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Im a bit surprised noone talked about it last week, but a big post came out about the history of Leverage Research. It was a major organisation in the same social circles as early Rationalism, but fell into disgrace shortly before covid after thoroughly driving themselves insane with woo/cult adjacent stuff. I was somewhat familiar with the case from back then, but reading this some things really came together for me, and I feel I now understand much better why the in-person rats are like that.
Reading this, there where many times where people seemed to me stupidly impressed by something. What little Ive seen of Anders (the founder/leader) psychological theory, that convinced so many he was worth working with, was the same. Why did they fall for this?
I think its because many of the people who got into Rationalism/EA/etc, did it because they Fucking Love Science. There really arent many places now where people believe in the power of science to transform the world in a big way, beyond what you need to rattle off to secure grants/investments, and it makes total sense that these people would be enamoured with it. There was of course also methodological thinking going on in rationalism, but these people would variously: adopt something from it as their shiny new tool, learn others as a shibboleth only, or saw the issue in self-improvment rather than understanding. They didnt do a systematic evaluation of methods generally, and keep it as a going concern in the back of their head, the way someone else might have done, and might have expected more people to do, if they didnt have in-person contact.
I dont want to blame them for this too much; I didnt get deep into methodology because I saw it as necessary for my journey to science utopia, either. I like science and all, but I got into methodology because I find it interesting for its own sake; from the rationalist perspective, Im drastically lacking in agency/urgency, its just that this is less personally harmful and more socially normal than what happened to them.
Measuring from the other end, the only case I clearly know of who really did develop significant methodological understanding because he thought it was neccessary for his project, is Yud. What did it take to make him do that? He thought he had previously been on course to destroy the world. The defense rests its case.
The "scene" is also bigger than just Rationalism, and the people who got into Leverage very deep may not have had as much contact with it as we might think someone moving to SF for this would. Still, a lot of social pathologies in the ratsphere make far more sense to me with a weaker version of this mechanism in mind.
I mean, we're all weirdoes to some degree on here and the other sibling sites. So Rationalism as per the Bay Area bubble is going to have a higher than usual proportion of weirdoes (not to mention that San Francisco is where you run off to when you're not fitting in to your family and environment along hippy-dippy/spiritual/socially heterodox lines).
Cult-like behaviour that goes overboard on exploring the hidden secrets of the universe and how we can exploit them for fun and profit is a long-established tradition in California, combine that with enthusiasm about brain-hacking and nootropics and melting your gray matter in the name of making yourself an evolved enlightened superbeing, and I'm not surprised you get all the woo creeping in.
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So I started reading this when Gwern posted it. Closed out partway through. Something about this sort of retrospective feels like a real…guilty pleasure? Voyeurism? Like I’m engaging in the kind of behavior that annoys me about Kiwifarms. Point and laugh at the bizarro cult.
Sometimes I’ll get sucked in to watching bodycam channels. Random police officers shooting violent criminals, that sort of thing. Usually censored—I’m not looking for gore—but still pretty macabre, no? Hence, guilty pleasure. If I had a real habit of it I think it would seriously skew my model of how policing or crime actually work.
So when I got that feeling reading this, I felt like I should stop giving it attention. Maybe that makes me a bad rationalist. “That weird cult which can be destroyed by the truth should be.” Guess I need to go do some reiki about it.
My consumption of Kiwi Farms and police bodycams is, admittedly, primarily for entertainment, but I always draw lessons in the kind of mistakes one should avoid if they wish to not cause problems for themself. "Don't groom kids" is a lesson from KF and "don't point guns at cops" is a lesson from the bodycams.
I see this retrospective in the same way. Here's what happened, here are the mistakes they made, and here's how to do better.
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I’m a junkie for the right kind of community drama, but I couldn’t get into this. All this woo stuff is incredibly lame and boring. The text is functionally indistinguishable from a narrative of one’s experiences with hallucinogens at Burning Man. I didn’t take the drugs, and I have no intention of taking those drugs. SBF tried to rootkit the United States Government and almost succeeded. Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are building god as we speak. What did Leverage Research ever do?
“Well, in 200 years Sam and Sam are going to need a Second Foundation. Guess we better get a head start.”
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Unfortunately, compsci and finance beat psychology on a field to field basis. It's really sad that this is the case, because psychology is cooler. Leverage is the attempt to compete with psychology, Anthropic uses compsci, and SBF tried to use finance.
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There's a lot to unpack here. But what strikes me is that so many "rationalists" turn out to be susceptible to basic bitch woo tactics.
You would expect a hard core of rationalist autists who wouldn't fall for this, but it seems hard to decide a priori who they are, and certainly many of the characters here would seem to fit the bill. It's unclear to me to what extent rationalism is even protective against this stuff, certainly many people in the genpop would head for the door once the crystals come out.
