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There appears to have been a mild resurgence of Hlynkaism on the forum. This is concerning, because I believe that the core tenets of Hlynkaism are deeply confused.
@hydroacetylene said:
It's not entirely clear what's supposed to be the determining criteria of identity here. Are wokeism and the DR the same because they're both revolutionary, or are they the same because they only differ on who gets the cushy sinecures? At any rate, I'll address both points.
Revolution (defined in the most general sense as rapid dramatic change, as opposed to slow and gradual change) is a tactic, not an ideological principle. You can have adherents of two different ideologies who both agree on the necessity of revolution, and you can have two adherents of the same ideology who disagree on the viability of revolution as a tactic. Although Marxism is typically (and correctly) seen as a revolutionary ideology, there have been notable Marxists who denied the necessity of revolution for Marxism. They instead wanted to achieve communism through a series of gradual reforms using the existing democratic state apparatus. But does that suddenly make them into conservatives? Their tactics are different from typical Marxists, but their core underlying Marxist ideological principles are the same. I doubt that any of the Hlynkaists on this forum would look at the reformist-Marxists and say "ah, a fellow conservative-gradualist! Truly these are my people; they too are lovers of slow, cautious change".
"Tradition above all" is an empty formalism at best, and incoherent at worst. If tradition is your sole overriding source of moral truth, then we just wind up with the old Euthyphro dilemma: what happens when the tradition that you happened to be born into isn't worth defending? What if it's actively malicious? "Support tradition" is a formal principle because it makes no mention of the actual content of that tradition. If you are living in a Nazi or communist (or whatever your own personal avatar of evil is) regime whose roots extend back further than living memory, are conservatives obligated to support the existing "traditional" regime? Perhaps they're allowed to oppose it, but only if they do so in a slow and gradual manner. You can understand why this response might not be appealing to those who are being crushed under the boot of the regime. And at any rate, you can only arrive at the position of opposing the regime in the first place if you have an alternative source of substantive ethical principles that go beyond the formal principles of "support tradition" and "don't change things too fast".
As for the assertion that wokeism and the DR only differ on "who gets the cushy sinecures"; this is simply incorrect. They have multiple substantive policy disagreements on LGBT rights, traditional gender roles, immigration, foreign policy, etc.
Hlynkaism to me represents a concerning abdication of reflection and nuance, in favor of a self-assured "I know what's what, these radical Marxist-Islamo-fascists can't pull a fast one on me" attitude. This is emblematic of much that is wrong with contemporary (and historical as well) political discourse. The principle goal of philosophical reflection is to undermine the foundation of this self-assuredness. Actually, you don't know what's what. Your enemies might know things that you don't; their positions might be more complicated and nuanced than you originally thought. Undoubtedly the realm of political discourse would become more productive, or at least more pleasant, if this attitude of epistemic humility were to become more widespread.
Sorry, I mostly missed this conversation, so I have nothing to add beyond what FC, and Dean already said, I just want to say that:
Good. I've been mumbling about the utter failure of the Rationalist movement for a while, and as the others I'm pretty sure it extends to the entirety of the Enlightenment, including it's right-wing parts. Between @FCfromSSC's heroic efforts, @hydroacetylene, @Dean, and @ControlsFreak doing their part, it only warms my hear that more and more people are picking up the mantle of Hlynkaism, and that it's getting big enough to concern you.
I’m not a Yudkowskian Rationalist. I’m an enemy of utilitarianism. I am in fact sympathetic to some of the critiques of the Enlightenment that these posters have laid out.
This is just about recognizing the distinctions between different ideologies that are in fact distinct. It’s not about anything else.
I'd like to point out that Yudkowsky himself never said (to my knowledge, and I've read practically everything he's written) that utilitarianism is the correct moral system. He's on record saying multiple times that rationality is a means to an end and not an end in itself.
You can very much be a "Yudkowskian Rationalist" while holding none of his values, beyond valuing rationality because of the utility it provides in a wide spectrum of situations. Probably throw in thinking about meta-rationality,
If you don't believe me, then the first of the Sequences is What Do We Mean By "Rationality"?:
Emphasis added. Rationality is systematized winning, or getting what you personally want (as people can strongly disagree on what counts as victory).
I'm a Yudkowskian Rationalist, but I'm not a utilitarian. I'm a consequentialist with a complex value system that isn't trivially compressed. You could be a malevolent AGI trying to turn everyone into paperclips and be recognized by him, as long as you weren't doing it in a clearly suboptimal way.
Wait, how is this incompatible with utilitarianism? A large chunk of the Sequences was an attempt to convince people that, despite Von Neumann-Morganstern being a theorem about rational values being expressible as a utility function, human values still aren't easily compressed into a trivial utility function. It was a key lemma in service of the proposition "if you think you have a simple function representing human utility and you're going to activate ASI with it then You're Gonna Have A Bad Time".
As an aside, this is where I most differ from Yudkowsky on the current race to AGI: he seems to think we're now extra-doomed because we don't even fully understand the AIs we're creating; I think we're now fractionally-doomed for the same reason. The contrapositive of "a utility function simple enough to understand is unsafe" is "a safe utility function is something we won't fully understand". I don't know if stochastic descent + fine-tuning for consistency will actually derive a tolerably human value system starting from human text/audio/video corpuses, but it's at least possible.
When most people use the term "utilitarianism", they're talking about the Benthamian or Springer notion. This is a mistake I've made myself, having argued with some poor guy on the old Motte where I claimed that since I have a utility function, I'm therefore utilitarian. I've learned from that error.
My understanding is that most humans aren't VNM rational! They violate one or more of the different requirements, in the sense that their preferences can be contradictory. An example is the Allais Paradox. I don't know if any human is actually VNM rational, but I don't think that's necessarily impossible for someone who is good at meta-cognition and math.
Note that I'm not disagreeing with Yudkowsky here, I was aiming to demonstrate that @Primaprimaprima 's (implicit, by my understanding) claim that not being a utilitarian disqualified him from being a "Yudkowskian Rationalist".
I disagree with Yud on this myself. My p(doom) has gone down from a max of 70% to a far less concerning 20% these days. Our alignment techniques, while imperfect, produce LLMs which are remarkably in-sync with the goals and desires of their creators (and to a lesser extent, their users). Anthropic is doing excellent mechanical interpretability work, such as recent studies into how Claude actually thinks (it's not just predicting the next token, it backtracks and "thinks ahead). They're not entirely black boxes, as was feared to be the case before modern LLMs arrived.
It's also remarkable that RLHF works, and I'm confident that Yudkowsky was surprised by this, even if his priors didn't update that much (I recall a Twitter post along these lines). I was surprised, I remember thinking, holy shit, this works??
Note that just because a model is aligned with its creators/users, that doesn't mean that it's aligned with me. Consider the possibility that a Chinese AGI follows orders exactly understanding the CCP's intent, but said orders are to permanently disempower all non-Chinese and wrest control of the light cone (casualties are acceptable).
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