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Notes -
Disclaimer: this is a serious test for shady thinking. My apologies. Consider this a strawman, and please try to confront a steelman.
Note: see disclaimer above. This is shady thinking in note format.
EDIT: This is mostly in response to https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-is-the-academic-job-market-so particularly thinking about Scott analyzing how the academic job market actually works. I bet Scott's analysis is super annoying to many of those in the market, and likewise super satisfying to others. My thesis is that the others are rationalists and the many are not.
idea
rationalists explain foreign things from "first principles"
they liken themselves to newton and hooke, exploring new frontiers
for better or worse
to the experts in the field, they are cringe and dilettante, sneer worthy
the problem
within every field, there are certain "touchy areas"
everyone understands the truth but pretends not to
a bigger problem
rationalists home in on touchy areas
rationalists can't "understand the truth but pretend not to"
rationalists "say the quiet part out loud"
the solution
demonize the rationalists
sneer at the rationalists
how cringe, what baby
This sounds like something a rationalist would say. I don't think we should ask rationalists about what makes rationalists special.
One big problem with human movements is they're founded on ideas, but select for traits, as the matching – if imperfectly – phenotype for their objective function is discovered. Martial arts turn out to be mostly about finding the guy with the most ape-like skeleton, social studies reward cutthroat political sloganeering, and rationalists become a particular breed of neurotic high-IQ systemizers – plus people who want to bask in their light. They can do well in analyzing bullshit in some domain just because they're smart enough; their interest in discussing it publicly is explained by incentives in their community (or lack thereof; as we can see, prestige rats have excised HBD bros from their ranks). This isn't the special part of what makes them a cohesive set.
I like this thread, very illuminating:
(To be honest, sometimes I have nightmares about this. Like, yesterday).
This is an almost perfect description of someone like @Quantumfreakonomics, I think.
The intersection of people who identify strongly with their intelligence and have an OCD-like anxiety about doing wrong is the natural substrate for rationalism, the tradition of cultivating correct thought processes. It's as pecuilar as some Gnostic sect, and while there's a central doctrine about questioning priors (including, of course, political taboos), all these trappings do not define the memeplex. There's an entire ecosystem of elements to it, like the very notion of a meme, the meme about infohazards, the assumption that thought ought to be recursively interpretable, the contempt for normie beliefs and the hope/fear that More Is Possible. Underneath it all, together with socialization, identity and morality, are some very general intuitions, probably following from neurological kinks that work like inductive biases in machine learning. For example, one key part is the uncomfortable but giddy conviction, informed by pure math I guess, that spaces – any spaces, really, or perhaps any manifolds, such as all mind designs, or all thoughts, or all physics – have… higher dimensionality than they seem to have. Are rougher, weirder, full of navigable hairline cracks. And accordingly, processes in such spaces are non-convex in the Talebian sense. So if you know just the input, if you're smart enough to derive the exact fitting passkey with correct values in every register, you'll be able to chart a trajectory that's shorter than what normies believe is the direct one – or longer than they'd say you can go. You'd be able to do magic. This is what Yud has in mind when writing:
(To be clear, the scenario was: «One of the things you can't rule out - and I mean this seriously - is "magic". Magic plain and simple. Running a particular sequence of instructions through the CPU so that a certain transistor turns on and off in a certain sequence and modulates the quantum cheat codes of the Universe.»)
When you feel this way, then fucking sure, you want to know how to think right. And surprisingly many people do.
I don't know where I'm going with that, but I feel that a proper account of «rationalism» has to include analysis of this axis.
I found the that thread very interesting. Reading between the lines and over thinking until I can see what isn't really there, I see two big issues.
First, QC sees the issues of cognitive bias and running on untrusted hardware as specificially human issues. Yudkowsky is a space alien, of a superior species, so he is unaffected by these issues. His takes on AI risk are gospel truth.
Second, I'm reminded of testimony before Congress about unconscious racial bias. The witness claims that every-one harbours unconscious racial bias. The Congress man asks: which races are you unconsciously biased against? This leads to a deer-in-headlights moment rather than an answer. I want to ask QC whether his own judgement is subject to cognitive biases and whether his mind runs on untrusted hardware. Specifically, is his judgement that Yudkowsky is telling the gospel truth from a position of superiority, also the gospel truth? QC seems to think that he too is a space alien, free from human failure modes.
The thread seems like a living-out of the Zen parable about the Dharma being a finger pointing at the moon. QC has studied hard and knows all about the finger, its joints, and its nail.
What I have written comes across as unsympathetic to QC. Or does it? The impression of a lack of sympathy comes from inferring that I see myself as a space alien, of a superior species, unlike Yudkowsky and QC, who are merely human. Actually, I think that I suffer from cognitive biases and am running on untrusted hardware. I'm writing from a position of despair. How do we know anything? Epistemology is difficult. Epistemology is harder than that, we read the sequences and still don't get it. We encounter arguments about AI risk and never stop to think: Well, that has been crafted by Moloch to suck me in, maybe I should stay away and leave it to less vulnerable people to wrestle with the issue.
My antidote to epistemological despair is reading the history of science. There are ways round biases. The double blind, randomized controlled trial is one route, available to a well funded team. There are other instructive stories. I particularly like Blaise Pascal's 1647 pamphlet on barometers. One of the experiments involved a six foot tall mercury barometer. Why six feet, when three feet tall is tall enough? So that he could fit a three foot tall mercury barometer inside it, and watch the mercury run out when the inner one was in the vacuum. The mad lad actually went the extra mile to check what was really going on.
I don't see a clever hack that lets me cross-check AI alarmism to see if it is for real. I'll wait. For me, the core of "rationality" is studying clever cross-checks. Get a feel for what we can know despite cognitive biases if we are willing and able to do the extra work. Get a feel for what we cannot know, and learn patience.
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