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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16083 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 12, 2026

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First off, it was a movement which explicitly selected for people who struggled with naturally, what's the phrase, "overcoming bias" (non-rationalists who do this naturally do it in very fuzzy ways, the classic intelligence/wisdom thing).

Maybe I’ve just been swayed by the Rationalists’ PR campaign, but I’d wager that the average Rationalist is better at overcoming bias than the average human (which is not to say that they’re immune to it, far from it); or at the very least, people who are naturally better at overcoming bias are more likely to be drawn to Rationalism as a hobby or social group.

The average human is very bad at overcoming bias, and the Rationalists are perhaps not much better, but I’d still be inclined to put them on the upper end of the bell curve. The average person just does not think about this stuff at all, so they’re usually just going to unreflectively reify whatever biases they walk in with.

Maybe I’ve just been swayed by the Rationalists’ PR campaign, but I’d wager that the average Rationalist is better at overcoming bias than the average human (which is not to say that they’re immune to it, far from it); or at the very least, people who are naturally better at overcoming bias are more likely to be drawn to Rationalism as a hobby or social group.

Yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're better at recognizing their own limitations at overcoming bias. There could certainly be a type of overcoming-bias Dunning-Kreuger effect, where people who are better at overcoming bias are also more likely to overestimate their true ability to do so.

The average human is really really dumb, but there are also plenty of normal people who are not like that and didn't need to spend years reading LessWrong to get there. The positive side of the Rationalist coin is that it was a really effective program for self-improvement for nerdy tech people to deal with their struggles with overcoming bias, which helps them thinking about the things they're building, which have turned out to be the most important things in the world. But it's like saying people in Alcoholics Anonymous are really good at not drinking.

I'd take the opposite angle from that. Rationalists are fairly good at reducing their own biases as individuals: take any constrained problem, and they'll find more unbiased answers to it than the general population. But biases are useful: the distributed rationality of human culture and history has granted us biases that are actually quite useful, and attempting to redo thousands of years of learned experience in a couple days or weeks is bound to fail given the limits of human brains, even if aided by holy texts like the Sequences (or Harry Potter fanfic).

The arrogance that you can discard all that accumulated human knowledge is how you get caught in loops around shrimp welfare or how you start thinking it's a good idea to throw Slutcons.

Most real-life perennial problems are not merely constrained but overconstrained: no solution exists which meets all the constraints. "Rationalists" are terrible at those.

That's a good lens. I might go further and say that rationalists then decide that if a problem is overconstrained and no solution exists, then there must be a problem with the set of constraints, and so one or another must be discarded. Which leads them to follow optimal solutions to idealized problems that don't map to reality.

Ahistorical ragebait slander. "Overcoming Bias" was not a support group for people who were knowingly below average at overcoming bias.

"Oh they just happened to stumble into being foundationally early to the most important thing that has ever happened that even now normies are still denying, but it was just a coincidence, they're actually worse than a dentist at evaluating reality"

Retarded thoughtless ragebait slander.

Calm down.

Sorry, did I touch a nerve? The thing is, being the kind of guy who needs to do a GPT-style "Thinking..." before every line of dialogue is not being good at overcoming bias, it's figuring out how to spend a lot of your tokens to get where a wise dentist (a small subset of dentists, of course) just kind of is.

I give kudos to rationalists figuring out the importance of AI, but they were not exactly the first to do so (the theories they're working with have not meaningfully changed since Turing and von Neumann, they've just added a lot of epicycles on top of what the greats had figured in 1950). This has been a longtime preoccupation of the smartest people in tech, particularly when not distracted by profitable fads. Rationalism got them, through great struggle, where they should have been anyway. Which is great! You can get a lot of clarity out of not being an alcoholic, too.

I am not a rationalist, not particularly a Yud-style FOOM-doomer, I have never made a habit of reading LessWrong, I don't particularly like Yud beyond greatly appreciating him as a unique historical character, and I think Yud is spiralling here and too (honestly! he actually believes this!) terrified to control himself anymore.

That is immaterial to this argument. LessWrong/rationalism/etc, as a loose association of people, tendencies, discussions, thoughts, and downstream influencees, is incredibly substantially tied to the ongoing revolution in AI, and not just or even primarily through dogmatic hard-dooming.

It's not just a coincidence that they ended up there and your dentist did not. To develop a novel thought beyond your priors, you need to actually do some rollouts. Their rollouts without feedback did much better than a streetwise normie. What did your dentist think mattered in 2026 from his 2022?

Some of their rollouts turn out to have been wrong and some of them have now become too fixated to update about it. Fine. "They could have just been von Neumann instead" is not much of an attack.

People purely reacting to AI-doomerism (you) have become ahistorically unhinged about this.

I am reacting to the original premise of LessWrong/rationalism, the idea that you can improve your life and decisions through the explicit cultivation of rational judgment, and the personality type it attracted 10-15 years ago. I'll leave it to the audience to decide who's acting unhinged.

This comment will age poorly if we are still alive in 2030 (I am p(!doom by 2030) ~= 99.9%) given that the rationalists have claimed, much like global warmers, that we will not be, thanks to GPT 8 or whatever.

In fact, I think there will still be JavaScript jobs in 2030. Maybe fewer, but > 0.

Rationalists downloaded their AI takes not from Yud's watered down and microwave reheated logical positivism & probability theory posts, but from sci-fi. That's why every correct idea they have (AI will be important) is wrapped up with fantasy like p(doom by 2030) > 25% and « a smart AI will break out of its box by perfectly manipulating humans by discovering the magical cheat code combo of words to string out that breaks human brains to make them perfectly compliant » (which Scott Alexander recently said was a strawman of his position, but which I'm pretty sure these people, not him but people in his status hierarchy that he works with, literally used to argue in the 2010s. He hates facing consequences for his status decisions like being held accountable for views that he tolerates for such purposes).

If it were real rationality they would have a rational view of AI, which I try somewhat hard to have. They have an extremist view of AI.

My p(doom) is still around 0%. The AI doomers have still not provided a convincing argument for how AI actually breaks containment. The most realistic disaster scenario would involve AI being put in control of infrastructure and then malfunctioning because it misread some signal.

I'm surprised that you consider that point persuasive, given that we've had several incidents of agents breaking containment or people not even successfully configuring the equivalent of a cardboard box around the agent.

I am talking about AI, not doom.

I am not sure how you don't understand the relationship between AI, and AI-doom, and how that fits into what I wrote, but whatever. Read this again maybe:

Rationalists downloaded their AI takes not from Yud's watered down and microwave reheated logical positivism & probability theory posts, but from sci-fi. That's why every correct idea they have (AI will be important) is wrapped up with fantasy like p(doom by 2030) > 25% and « a smart AI will break out of its box by perfectly manipulating humans by discovering the magical cheat code combo of words to string out that breaks human brains to make them perfectly compliant »

In other words I agree completely with @Bartender_Venator 's response to you, and will add you are committing a logical fallacy I have seen before, wherein you attribute what is correct but not original to a thinker you like spuriously, and ignore what is original and not correct, particularly when most of what is not original is correct and most of what is original is incorrect. That is what is going on here.

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