, using actual numbers. That's why EY cannot stop talking about the Bayes' Theorem. Yes, people actually do that.

> The #1 comment says that the rationality community is about "trying to reason about things from first principle", when if fact it is the opposite.

Oh? Eliezer Yudkowsky (the most prominent Rationalist) bragged about how he was able to figure out AI was dangerous (the most stark Rationalist claim) from "the null string as input."[1]

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a...

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