#rationalists

[gaykarstaagforever]

Robert Evans saying that Roko's Basilisk is basically atheists reinventing Calvinism is spot-on.

"Roko's Basilisk is Pascal's Wager but God is an evil robot."

I also like he points out that all of this is people whose enlightened idea of how a future super-robot will work is from Terminator and The Matrix, and both of THEM were just stealing it from Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.

...Except in that story, the God-Robot was doing that for a very specific reason in the context of that story, not just because it was generally an asshole.

Who has the foresight to conceive of an advanced AI that is all-powerful, yet then they go "but it's probably going to be a giant petty bitch just like we are."

Why would it be? It's a robot. It doesn't have the same needs and wants that we do.

Do these people really perceive of "advanced intelligence" as automatically being self-righteous and inherently cruel?

That says way more about how fucked up these people are than anything about robots.

And if they think this...why are they trying to make it? Because a lot of them are programmers and they're working for AI startups. If you think there's no god now, and if we make one it will be evil, why the fuck are you working on it?

At least when people invented God thousands of years ago, they fantasized that he was fundamentally good.

Who actively tries to invent an evil supercomputer?

Again, I think that tells us everything we need to know about Silicon Valley.

...Also LLMs aren't genuine intelligence, we can barely define what that even is, but it is probably more than "math that tricks people into thinking a computer knows what it's doing because it can have a conversation with us."

[dawnlightmelody]

hello everyone! tumblr seems like a plausible successor site for posters as twitter becomes less fun, so i'm moving part of my exodus here.

where on here do the rationalists hang out? or the zoomer transfems? or the zoomer transfem rationalists, even?

[shortnasties]

3125. No Cantos (2025 Piece)

This is "No Cantos (2025 Piece)." Activate the forest weapon.

No cantos for the war-hungry, please. And let me forget (not really) your insipid kisses on my pillow. We're in the age where a full moon will bring out the rationalists. Careful! Another dream of you walking away in a slushy parking lot wheels forth. Another you coming back as a beautiful stranger with secrets and a slice of pie. I can smell the spring on everything now. The wet trees and sound. The thrum of the insect world beating its drums of war. Eat your sugar now! Explain your confusion to someone close. I'm going to stop now—I'm sorry. All my life I've been a victim of politeness.

[sewer-swan]

I have to consciously dodge sounding like a rationalist sometimes. We probably share some ground, we both worship the effective and love analysis. But they have this certain bright-eyed optimism, a total lack of edge with a slight note of corniness. You hear them pipe up from 6 feet deep in the weeds, all nuance and pet theory, and you just think "god, I should step on that thing."

I think if tumblr people can be corny too, we at least like to think we're outrageous outsiders. Rationalists seem to allow no concept of the outrageous and they're so damn sincere about that: you need a patina of cynicism, a hint of jadedness, to pull it off.

[gaykarstaagforever]

1) Yes, the Zizians floated around Tumblr for years, in various forms. They're uber-nerds, trans people, and decided violence is the only logical means to their ends. If they had held out until 2025, they would have been fantastically successful here.

2) At some point, Pennsylvania is involved, because as I've said before, there is no obscure violent cult that doesn't eventually end up here.

3) To any Rationalists reading this, fuck the Singleton. If God being mad at me wasn't enough to stop me, I'm not cowering before your stupid demon robot.

At least God doesn't have a power cord that can be yanked out of the wall, metaphorically speaking.

"YEAH WELL IT WOULDN'T BY THEN!"

Yeah I know. It would be using human bodies as batteries. I saw that movie too.

[iteratedextras]

[profound-yet-trivial]

A rationalist meetup invited me to give a talk on decision theory, so I did, but I spent the last third of the hour hammering in "DO NOT GO CRAZY BECAUSE OF DECISION THEORY, IT WILL NOT HELP YOU."

There are some really cool things one can prove about superintelligences playing 5-D acausal chess with each other. You are not a superintelligence, and LARPing as one will not cause future or hypothetical or alternate-Everett-branch superintelligences to treat you like they would treat an actual live player.

You should stick to boring 2-D chess, i.e. the connection between your actions and the predictions that other humans alive today will make about your actions.

