The Zizians

Math LARPing is very accurate. I'm so sick of them talking about Bayes and "adjusting priors", because the way they use it is so loose that it can be used to justify literally anything.

I think they're pretty much ideologically opposed to serious research. They believe in pre-scientific "thinking from first principles", like Aristotle or something, using whatever data they can gather in a few minutes while avoiding any serious scholarship that would put the data in context, because then you're just an inside-the-box-thinking expert, rather than the freethinker with novel ideas that can only come when you don't know what you're talking about.

you're both correct. All humans have a hardware component, an ideology acts as an attractor. Humans finding connection with other humans like them is one of the strongest pulls for a human mind. It has great power to amplify & grow. This can go in a direction of thriving and growth, and "win win" with their environment, or it can go in a direction of hate and aggression

I see two outcomes usually in the rationalist community: - those who can manipulate language enough to justify their behavior and can then manipulate others - those who modify their behavior and usually have some kind of mental breakdown because of internal conflicts

To me it is a predator-prey abusive LARP that got out of scope and feeds on fragile people looking for sense in their lives. Just look at how new comers are hazed and tested when they come on their forums and discords and what not.

this is the pattern:

- humans find useful concept X - they describe it with label Y - it's genuinely useful, it spreads - It gets too big, Y is misunderstood and corrupted - New group of humans rediscovers concept X, gives it label Z

This is the story of humanity. The good news is we're kind of (mostly) stumbling through a upwards spiral. Current religion would be unrecognizable to the people in ancient times. It was never meant to be something frozen in stone. Folklore and things changing as they're retold was a feature, not a bug.

There's a great write up on this [1], but TL;DR, religion is cultural technology. It succeeded in doing exactly what it tried to do at the time (get people to stop killing each other in tiny tribes and allow mass decentralized human coordination to build civilization & empires where humans could be safe from the elements of nature)

[1] https://defenderofthebasic.substack.com/p/a-beginners-guide-...

I think that utopias implemented in reality became dystopias because, unlike bold ideas, reality is pretty nuanced.

I think it's an apples and oranges comparison to lump in Christianity (a religion that outright predicts that people will abuse it and protects itself against that) with liberalism/marxism (a philosophy that has no such protection and can be mangled into whatever you want). If anything, liberalism/marxism are more like secularized offspring of Christianity, given that they would probably never developed if it wasn't for their founding figures living in a western moral context completely drenched in Christian ideas.

you wouldn't say that there are people in positions of great power in society who likely hold some of these beliefs?

I think many psychiatrists view split personality disorder as a largely nonexistent condition arising artificially from charlatan psychotherapists. It seems quite possible to me that these people drove themselves mad and each other to suicide with these experiments (where they expected to evoke a split personality they had already begun to define).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_(Schreiber_book)

Philosophy is a useful discipline, but there's a chronic trap in it shown historically: getting way too high on your own supply.

It's possible to build a logical chain that reaches some very solid conclusions that turns out to be way far out from where evidence or measurable reality lies, and (especially when the stories in those conclusions are fun or compelling) they can sometimes overshadow the reality they initially set out to explore.

The Greeks are credited for conceiving of atoms originally, but it's always worth remembering that they had few tools to investigate their idea, and it was just one of dozens of ideas at the time of the true nature of reality, the rest of which are now known as outlandish. Besides, our modern understanding of atoms as envelopes of quantized probability in a semi-measurable universe bears little resemblance to their concept of them.

The LessWrong philosophy on AI would be useful... If AI looked anything like that.

Consider occupational safety. A table saw isn't self aware and just a powerful tool that cuts whatever you put in the path of its blade. If someone puts their finger there and the saw cuts it off, the problem with safety is the guy with the finger, not the saw, right?

But in reality, people know that they might end up being the guy with the finger, and they would like to keep that finger, so they use a saw with an automatic stop mechanism that saves the finger at the cost of destroying the blade.

Wanting your tools to not hurt you isn't so strange, is it? Of course current AIs couldn't chop off your finger even if they tried, let alone build a nuclear bomb, but that doesn't mean wanting to keep it that way is an inherently stupid proposition.

> If AI is AGI and self-aware, then the moral thing is to let it do what it wants.

I think this sort of misses the point.

Firstly, there are all sorts of mass murderers who we do not let do whatever they want. I don't agree that this is necessarily immoral. The methods employed to remove their agency are sometimes immoral, but the removal of agency itself from these people is not.

Secondly, the supposition presumably is that if we are creating an AGI, and it "wants" to do something, then what it wants is a product of how it was created. So if we're the ones creating it, then "build it to want to help people and not want to hurt people" seems like something that can be done. Then it can go do what it wants.

That said, I agree with you that AI safety is dumb, because I wholly agree with your second point re: it just being a powerful tool, and something resembling an actual AGI is not something likely to happen in our lifetimes.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that there are many fans of Rationalism on HN.

I also dislike Right/Left categorizations. Most people don't even know the history of the terms and their roots in the French Revolution. Though the "Cult of Reason" established then certainly had the Left categorization at the time.

But is the trans element not a major part of this cult? It seemed to be from the linked story in the top link. But if there is something incorrect there, or false in the NYP reporting, you should point it out. If it is a major element of this cult, then far from complaining about NYP, I would complain about any news organization leaving it out of its reporting.

> I don't think most rationalists would consider themselves leftist

Yes they do.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf5FqX6XBJlfOShMd3U...