I do not think rationalists are duped more easily than normies that never heard about Less Wrong, but people who claim to be the smartest people in the world should be held to higher standard, and claim that studying their super special sequences will make anyone as smart as they are should be put to close scrutiny.
If you are boasting you are Airborne Navy Seal Ranger specially trained in gorilla warfare, and get your ass regularly kicked by ordinary drunks in bar fights, people would be justified doubting the value of super secret martial arts training you offer.
Point me where in the sequences it makes the claims that you will become unusually successful for having absorbed them? Or where they claim that they're useful to everyone. In the matrix the red pill cannot be used on just anyone. And finally, who elected these main stream media figures who were criticized as rationalist representatives? I don't even really call myself a rationalist, but these are weak swings.
I guess it hasn't made me "successful", but I do think I live a happier and more fulfilling life because of the rationalist literature. Having the tools to make the world make sense is a value in itself.
Having the tools to make the world make sense is a value in itself
Exactly. "I notice I am confused" is a damn superpower.
Before, I used to observe stuff that didn't make sense, think "Huh. That was weird," and then go on about my day.
Now I actually interrogate the phenomena until it makes sense.
If you see a coin that turns up heads 100 times in a row, your first step should really be "Let me see that fucking coin" and not "wow, what a crazy random happenstance." Hell, if you see a coin that shows heads 99 times then tails on the 100th, you should DEFINITELY demand to examine said coin.
Although this has ruined the entire concept of magic performances for me.
I relate a lot. I have not read a lot of rationalists articles, but it seems to me that a lot of what they do is share ideas amongst themselves, but these ideas are not necessarily true or important, merely interesting. Few of these ideas have anything to do with the real world.
Nassim Taleb talks about putting skin in the game as a way to escape this intellectual circle jerking, because when you confront ideas with reality is the only way to know if there's any true truth to them. This follows Karl Popper's falsification principle: if your idea cannot be falsified (in the real world), then it's worthless.
I think the reason why there are no successful rationalists is because they don't want their precious ideas to actually be tested in the real world, they'll rather keep them unopened like collectionists do, and just admire them.
Where are all the former losers who read the sequences, pulled themselves by their bootstraps and became brilliant winners?
*✋️ raises hand✋️ *
Hi, I was in a rut of depression and uncertainty and fear of the future in my early twenties, then one summer I read HPMOR, then worked through the sequences, recognized the value, and spent the next several years doing the hard work to adjust my life onto the track that allowed me to actually become happy, healthy, and financially secure. I truly enjoy life now.
Also, I tempered that knowledge with some extra examination of neuroscience, statistics/risk (Fooled by Randomness is a REALLY good book), and the art of rhetoric since, it turns out, merely thinking rationally doesn't get you very far if you can't deal with other "irrational" people in normal conversation.
A few things I credit rationality/the sequences with:
Being aware of and buying Bitcoin very early, recognizing the potential upside.
Being aware to never go all-in on Bitcoin or crypto (we see many, many people never grok this and blow up) at any given time.
Avoiding every single collapsed exchange and rugpull, from Mt.Gox to FTX, and thus never losing my gains to some unexpected event.
Pulling the fuck out of crypto when it became clear it had gone full cheap-money-fueled casino.
It is likely that I would have been one of those poor rubes who got fucked by SBF if I had not gotten my epistemic foundation built on solid ground well in advance.
Now, the caveat is that I have defined "winning" in quite modest terms. So my success is not amazing when compared to what many others who aren't rationalists have achieved. But it has put me in a position where virtually no single event (not counting X-risks) can wipe me out. And that's the fucking dream.
So I will strongly maintain that the sequences are a force for good, even if they haven't caused humanity as a species to vault to a higher state of being in a single decade.
And I did all the same as you in crypto while never fully reading the sequences (have read some but find them to be too much of a waste of time to complete) and reading HPMOR fully but considering it a joke as anything other than an amusing diversion. Meanwhile there are also plenty of people who worship the sequences and HPMOR and "rationally" dismissed or significantly underestimated crypto (as complained about on LessWrong itself many times) in its free money bonanza days despite being fully aware of it.
It seems more likely to me that you simply have decent (at least in one proven realm) intellectual instincts and latched on to sequentialist rationalism as the means through which to express them. But it's the good instincts, not the book, without which you'd be nothing, same as plenty of people who had the book but not the instincts.
