you are heavily downplaying the power and influence some of these people have. Sam Bankman-Fried is one of these people, for example
That, along with constantly calling yourself rational and being well-intentioned, easily leads to cultish beliefs to be pursued despite how wacky they seem at their face, because it was your superior brains that led you to them.
If we add the often good (or enormous) financial resources, it makes for a seriously dangerous cult.
There is not any such conviction. This is just your interpretation of a domain name, which is not intended that way.
> That, along with constantly calling yourself rational
This is explicitly not what you are supposed to do, and the point is explicitly not to create an identity around it.
But it is insane to say that EA and rationalism* are not about believing you are superior and more rational than your peers, or that most EA/rats don’t make an identity out of it (look at any of their online presences). Anthropic literally exists to funnel money and influence to its EA/rat cofounders and early investors, who sincerely believe that they and they alone are smart and rational enough to shepherd our society through its “technological adolescence”. I wish people who agree with this would at least be honest about it.
I know he's EA, but let's not pretend that EA is so distinct from the rationalist community.
Everyone implicitly believes the above when they believe the concept of a "backwards society" can even exist, or when they think their own society would be better if their lost candidate had power. In both cases you think that there exist a set of values that are better to live under than what the democratic process resulted in.
I think actually most people believe this about their own values. I could find you infinite posts online that say "humanity would be better off if the other political party was gone [and my political party had sole power]"
I'm far from sure that even the rationalists' god-like AI could play that role, even in the extremely unlikely hypothesis that it will materialize at some point.
Not to mention that the best set of values could change with the circumstances, and most of all values are a vague concept, WAY too vague to make a dictator behave properly in all circumstances, even if he were somehow compelled to always follow them.
> humanity would be better off if the other political party was gone [and my political party had sole power]"
Even people wishing that don't necessarily long for a dictatorship, far from it; you could wish for the party you loathe to not exist, but still want everything else of your democratic system to stay unchanged (the possible parties are infinite, removing one doesn't necessarily turn your system into a single-party system).
Can I ask you if it's an idea you developed yourself or you read about it somewhere?
I don't think I read about this, it just seems obvious that if a truly great intelligent leader leads a country it's better than the stupid masses voting about things.
[1] https://lydialaurenson.substack.com/p/the-inside-story-of-le...
[2] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/11/why-are-there-so-many-rati...
> This is a textbook study of motivated reasoning
What would be his motive, why would he have preconceptions about you?
Could it be that it's your messages here that are motivated, and with scarce reasoning?
A libertarian socialist podcaster tries to discuss an online culture that is adjacent to Silicon Valley tech scene. He then proceeds to take movement’s worst manifestations as its essence. One would have to be naive to miss the source of his bias.
Take his advice to talk with (and listen to!) people outside your cadre, and to consider the possibility that you're entirely in the wrong. And maybe to touch grass.
Cheers
A part of me somewhat wishes I was this easily swayed by YouTube smooth talkers.
It would be highly surprising if an open-access online community with the kind of slogans that might be particularly appealing to somewhat spectrumy individuals did not occasionally attract some eccentrics. The point I am trying to make here is that these are pretty fringe offshots and are far from the representative views of the community as a whole. Appeals to reason don't make any community immune to human nature. After all, their main place of gathering is named "less wrong", not "correct".
There was also someone else ITT pointing out that the community are not at all uniform, and that got a pithy response about it being largely "childless white male Americans" as if that is supposed to matter (and disregarding that fully 5% of survey respondents consider themselves not cis, and 19% not straight, which are both way above baseline).
So pardon me if I don't consider this sort of question to be in good faith.
If you start reasoning from first principles you can very easily make an incorrect assumption somewhere down the line that snowballs until you're talking about shrimp welfare, or making decisions based on the potential sextillion humans that exist in 1,000,000 AD, or planning to convert the entire universe into unthinking organic matter that can only experience bliss.
I think it is more that teenagers and very young adults and people high in the trait of "openness to new experiences" are more susceptible to nonsense and more attracted to new intellectual movements, of which the rationalist community is one.
Also, I expect a rationalist to be lower in conscientiousness than average (because the conscientious people are too busy to devote a lot of time to reading long intellectual texts) and low conscientiousness makes violence and other transgressive behavior more likely.
That's what can make the rationalist movement feel more like a religious cult and less like a bunch of eccentrics. As an outsider looking in, it seems like the entire movement is filled with just accepting priors with very little evidence for why those priors should be accepted.
(Except that they don't claim them to be "their own beliefs" but instead call them "priors".)
How about the 95% stop having gatherings where they all proclaim that their beliefs are true even if they don't seriously believe them?
How is the 5% supposed to know that the 95% is actually larping belief? And how is an outsider who observes the 95% espousing their whacky beliefs supposed to know who is a member of the 95% and who is a member of the 5% (and if those percentages are accurate).
You can observe the same dynamic in any church. Everyone in the congregation will have different levels of belief, but when it comes to sharing a testimony you'll be hard pressed to distinguish between who the true believers are and who's just "faking it until you make it".
What on Earth are you referring to? What gatherings? What beliefs? What proclamations? What evidence of insincerity?
Rationalist have groups meetup and conferences. For example [1]
> What beliefs?
It's pretty diverse and not uniformly held. Some of the more strange ones that seem to have pretty wide appeal are around AI safety. For example, Roko's basilisk.
> What proclamations? What evidence of insincerity?
I was responding to the comment above me that suggested that 95% don't actually hold rationalist beliefs and are instead simply having fun with it. Only a small 5% are actually sincere.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1car63w/les...
If I observed such a gathering knowing that 5% of the people there have sincerely come to a particular conclusion based on the available evidence and the other 95% think the evidence doesn't support that conclusion, I would be extremely surprised to see everyone going around "larping belief". And I don't think you can actually show such a thing occurring.
> I would be extremely surprised to see everyone going around "larping belief". And I don't think you can actually show such a thing occurring.
I never claimed I could or that I observed such a thing. The 95/5% didn't come from me, it came from the person I responded to.
My point was that
- It's impossible to distinguish who's a true believer and who isn't.
- That the meetups of the rationalists re-enforce beliefs, particularly in true believers. Also that these beliefs of the rationalists can be pretty whacky and based on a jenga tower of priors.
- That there isn't "nothing" a rational person could do to dissuade someone from a whacky belief.
I am genuinely curious where you get that impression. The central element to the whole thing is that people should be willing to question their own beliefs and change their mind based on the data.
If there is anything that turns rationalists into eccentrics, I it is being overly open to new ideas or beliefs.