Or, more accurately, you should derive some simple rules from general reasoning about those cases (e.g. Integrity for Consequentialists, and nothing more complex than Meta-Honesty) and just execute on those rules, playing explicit 2-D chess only in edge cases.

i promise to shoot the man i accosted in the alleyway unless he gives me his wallet. he says "this is just like rokos basilisk". i say "what?", and the man says "ah so you don't already know. i know information which is dangerous to you, and may cause unquantified but large amounts of disutility to you if you know it. give me the gun or i will tell you this information". obviously i wouldn't believe him, except omega previously told me that my next victim would be right about everything he said. so im inventivzed to shoot him before he can speak, but a weighted average of all human beliefs implies murder will be punished severely in the afterlife (so the tiny probability any god is real doesn't cancel itself out across different gods). instead i lunge forward and hold a cloroform rag over his mouth, knocking him out. now i need only fear earthly reprisal, and my accomplice (who is my alibi, due to our distinct resemblance) is a perfect copy of me. since ive precommitted to kill myself if i get ratted out (as has he, since we're perfect copies) i know im secure. in a way he precommitted before he even existed, though since that idiot thinks he's the original he doesn't realize it. hey what if i could credibly predict that he would commit to other things before he existed. he could- oh goddamn it what a waste of cloroform. before i leave to begin bringing about the existence of a vindictive superintellegent ai i pull the wallet from the mans pocket- $0 dollars. just another night for me, just another night

[ladyshinga]

Probably not weird that an "we MUST create the AI god so that the AI god won't punish us for not creating it" cult is buddy buddy with Christians and opportunistic rich people who want to burn the world down for their own version of the rapture (and profit in the meantime). I just wish they weren't in the FUCKING WHITE HOUSE ACTUALLY DOING IT

[snissel613]

Everyone say hello to one of my all time favorite shirts

[pageofheartdj]

There is something about this dynamic and I want more XD

[julianova44]

I’ve been slowly catching up with Behind the Bastards and listened to that episode just days before the new Leverage. It doesn’t help that I know people who absolutely were dipping their toes into the Rationalist movement ten years ago.

[kaibacorpintern]

i have a complaint that's really minor in the scheme of things but you know i love to be pedantic. too many posts and comments saying kaiba invented "time travel."

kaiba did NOT invent TIME TRAVEL. he did not go three thousand years back into the past to see Atem. time travel is beginner shit.

he DID invent TEARING A HOLE IN THE FABRIC OF SPACE-TIME TO ENTER THE ANCIENT EGYPTIAN REALM OF DEATH, which is a totally different thing, and implies something way cooler and metaphysically/spiritually challenging than time travel, which is that many dimensions exist alongside ours, and maybe death is just one of those dimensions, and dying is perhaps merely a process of moving irreversibly from one dimension to another.

yugioh is fantasy, except for the blaring and inescapable klaxon of science fiction that is kaiba. this has been my PSA (pedantic service announcement)

[katherinakaina]

I also need to add a bit of context to your very short bit about Zizians, @strange-aeons .

TLDR: Ziz left the rationalist community 6 years ago and even at the time she wasn’t liked there, the fact she managed to exploit. Her actions directly contradict both hpmor and what CFAR was doing and teaching. Her other affiliations that are no less relevant include being an anarchist and a vegan. You are not immune to cults just because you are not into any particular weird internet subculture.

Cults form from niche subcultures, that’s true enough. But any subculture can form a cult because any culture, even the mainstream one, contains some ideas that can be twisted to an insane degree. And any ideology, even the most niche and scary one, can be approached casually and sceptically. What is actually needed to create a cult is not a special ideology but a cult leader and vulnerable people to follow them. That is the main uniting quality between all cults. Trying to figure out what’s wrong with a certain music band or a certain fantasy book forum is an exercise in motivated reasoning. You will always end up finding something that's wrong.

The rationalist community was trying to prevent the formation of a cult as best as they could. Partly that’s the reason why people like Ziz and others with bad and unpopular takes were often tolerated longer than necessary. To encourage criticism and prevent getting stuck in a positive feedback loop. Because it’s not a high control group! You cannot be simultaneously mad that people are allowed to talk about wacky ideas on forums and also that the group is supposedly very rigid and controlled. Apparently, they could use some control. Not like it would actually stop an aspiring cult leader from recruiting, they’d just go some other place.

Zizians were not mostly trans by accident (what are the chances?). Ziz was recruiting the most vulnerable people who related to her and were willing to trust her (also because there’s a lot of trans women in the community, like a lot). She used their very real and grounded experience of discrimination to convince them that her not being liked is not due to her takes being bad but because she’s trans.