If you can fool rationalists with the usual bag of tricks, that seems pretty bad for the "rationalists should win" project.
I'm surprised that people are surprised by this, to be honest?
If I think about 'rationalists', I think about people who are really into 'AI safety', who experiment with and use nootropics, who are keen on inventing and trying new life hacks, who are actively interested in reinventing things like relationship models from the ground up, and who for some reason are associated with California and the Bay Area...
Obviously that's a group that are going to be into woo because, well, they're already into woo. They always have been. They're already cousins of traditional hippies, right? They're pro-tech where the older generation of hippies tended to be anti, but you can see the kinship, surely?
It's a weird version of the story to tell themselves.
There's a version of post-rat that buy into woo because it's woo. There's a version of the normal rat that buys into woo because oh there's there's really fascinating and counterinuitive and probably-fake theory but it's a minor cost and there goes the Pascal's Wager; that's the popsci version of Roko's Basilisk. There's a version of the normal rat that buys into woo just because they miss the woo; arguably, the original HPMOR-era fascination with Kahnneman fits here.
But that's not what happened, here.
Leverage's people seem, at least from the summary here, to have purchased into the central example of a thing that their mainstay texts specifically highlight as not working. It's like a Christian worshiping a bronze bull, or a tech guy being happy about Microsoft's business practices.
Of course, SBF bought a concussionball endorsement for his 'EA'-themed organization, and that was also a central example of bad charity.
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I don't know that it's "surprising" per se. But I think that the rationalists would say that nootropics and the things you listed are not woo, so it's just rational to be into them, while they would readily admit that crystals are woo so it's irrational to be into them. In other words, the rationalists are being irrational by their own standards and are susceptible to the same things they claim to not be susceptible to. Everyone, rationalist or not, can agree on these facts.
Sure, but that's exactly the same thing a homeopath or a chiropractor would say. The word 'woo' is pejorative. Nobody uses it of himself or herself. I think the subculture is the interesting part. Whether it's nootropics or the older counter-culture embrace of mind-affecting drugs, or to take substances out of it entirely, the way that both original-flavour-hippies and rationalists have gotten really into meditation, Buddhism, Hinduism, and eastern spirituality, I think there's a noticeable qualitative similarity.
They totally do. Recent example.
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I was always under the impression that a core part of the Rationalist project was rejecting prior societal judgement of things and instead autistically determining effectiveness through experiment and first principles.
I don’t see why “crystals are woo” would be any less thrown-out than “computers aren’t alive” or “polyamorous relationships are bad.” Heck, even just the prior step of “woo stuff is ineffective/bad” would have to be thrown out to start to have any ideological coherence: Frankly I’d be disappointed in any Rationalist project that didn’t address woo topics from a neutral open-minded perspective.
This seems to be true in practice, but plenty on this forum (and I'd put myself in their number) would consider Chesterton's thoughts on fences to be quite rational as well in the general case. There is probably room enough to argue that both can coexist as "rational", but that us humans tend to smuggle in our prior value systems at any opportunity: Left-leaning rationalists (in the Bay Area) find leftism completely rational; right-leaning rationalists (here, I suppose?) find rightism completely rational. I'm not sure either can really claim a monopoly on "rational truth".
Oh I certainly agree with that in practice, but it seemed to me that it was just a sad deviation from the theory, rather than an actual doctrinal goal (to the extent that a loose group of people who frequent certain blogs can be said to have a doctrine). Of course, like any loose set of ideas, each person carries their own personal bundle.
I don’t doubt that everyone smuggled in their own values via intuitions, and I have my own per theory that this is because values are mostly actually just expressions of biologically rooted emotional reactions.
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The difference between superstitio and religio goes both ways. Nonreligious people can believe in, and regularly do believe in, ghosts, animism, astrology, voodoo, etc.
Youre the second religious person to say something like this, but thats not the surprising thing. If I thought these people had no selection beyond "nonreligious", I wouldnt have wondered to begin with. The problem is that my window into all this where the rat fora, but the in-person community is much less defined by self-selecting into that specifically, and much more by Bay-Area-diffusion.
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I wonder if sometimes that's a natural result of forming a sufficiently complete/complex model of reality to basically explain almost everything you encounter, and yet realizing it is still incomplete, or unsatisfactory. You keep having to push back the explanation of 'where it all came from' to the big bang and then... what?
If there's not something else out there, and if that something doesn't transcend our understanding of physics, then how in the hell did we get the rules known as 'physics' in the first place?
And if you can't let that thought rest, it opens the door to many things being possible. Believing in ghosts isn't so 'odd' if you're already theorizing about alternate timelines and the existence of higher dimensions that could harbor intelligent life.