I think the "good instincts" amounted to being aware that I was behaving in irrational/suboptimal ways, to my own detriment and there were probably tools out there to improve on this, if only I could find them.
The question that kept recurring in my head was "there's plenty of people who can give me advice on various decisions I'll have to make... but how the fuck can I know which advice is good?" Blindly accepting the advice of people I considered "authority figures" had already failed me badly.
That was the "bootstrap" portion of it. Being able to assess information in a systematic way so as to identify and make use of good information and, generally, discard bad/useless information (and none too soon, given how the ratio of useful to useless information has decreased exponentially).
Or, as the sequences put it, to be more confused by lies/falsehoods than truth.
I lacked any reliable tools for doing this despite having, as stated, the intuitive sense that the tools ought to exist.
Which really speaks ill of my college education, I should add.
The main way this helped in Crypto was the very early realization that nobody on the crypto subreddits knew shit about finance, they were all self-interested, and mostly dishonest (or self-deluded). So I went and learned to understand finance and ignored 99% of what the community had to say.
Only regret I have is not jumping on Dogecoin early on. Had no reason to think it would have this kind of longevity, though I did predict that it's community would fail to keep any of its early ethos intact.
I dunno, I think my life ends up very different if I never read the sequences. I would probably be one of those types who "fucking loves science" but really just uncritically accepts what experts say. And that would have caused me some problems when Covid hit.
Also, being plugged into the rationalist community (and, relatedly, /r/themotte) kept me like 3 months ahead of the curve on understanding the pandemic.
Over the years I've made better life decisions in a hundred little ways that would be hard to sufficiently articulate here, that I think the counterfactual version of me handles more poorly overall.
Also, being plugged into the rationalist community (and, relatedly, /r/themotte) kept me like 3 months ahead of the curve on understanding the pandemic.
Really? This place was overflowing with doomer takes about the pandemic as the "big one" (as opposed to the big scam) that aged terribly, and as far as I can still tell there's still no widespread recognition here that people were overly hasty and insufficiently scrupulous about their vax shilling.
If I had listened to /r/themotte I'd probably have my furniture made of worthless (or at least mostly unnecessary) N95 masks by now.
That's the thing. Themotte was quicker to see that masks might be helpful (whilst the CDC was literally saying "stop buying masks!"), but also shifting away from them as it became clear that this wasn't going to be the civilization-ending event it might have been.
The biggest insight I received from /r/themotte specifically was someone pointing out that viruses tend to mutate towards less lethal versions since that is optimal for long term spread.
Which is exactly. what. happened. Remember Omicron was more contagious and less deadly?
In absolute OCEANS of misinfo on the right and the left, and absolute collapse of expert guidance, themotte was basically the equivalent of a lighthouse in a storm.
Reddit at large was still in favor of mandatory masking FOR CHILDREN long after some posters here had already pointed out that this didn't actually help and might actually HURT young children's development. The latter being a point the CDC (I think) agreed with until it became politically unfavorable and they pulled that info from their site.
I'll go back and pull up the actual comments from the old sub if you don't believe it.
Of course, you do have to be able to sift out useful information from non useful to get the full benefit. But see my whole comment above about rationality teaching exactly that.
Fair, but I still resent the "rationalist" side of the Internet (well it wasn't all rationalists per se, but it was mostly fringey Internet commentators at least at the very beginning, not established media figures, Substacks and Mediums at best) for (and I'll admit contributing myself to some of the first point, to my regret, which is why I think it's worth pointing out):
Essentially greenlighting the whole hysteria. Sure, established authorities weren't taking the threat as seriously as they should have at the beginning and maybe needed a little kick in the pants, and sure many rationalists called BS on the alarmism once the novel virus became less novel and was revealed to be far less dangerous than initial concerns (which happened far before Omicron btw and as early as the first global strain, so anybody only admitting it then was way behind the curve), but if rationalists really were all that rational, they should have perhaps seen two steps ahead instead of just one and realized that it would be very hard to take back the panic they helped drum up once it got rolling, especially since it was known that viruses have a tendency to moderate their own mortality as they spread as you mentioned. Instead I think so many people were desperately excited to finally get to go into "X-risk" mode and prove how Serious™ they are, and then the resulting mindset of paranoid doomer absolutist safetyism was hijacked by established authorities for their totalitarian ends and became the dominant attitude of authority throughout the entirety of the pandemic until it was unceremoniously ended by Putin.
