Guess I'm a Rationalist Now
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8908
#HackerNews #Rationalism #Rationalist #Thinking #Philosophy #HackerNews #Blog
#Rationalist
My friend says their husband "wants to crawl inside Eliezer Yudkowsky's butthole" and I don't know what else to say other than my condolences. :sadcowboy:
I guess the Yudd-Hole is like, a nice place to be? Maybe there's like, a #Rationalist night club in there? Maybe it's a cozy nook for reading scifi-fantasy stories?
ā They wanted to save us from a dark AI future. Then six people were #killed
https://www.theguardian.com/global/ng-interactive/2025/mar/05/zizians-artificial-intelligence
āRationalists had considerable #openness to new experiences, but sometimes poor discipline or #judgment, and could embody the old joke about being so open-minded that oneās brain falls out [ā¦]ā
āIt goes without saying that the #AI-risk and #rationalist communities are not morally responsible for the #Zizians any more than any #movement is accountable for a deranged fringe.ā
"Behind the Bastards" has a 4-parter on the Zizians but really it also acts as a good primer on rationalists et al. if you've never heard of them.
First episode: https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-one-the-zizians-how-harry-potter-fanfic-inspi
#podcast #ConseilPodcast #rationalist #tescreal #behindTheBastards
In #Reason We Trust
For many of us in the #rationalist and #humanist community, the focus on how we define ourselves often falls on the difference between developing and upholding the #rationalmind versus #religious tendencies towards bias or inference. This does not mean #freethinkers are not impacted by our own #biases and inferencesā we accept them and are aware of them.
This year's #rationalist #fanfic exchange has posted all the fics now!
https://archiveofourown.org/collections/RatFicEx2024/
There's an interesting mix of fandoms: half OC, #Myst, #dungeon stories, #FullmetalAlchemist, #mecha, #creepypasta, #TimeTravel, #PTSD, #transformation, #tf, #Thor, #OuterWilds, #Naruto, and #Animorphs
I am often called a critic of #religion, but rather in the superficial way of those who misconstrue dialectical analysis as blaming. Never have I advocated for a world without religion, nor for a #rationalist crusade against it. #philosophy #GregoriusAdvena
What is right vs who is right
"A #rationalist is simply someone for whom it is more important to learn than to be proved right." ~Karl Popper
thinking this morning about the #rationalist-to-#AI-doomer-cult pipeline offering a program of
ānegative #enchantmentā
spiritual exercises dressed as cognitive cleansing routines, inducing paranoid terror at prospect of evil gods emerging. everything is either harbinger or irrelevance. price of entry to vivid (faintly stupid) shared fantasy is recitation of jargon-stuffed Just So Stories and mantras. IQ-phrenology akin to flat-earth nonsense.
socially maladapted midwit dilettante gaggle. ugh.
Reading this and thinking about the #yimby arguments for increased density.
Man as a #Rationalist Animal ā sam[ ]zdat
https://samzdat.com/2017/05/22/man-as-a-rationalist-animal/
but i should add: by FAR the dominant position among rationalists about #AI is accelerationist: we should build it as powerfully and as fast as we can, & somehow that will show us how to mitigate the dangers.
which is why virtually none of the #rationalist AI "leaders" have signed the petition, or are likely to sign it.
this break in that edifice seems notable to me, & worth amplifying.
to be clear, the concerns about large #AI models laid out by the drafters of the Future of Life petition are largely not the ones I have. & Future of Life is a #rationalist/#transhumanist project with very unpleasant roots & associations.
but many non-rationalists have signed the petition, & I don't care that some of the language is typical AI hype. serious regulation of this sector is needed, & a pause in development risks virtually nothing of value & will hopefully spur regulators to action.
nearly every popular (to say nothing of #rationalist) discussion of #ChatGPT, #GPT4, #OpenAI, etc., features a huge amount of prevarication over these concepts, constantly suggesting that they are the same: that "mind" is more or less just a synonym for "intelligence" (while almost never noting that most experts do not agree with it at all).
it isn't, & those who say it is have various kinds of agendas & axes to grind.
For #presidentsday we give you a bonus episode with George Mason University constitutional law scholar Prof. Ilya Somin, who used his scholarly chops to develop a #rationalist approach to #dating and ultimately finding #love. He shares his wisdom about how to cope with #rejection while trying to meet a mate, plan #dates, and remain open-minded (did he really agree to a first date at #arlingtonnationalcemetery??). Come hear about Ilyaās journey that happily led to his wife Alison! š¤š„°
@introvertnudist you are literally the first person to have recognized one of my #sigils for what they are without me having to explain it to them. LOL
I'm a pretty #rationalist, #science minded guy... but I love the idea of magic, I always play wizards in RPGs, etc. Then one day I ran across chaos magic and what stuck with me is that what's "real" is immaterial, so long as it's effective. I immediately had the idea for this #tattoo.
About to leave #prague today, on my way back to SF. It was really nice to drop by Europe again, especially to see my #furry #rationalist friends in #Berlin.
Last day or two I've been just chilling in Prague, hanging out in local tea rooms/cafes and being a pretentious hipster public intellectual. I'll miss the vibe. But I'm hoping to take some of all this cool energy and use it to find more nice chill spaces and people in SF and to get lots of good vibes, cuddles and caring :)
Perhaps I should swing for the fences: no rational numbers can be probabilities. They're of measure zero, there's no way you just happen to come across 2/7 when you finish that integral. #bayes #bayesian #rationalist #probability
Other #rationalist visionaries lack imagination -- they try to say that 0 and 1 are not probabilities, but this is not bold enough. I propose that 0.5 is also not a probability. #reason #probability #bayes #bayesian #basilisk
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