And of course, the belief in superintelligence being possible... well that creates an opening for all sorts of weird things that could happen to you.
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I did my Mormon mission in the Czech Republic. The Czechs have been in a fierce competition with the Estonians for a few decades over who can be the most atheist country in the world. Estonia appears to have a slight edge in the competition. Estimates range from approximately 1/2 to about 2/3 of either country being atheists.
Having talked to an extremely high number of (ostensibly atheist) Czechs about religion, I learned something important: being nominally atheist often doesn't mean believing in strict adherence to rationalism, the scientific method, etc. as a source of knowledge. I'd estimate that the overwhelming majority of "atheist" Czechs believed in what could loosely be called "new age gibberish" or "woo".
My point being: most people are not actually rationalists, and it's not surprising to see this, even amongst self-proclaimed rationalists. I'm not either, I think it's a retarded ideology, largely for reasons that were best covered by C. S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man when he talks about "men without chests" so I won't retread them here. But people who are strict about adherence to finding knowledge exclusively through "rational" methods are the exception, not the rule. Even amongst "rationalists".
Well, Czechia is not paradise on Earth, but according to most official statistical metrics and impressions of visitors and expats it is one of the best countries of the world. Including homicide and general crime rate.
This example alone rather disproves common religious argument that without faith there is no morality.
For example, here is local crime blotter - use autotranslator and see that most newsworthy habbenings from 10M country are traffic accidents and low rent scams and thefts. No deluge of grisly murders and gang violence, as you would expect from similar sized highly religious US state or city.
Yes, the birth rate is low, but this is the case for all developed countries. Generally, it is unclear how would Czechs benefit from conversion to Mormonism and giving up alcohol, including beer.
I wasn't making any kinds of arguments about the relationship between religion and morality though? I was talking about atheism not inherently leading to pure rationalism, and arguing that this explains at least in part why so many in the ratsphere seem to get caught up in new age woo. And then arguing that pure rationalism isn't even desirable anyways.
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Atheists have had Chests for at least as long as Lucretius's "On the Nature of Things"
You may disagree with their conceptions. You may find it despicable even.
But they have always had chests.
I'm not claiming atheists don't have chests, I'm claiming rationalists generally don't.
That is a fair distinction
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"In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful."
Thanks for pulling the quote!
A rationalist might try to argue that loyalty can be derived from first principles. "It's important to express loyalty because of [insert game theory or some other retarded bullshit here]!" But loyalty and honor do not spring forth from rational considerations, they come from our feelings, our chests. Rational and material considerations can override loyalty (sometimes in ways that most would consider traitorous), but the very idea of traitorousness depends entirely on the the feelings of loyalty that they betray.
This famous meme of a frustrated Jacksonville Jaguars fan wouldn't exist in a world of pure rationalists. No one would stay a fan of such a team that pretty consistently failed to make it to the playoffs, let alone the Super Bowl:
https://tenor.com/view/confused-jaguarsfan-what-gif-4503901
Yes because they regard as the highest form of morality and integrity the consistent following of Truth, logical, rational truth and reason to wherever it may lead. When the conclusion from first principles matches common sense, at least you still have a cool story for why you do the common thing. When it deviates, then it's a moral imperative to follow through with the logical derivation and disregard normie common sense, since if you fell back to normie common sense each time a conclusion is "strange", especially when the stakes are high, then what even differentiates you from a larper who just vibes on rationalism but doesn't put their money where their mouth is? Skin in the game! And anyway, if you didn't choose your intellect and reason over normie grass touching, then how are you superior to them anyway? If you're at the end of the day also just running normie script, then it would turn out that your life has to also be judged according to normie criteria. You're no longer a wizard among muggles with the special power of Logic and Intellect (no coincidence that HPMOR is a fanfic of HP).
And they eternally conflate external explanatory analysis and first-person choices.
This disgust at the calculated "loyalty-like" behavior that appears to be loyalty but is actually some kind of conscious game theory or whatnot, seems related to women's ick about finding out that someone used PUA tactics on them. They just want a guy to be attracted and to act "naturally". Same here. You want the man to be loyal "naturally", not just because they feel this is the best tactic and course of action right now to achieve their objectives.
'Calculated loyalty' does not sound the same as 'loyalty' to me. That's like saying nobody should prefer butter over 'I can't believe it's not butter'.
At least for the meme of women being upset that PUAs are faking confidence and are not actually the kind of men that they represent themselves to be, there is actually a chance that they grow closer to the female ideal through 'fake-it-til-you-make-it'.
Interesting recent comment on the importance of loyalty, trust, fealty, in a medieval context.
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All(most) rationalists are atheists, but not all atheists are rationalists.