Particularly on /r/themotte (though obviously this particular issue was far worse in the non-terminally online realm in general), again the vax was shilled far beyond available sensible justification (and I haven't seen any retractions), especially for people who had supposedly appropriately absorbed SSC's reflections on metascience/the replication crisis and the flimsiness of so much "research" and so many "studies" because they are too hasty, unexacting, and corrupted by perverse incentives (like how about being conducted by the same people trying to sell the object of study as one of the most profitable pharmaceutical products of all time?). (But I'm pretty sure Siskind got the jab too (or I assume his polyorbit or whatever would have screeched at him until he had) so maybe even he didn't absorb his own reflections. Hopefully he faked getting it.)
I certainly won't say there was no insight on the subject to ever be found on /r/themotte. Its early campaign in favor of variolation was a good idea and probably would have been far superior to the vaccination we got.
The reason that you had many rationalists skeptical of the hysteria but still supporting vaccines is that rationalists tend to be scientifically trained, so even if they don't listen to the scientists who are signal-boosted by the media, they can understand what vaccines do based solely on their own knowledge.
komm-nach-unteralterbach
transhumanist libertAryan monarcho-pedo(anti-agecuck)fascist/natsoc + androsupremacist (unironic)
Jiro 1yr ago
they can understand what vaccines do based solely on their own knowledge.
If that were true then they would have been far more skeptical of taking them, especially for the younger demographics of their own community.
But no, I don't believe your average /r/themotte poster was in any way particularly "scientifically trained" in mRNA vaccine platforms before the debut of the most recent ones.
I am happy that you've found success. May you be your best self in enjoying the good that you've earned.
I would not describe myself as a rationalist, but I recognize what you've discovered--there's value to be found here, and it's worth the time to seek out. I suspect that SBF found some valuable facts about the world, but not the much more valuable attending wisdom, and proceeded to apply his lessons much less well than you've done. Perhaps he'll learn something from the ruin his mistakes have caused, but even if so, it will have been purchased at great cost to many others.
I'm increasingly convinced that SBF was acting with some level of malice aforethought and he was using EA as a decent camouflage.
But whatever he did learn from the rationalists, he missed the lessons on how deontology is extremely useful for putting up behavioral guardrails so that your fallible human hardware doesn't end up causing you to commit moral atrocities.
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Notes -
I do not think rationalists are duped more easily than normies that never heard about Less Wrong, but people who claim to be the smartest people in the world should be held to higher standard, and claim that studying their super special sequences will make anyone as smart as they are should be put to close scrutiny.
If you are boasting you are Airborne Navy Seal Ranger specially trained in gorilla warfare, and get your ass regularly kicked by ordinary drunks in bar fights, people would be justified doubting the value of super secret martial arts training you offer.
Obligatory link:
Where are All the Successful Rationalists?
Where are all the former losers who read the sequences, pulled themselves by their bootstraps and became brilliant winners?
Point me where in the sequences it makes the claims that you will become unusually successful for having absorbed them? Or where they claim that they're useful to everyone. In the matrix the red pill cannot be used on just anyone. And finally, who elected these main stream media figures who were criticized as rationalist representatives? I don't even really call myself a rationalist, but these are weak swings.
Rationality is Systematized Winning
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I guess it hasn't made me "successful", but I do think I live a happier and more fulfilling life because of the rationalist literature. Having the tools to make the world make sense is a value in itself.
Exactly. "I notice I am confused" is a damn superpower.
Before, I used to observe stuff that didn't make sense, think "Huh. That was weird," and then go on about my day.
Now I actually interrogate the phenomena until it makes sense.
If you see a coin that turns up heads 100 times in a row, your first step should really be "Let me see that fucking coin" and not "wow, what a crazy random happenstance." Hell, if you see a coin that shows heads 99 times then tails on the 100th, you should DEFINITELY demand to examine said coin.
Although this has ruined the entire concept of magic performances for me.
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I relate a lot. I have not read a lot of rationalists articles, but it seems to me that a lot of what they do is share ideas amongst themselves, but these ideas are not necessarily true or important, merely interesting. Few of these ideas have anything to do with the real world.
Nassim Taleb talks about putting skin in the game as a way to escape this intellectual circle jerking, because when you confront ideas with reality is the only way to know if there's any true truth to them. This follows Karl Popper's falsification principle: if your idea cannot be falsified (in the real world), then it's worthless.
