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It seems lately that within the rationalist / post-rationalist diaspora on twitter and elsewhere, polyamory is starting to come into the crosshairs. I've seen a few 'big' accounts in the tpot space come out against polyamory, but the biggest one has to be the recent post that Kat Woods put on the Slate Star Codex subreddit, Why I think polyamory is net negative for most people who try it.
I wont summarize the whole article, but recommend you go read it. The TL;DR is:
Also, a rather hilarious quote from the middle:
In general, I think this is a continuation of the vibe shift against social experimentation within the rationalist communities, trying to push them back a bit more towards 'normal' social standards. It has been happening for quite a while, and I'm not surprised it continues to happen. My basic view is that while the experimentation and willingness to shrug off societal norms led to a lot of fascinating and good new ideas within rationalist groups, unfortunately, as always happens with these sorts of things, issues arose that reminded people why these ideas were fringe in the first place.
For those not steeped in rationalist lore, there have been many 'cult-like' groups that have hurt people arising in the rationalist and especially EA space. Some of the early and notable ones were Ziz, the whole Leverage fiasco, and then of course later on you have the highest profile issue with SBF. But these are just the most notable and even news worthy. On top of these there are dozens, probably hundreds, of smaller scale dramas that have played out in day to day life, similar to what Kat talked about above.
I actually think her point about drama scaling with more surface area in polyamory to be quite salient here. In general one of the purposes of societal norms and rules is to make sure everyone knows how they and others are supposed to act, so that arguments over constraints and less annoying and difficult. When you throw out major parts of societal norms, things get complicated very quickly.
Of course the whole polyamory issue ties into the broader culture war in many ways - notably the push back we've seen against wokeism, and the radical left more generally. I think overall the appetite people have for radically changing social norms has shrunk dramatically over the last few years. Sadly, I am not sure that necessarily means we'll go back to a healthy, stable balance. Looking at the people on the conservative side, the loudest champions of a traditional moral order seem to be grifters, or at least hypocrites where they say one thing, and do another in their personal lives.
That being said, I am hopeful that the uneasy alliance between the new conservative, Trumpian movement and traditional Christians is finally fracturing. To bring in another CW point, Trump recently posted an AI generated image of himself as the Pope. This understandably pissed off a lot of Christians, and led to them ending their support for Trump's antics. (I happen to be one of them.)
To which his response is, basically, "why can't you take a joke?"
Anyway, I am curious to see where all these social norms shake out, especially with regards to relationships and dating.
Always has been, this happens every few years. Was Kat's post the origin post for this round, or was she prompted by something else? It's been over a year since poly did the New Yorker/NPR/etc circuit.
There's a few issues around it. One of which is the typical-minding by the WEIRDest people around, and outside of a small, hyper-selected group influenced by the Berkeley egregore, such experimentation has a much higher failure rate. There's also the "what is the rationalist community for" question that was asked and left largely-unresolved several years ago, by Sarah Constantin and Zvi part one, Zvi part two that explicitly says polyamory is bad. Zvi's post always struck me as so idealistic it crosses well into arrogance, but I get that was also the atmosphere at the time- changing the world in wild ways and encouraging adoption of poorly-tested social technologies that may not generalize is something to be incredibly careful with, and broadly, they're not.
Didn't Sam Altman suggest that in Yudkowsky's efforts to inoculate against paperclipping AI he basically hyperstitioned the field into existence? The anti-human branches of AI researchers are almost certainly a rationalist-descended cult-like phenomenon.
It's never really been clear the degree to which rationalist/EA spaces are prone to certain kinds of sex pest, or just unusually public at writing blog posts about them rather than quietly jettisoning them.
Exceedingly few "true conservatives" are able to win in the attention economy. This says something important about communication of conservative ideologies, though I'm not entirely sure what, and perhaps says even more about the terribleness of ideologies that are able to win within the attention economy.
I've certainly seen similar thoughts suggested in places. You can certainly question whether Musk would have helped create OpenAI without having encountered Yudkowsky's ideas, but it's hard to reason on how much OpenAI particularly pushed forwards the current AI paradigms. Would they have been discovered elsewhere? It's worth remembering that machine learning models had a renaissance several years before LLMs, with self-driving cars being the initial ignition factor. This was back when LessWrong and associated platforms were still super niche.
There's also the question for AI doomers of what the cost/benefit would be. Let's say that Yudkowsky's writing brought forward AGI by 10 years. However, what would be the state of AI safety if he never started writing? Having an extra 10 years for a far smaller AI safety movement could easily be a worse outcome.
Personally I think the question of what the purpose of rationalism is has been answered: it was to create the AI safety movement. Yudkowsky built up rationalism into a "big tent" to attract more interest and provide intellectual scaffolding. Over the years rationalism has splintered into various more effective sub groups, including AI safety but also EA and its associated movements. Rationalism was never coherent enough, but these smaller groups have accomplished important things.
Rationalism accomplished its job in creating these, and now the original husk still just soldiers on, oblivious to it's obsolescence.
This was never a question - Yudkowsky set up the so-called rationalist community with the explicit purpose of creating a future generation of AI safety researchers. Or rather AI researchers more generally, because at the point when he did it (LessWrong was founded in 2009) AlphaGo was still years away, academic AI (both the GOFAI and neural nets factions) was in a long-term rut, and the state of the art was machine learning algorithms for recommending viral content. As of 2009, Yudkowsky thought that the problem was "build an aligned AI slowly and secretly" because nobody else was doing anything he expected to lead to working AI.
My assumption is that an underrated source of weirdness in the rationalists community is that the first thing Yudkowsky did to promote this community was to write a viral Harry Potter fanfic, meaning that the 2nd generation of rationalists (after the Overcoming Bias readers) were pulled in from Harry Potter fandom, bringing everything wrong with that community into "Rationalism".
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