And she had a lot of takes, some of them not being popular enough you actually complained about. You criticised LessWrong for being too pro-capitalist for your taste and then started talking about the Really Bad rationalists and THEY ARE LEFTISTS killing landlords and cops.

Now if we are talking about ideologies that devalue human life, how about some that require actual Class War (guess what people do in wars) or violent mass uprisings? Or some that require assassinations of certain select individuals? How come you hear that there are people on forums discussing the ethics of murdering those directly responsible for destroying our planet and you, as a leftist, do not immediately recognize yourself in it? Nothing discussed on LessWrong is more violent than a communist revolution or even the killing of Brian Thompson.

Why being into rationality at some point and reading hpmor is the only thing you told about Ziz? I think I know why. All the right wingers really leaned into the whole ‘trans vegan cult’ thing. That is not a good look for our side, is it? How amazing would it be to find a scapegoat. Who cares about those AI safety freaks anyway? They are all cishet men anyway! All cishet men who somehow have an offshoot of violent vegan queers, that certainly adds up.

Ziz being a radical vegan* (another niche subculture) corresponds to her actions way better than anything that's discussed on LessWrong or happened in hpmor. In fact, there’s an exact scene you probably skipped. Harry is on a very important and dangerous mission with Quirrell and at some point he is told to hide while Quirrell duels a cop guard at magical Guantanamo Bay – a total pig and an absolute scum who Ziz would kill without a second thought. Harry does share her sentiment, he fucking hates Azkaban. But when Quirrell tries to kill the evil torture cop Harry instinctively protects him jeopardizing the entire mission. And it’s not a random scene. It starts the entire disillusionment spiral where Harry realizes his beloved groomer professor might be a bad guy. Murder of a bystander whose only crime is being a product of his society is not something Harry can tolerate. He does end up decapitating a bunch of actual death eaters in the very end (the bit you probably did read) to save his own life and defeat Voldemort and even then he regrets it and apologizes for it (despite it being the right thing to do and not even comparable to a random cop). There’s an entire scene where Harry bonds with Draco over their mother’s deaths where he expresses that every death is a tragedy, even deaths of very bad people (like Voldemort).

Not to mention the entire immortalism theme (did you skip the entire third book?). One cannot read hpmor and walk away thinking human life is worthless or only super geniuses deserve to live. Timeless decision theory leading to murdering people is not in there**, nothing in the fic even suggests such a conclusion. More about how you got most things wrong about hpmor here.

Let’s face it, those were a bunch of sleep deprived vulnerable people high on all sorts of radical ideas, who were kicked out of every decent movement and that’s why they slipped into a cult.

Any subculture can become a cult. If you ever read a boring preachy fanfic or ever went to a physical meeting with internet weirdos. If you ever felt rejected by mainstream society and went looking for ‘like-minded people’, for a ‘found family’, for a ‘place where you belong’. You are not safe. Touching grass from time to time is not enough. You have to never leave the pastures to be highly immune to cults. And that ain’t you, my friend. That’s none of us.

Previous post about rationalist community.

* Ever heard ‘veganism is the moral baseline’ (sometimes minimum or imperative)? That’s not a slander, it’s a commonplace argument and an actual slogan.

** The only use of timeless decision theory in hpmor is about being able to reliably cooperate with other well meaning people, not about killing anyone.

[tanadrin]

The norms that are useful for batting around complicated ideas in your insular and socially awkward (affectionate!) book club are not good for understanding how politics functions in the real world. Of course people lie about their political motivations, and if they realize they can get you on side by dressing up their tendentious argument in a way that appeals to you, they will tailor their lies precisely to flatter your preconceptions. That’s why costly signaling and mechanisms of in-group/out-group distinction evolved in the first place! They weren’t just a fun way for paleolithic allistics to bully each other, they were a safeguard against all the dang liars!

[etirabys]

pretty wild highs & lows since childbirth. renovations still ongoing at a distance with move date uncertain; live-in postpartum care worker my parents dubcon-gifted us who's hard to communicate with (language barrier) and is doing unsafe-seeming food practices; family stuff both sides; health issues from a complicated labor. there's also the actual baby, but right now she's noticeably less difficult than the interpersonal stuff. I'm sobbing multiple times daily from stress

"would I rather be bored" – ah well... er... no. (sheepishly) I like stress

I always regretted not doing the silicon valley startup grind in my twenties when I had energy, and this feels kind of similar. except all the problems are stupid and don't make me money

nonetheless, they are problems, which I seem to adore having