I think rationalism is kind of like stoicism (both philosophies I like and try to practice, though I don't really "identify" as either a rationalist or a stoic) - the basic outlines are unobjectionable and sensible, and more people would benefit by them, but the more fine-grained you get, the harder it is to be a "true" rationalist/stoic. Nobody can act with pure rationalism or stoicism all the time, and the more seriously you take it the more you become entangled in questions of "what is the real rationalist/stoic answer, anyway?"
Note that Ryan Holiday, the most famous Stoic influencer online, regularly seems to have embarrassing emotional meltdowns in public, usually over politics. A lesson in that for dealing with Actually Existing Rationalism, too.
I think a lot of modern stoic practitioners consider Ryan Holiday to be one of the many $toic grifters who gives the philosophy a bad name. Of course, there's always going to be the "no true Scotsman" problem, but the problem of Stoics in name only is a much older problem, if Epictetus is anything to by:
I agree - I have a high opinion of Stoicism, hence the lesson about figures in the movement who seek "thought leadership" positions.
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They are absolutely different philosophies. Ethically, Stoicism (similar to Christian ethics) is virtue ethics system, rationalists/Yudkowskyans are utilitarian consequentialists. Stoicism is focused on individual and it teaches how individuals can lead a virtuous life. One of the principles is Hierocles’ Concentric Circles (similar to Catholic subsidiarity) where responsibility flows from virtuous individual to virtuous broader society. Yudkowskyian rationalists have completely opposite system, they ground their morality in "greater good" of Effective Altruism, where they obsess about macro level and maximizing utility for maximum number of conscious beings including those not yet born.
Rationalists are reductionist materialists/physicalists. The universe is dead, intelligence is emergent property of unthinking universal wavefunction, morality is accident of evolutionary engineering of biological computers that gave birth to human intelligence. Stoics believed that the universe has telos, that it is a thinking organism and by being virtuous you align with this universal telos - it is similar to Thomistics natural law philosophy.
Those two systems could not be more different. In fact it is one of my main criticism of Rationalists.
The Stoics were also materialists/physicalists, even if they did believe in a divine telos, as you say.
-- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.17
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I'm aware they are different philosophies, though I disagree that they "could not be more different." I find them similar in their systemic approaches. As I said, I don't identify with either or take either one as ground truth about the nature of reality.
They are not only different, they are opposite to each other in all ways that matter. They are bitter enemies.
Their similarity is in following logical, thought-out principles. The real opposite is normiedom, i.e. just do whatever everyone else is doing, and "we do it like this because we've always been doing it like this, my father and his father did it so as well" and I live my life like this because that's what everyone else expects and they would point their fingers and laugh at me otherwise. It also differs from the morality that the tyrant would want to install in everyone which boils down to "I do it because I was ordered to do it".
Both Stoicism and rationalism are about taking control of your own simpleton mind and applying superior individual control over it using one's own willpower and superseding the trappings of regular normal-people thinking. I know that this is a broad umbrella, but "just be a normal person and do what everyone else is doing, go with the flow, don't ever be weird" is the true opposite pole.
This is actually a false dilemma fallacy, you can use the same logic to show how any coherent philosophical system has more in common with one another compared to "normiedom". Additionally it is self-defeating specifically from rationalist perspective. Adhering to tradition and proclaiming normie beliefs is absolutely a rational thing to do. One can argue that these norms are just highly-optimized and time tested heuristics. My argument is that following stoic as opposed to rationalist philosophy would lead to a completely different heuristics and norms.
There is no need to sneer at it. In fact stoics did not sneer at simpletons, they saw them as agents with spark of logos fully capable of manifesting it. Additionally one of four cardinal virtues of stoics was wisdom in both senses - Sophia as understanding of math and logic, but also Phronesis as practical wisdom rooted in tradition. Plus again stoics were interested in personal virtue, many of their individual or societal prescriptions would be sneered at by rationalist as backwards and "irrational" in Yudkowskian utilitarian/consequentialist sense.
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You seem more invested in the conflict than I am, but it doesn't bother me. While I wouldn't call myself a "stoic rationalist" or a "rationalist stoic," I wouldn't scoff at the label.
I think the part that hangs you up is the discipline of stoicism I find the least relevant, that of Physics, concerning the nature of God. I find stoicism more interesting in its mental practices and its connection to CBT.
Sure, you can also say that you are atheistic theist and that they both have in common that they discuss God and that it makes you feel good as part of your CBT. I am not denying that, I am just arguing that saying I think rationalism is kind of like stoicism is incoherent, that is all.
Well, I understand your opinion. I think you're wrong and honestly, being a little silly here, but I am not trying to persuade you to be either a rationalist or a stoic.
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