I think the reason why there are no successful rationalists is because they don't want their precious ideas to actually be tested in the real world, they'll rather keep them unopened like collectionists do, and just admire them.
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*✋️ raises hand✋️ *
Hi, I was in a rut of depression and uncertainty and fear of the future in my early twenties, then one summer I read HPMOR, then worked through the sequences, recognized the value, and spent the next several years doing the hard work to adjust my life onto the track that allowed me to actually become happy, healthy, and financially secure. I truly enjoy life now.
Also, I tempered that knowledge with some extra examination of neuroscience, statistics/risk (Fooled by Randomness is a REALLY good book), and the art of rhetoric since, it turns out, merely thinking rationally doesn't get you very far if you can't deal with other "irrational" people in normal conversation.
A few things I credit rationality/the sequences with:
Being aware of and buying Bitcoin very early, recognizing the potential upside.
Being aware to never go all-in on Bitcoin or crypto (we see many, many people never grok this and blow up) at any given time.
Avoiding every single collapsed exchange and rugpull, from Mt.Gox to FTX, and thus never losing my gains to some unexpected event.
Pulling the fuck out of crypto when it became clear it had gone full cheap-money-fueled casino.
It is likely that I would have been one of those poor rubes who got fucked by SBF if I had not gotten my epistemic foundation built on solid ground well in advance.
Now, the caveat is that I have defined "winning" in quite modest terms. So my success is not amazing when compared to what many others who aren't rationalists have achieved. But it has put me in a position where virtually no single event (not counting X-risks) can wipe me out. And that's the fucking dream.
So I will strongly maintain that the sequences are a force for good, even if they haven't caused humanity as a species to vault to a higher state of being in a single decade.
And I did all the same as you in crypto while never fully reading the sequences (have read some but find them to be too much of a waste of time to complete) and reading HPMOR fully but considering it a joke as anything other than an amusing diversion. Meanwhile there are also plenty of people who worship the sequences and HPMOR and "rationally" dismissed or significantly underestimated crypto (as complained about on LessWrong itself many times) in its free money bonanza days despite being fully aware of it.
It seems more likely to me that you simply have decent (at least in one proven realm) intellectual instincts and latched on to sequentialist rationalism as the means through which to express them. But it's the good instincts, not the book, without which you'd be nothing, same as plenty of people who had the book but not the instincts.
I think the "good instincts" amounted to being aware that I was behaving in irrational/suboptimal ways, to my own detriment and there were probably tools out there to improve on this, if only I could find them.
The question that kept recurring in my head was "there's plenty of people who can give me advice on various decisions I'll have to make... but how the fuck can I know which advice is good?" Blindly accepting the advice of people I considered "authority figures" had already failed me badly.
That was the "bootstrap" portion of it. Being able to assess information in a systematic way so as to identify and make use of good information and, generally, discard bad/useless information (and none too soon, given how the ratio of useful to useless information has decreased exponentially).
Or, as the sequences put it, to be more confused by lies/falsehoods than truth.
I lacked any reliable tools for doing this despite having, as stated, the intuitive sense that the tools ought to exist.
Which really speaks ill of my college education, I should add.
The main way this helped in Crypto was the very early realization that nobody on the crypto subreddits knew shit about finance, they were all self-interested, and mostly dishonest (or self-deluded). So I went and learned to understand finance and ignored 99% of what the community had to say.
Only regret I have is not jumping on Dogecoin early on. Had no reason to think it would have this kind of longevity, though I did predict that it's community would fail to keep any of its early ethos intact.
I dunno, I think my life ends up very different if I never read the sequences. I would probably be one of those types who "fucking loves science" but really just uncritically accepts what experts say. And that would have caused me some problems when Covid hit.
Also, being plugged into the rationalist community (and, relatedly, /r/themotte) kept me like 3 months ahead of the curve on understanding the pandemic.
Over the years I've made better life decisions in a hundred little ways that would be hard to sufficiently articulate here, that I think the counterfactual version of me handles more poorly overall.
Really? This place was overflowing with doomer takes about the pandemic as the "big one" (as opposed to the big scam) that aged terribly, and as far as I can still tell there's still no widespread recognition here that people were overly hasty and insufficiently scrupulous about their vax shilling.
If I had listened to /r/themotte I'd probably have my furniture made of worthless (or at least mostly unnecessary) N95 masks by now.
That's the thing. Themotte was quicker to see that masks might be helpful (whilst the CDC was literally saying "stop buying masks!"), but also shifting away from them as it became clear that this wasn't going to be the civilization-ending event it might have been.
The biggest insight I received from /r/themotte specifically was someone pointing out that viruses tend to mutate towards less lethal versions since that is optimal for long term spread.
Which is exactly. what. happened. Remember Omicron was more contagious and less deadly?
In absolute OCEANS of misinfo on the right and the left, and absolute collapse of expert guidance, themotte was basically the equivalent of a lighthouse in a storm.
Reddit at large was still in favor of mandatory masking FOR CHILDREN long after some posters here had already pointed out that this didn't actually help and might actually HURT young children's development. The latter being a point the CDC (I think) agreed with until it became politically unfavorable and they pulled that info from their site.
I'll go back and pull up the actual comments from the old sub if you don't believe it.
Of course, you do have to be able to sift out useful information from non useful to get the full benefit. But see my whole comment above about rationality teaching exactly that.
Fair, but I still resent the "rationalist" side of the Internet (well it wasn't all rationalists per se, but it was mostly fringey Internet commentators at least at the very beginning, not established media figures, Substacks and Mediums at best) for (and I'll admit contributing myself to some of the first point, to my regret, which is why I think it's worth pointing out):
Essentially greenlighting the whole hysteria. Sure, established authorities weren't taking the threat as seriously as they should have at the beginning and maybe needed a little kick in the pants, and sure many rationalists called BS on the alarmism once the novel virus became less novel and was revealed to be far less dangerous than initial concerns (which happened far before Omicron btw and as early as the first global strain, so anybody only admitting it then was way behind the curve), but if rationalists really were all that rational, they should have perhaps seen two steps ahead instead of just one and realized that it would be very hard to take back the panic they helped drum up once it got rolling, especially since it was known that viruses have a tendency to moderate their own mortality as they spread as you mentioned. Instead I think so many people were desperately excited to finally get to go into "X-risk" mode and prove how Serious™ they are, and then the resulting mindset of paranoid doomer absolutist safetyism was hijacked by established authorities for their totalitarian ends and became the dominant attitude of authority throughout the entirety of the pandemic until it was unceremoniously ended by Putin.
Particularly on /r/themotte (though obviously this particular issue was far worse in the non-terminally online realm in general), again the vax was shilled far beyond available sensible justification (and I haven't seen any retractions), especially for people who had supposedly appropriately absorbed SSC's reflections on metascience/the replication crisis and the flimsiness of so much "research" and so many "studies" because they are too hasty, unexacting, and corrupted by perverse incentives (like how about being conducted by the same people trying to sell the object of study as one of the most profitable pharmaceutical products of all time?). (But I'm pretty sure Siskind got the jab too (or I assume his polyorbit or whatever would have screeched at him until he had) so maybe even he didn't absorb his own reflections. Hopefully he faked getting it.)
I certainly won't say there was no insight on the subject to ever be found on /r/themotte. Its early campaign in favor of variolation was a good idea and probably would have been far superior to the vaccination we got.
The reason that you had many rationalists skeptical of the hysteria but still supporting vaccines is that rationalists tend to be scientifically trained, so even if they don't listen to the scientists who are signal-boosted by the media, they can understand what vaccines do based solely on their own knowledge.
If that were true then they would have been far more skeptical of taking them, especially for the younger demographics of their own community.
But no, I don't believe your average /r/themotte poster was in any way particularly "scientifically trained" in mRNA vaccine platforms before the debut of the most recent ones.
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I am happy that you've found success. May you be your best self in enjoying the good that you've earned.
I would not describe myself as a rationalist, but I recognize what you've discovered--there's value to be found here, and it's worth the time to seek out. I suspect that SBF found some valuable facts about the world, but not the much more valuable attending wisdom, and proceeded to apply his lessons much less well than you've done. Perhaps he'll learn something from the ruin his mistakes have caused, but even if so, it will have been purchased at great cost to many others.
I'm increasingly convinced that SBF was acting with some level of malice aforethought and he was using EA as a decent camouflage.
But whatever he did learn from the rationalists, he missed the lessons on how deontology is extremely useful for putting up behavioral guardrails so that your fallible human hardware doesn't end up causing you to commit moral atrocities.
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