they spend fucking hundreds of collective hours going around in circles on the EA forum debating[1] this shit, instead of actually doing anything useful
how do they, in good conscience, deny any responsibility for the real harms ideas cause, when they continue to lend them legitimacy by entertaining them over and over and over again?
Adderall
Not to get too corny about it, but there are people in this world who think “don’t condescend” means “be nice about other people’s shortcomings” and people who think it means “you might fucking learn something if you would just stop condescending to people you perceive as having shortcomings”, and the first group is completely oblivious to the difference
Which is fine, actually, kind of. It certainly takes genuine work if for whatever reason you grew up to see things in a particular way. But it’s also completely not fucking fine that there are so many people going about their lives pontificating on the world without a shred of the requisite humility.
I think it misses the word for the trees to put the emphasis on a libertarian bent. The British and American class systems are perfectly capable of enforcing the same rules for prestige and polite discussion in order to favour some preferred hegemonic power without endorsing libertarian values. Indeed libertarianism as a movement most certainly adopts those rules because - for all that it may derive political support from (primarily white) guys of all sorts of backgrounds - it’s a fundamentally aristocratic proposition, right down to almost absurdist details such as its propensity to distribute land amongst an elite who employ lesser beings to work it.
In the case of rationalism, the emphasis should instead be on control: Yudkowsky built his system to control what was and wasn’t acceptable thinking, ostensibly for the benefit of the thinker. Its departures from actually very good patterns of thinking are what take it into cult territory, as the rigidity of the rules meets the hard wall of reality, and forces adherents to choose between reality and fantasy.
And as I say below to David, sure, there were other trends in play (most especially - as I note above as well - the tendency for America’s moral arc to bend towards racism). But I’d push back on suggesting that IQ-fetishism is distinct from naive biologism. Rather, IQ-fetishism itself is an expression of naive biologism (as we can see tracing its antecedents through back to Herbert Spencer), because you don’t get IQ-fetishism without the spectres of relativism and nurturism which, politically, it purports to counter-act - “IQ” is a supposedly sound, stable, measurable, cognitive category, where the alternative is understood to be a tangled mess of occult entities which cannot be reduced to any structure in the brain (and IQ holds out the promise of being reducible to g, which is in its whole conception reducible to a structure in the brain).
In this way the speculative futurism is simply of a piece with the biologism: once you reduce everything to (this very peculiar and highly naive, already science-fictional, concept of) the physical, you can manipulate it to generate whatever future you want. By the same token, the eugenic and fascistic trend in science-fiction pursues the same conceptual route. But it is only with the right historical ingredients, and the right players to activate those ingredients - which is to say an unequal society and the tendency to have people who want to naturalise that inequality - that the mixture becomes potently racist, and Yudkowsky, so to speak, is the one building the pot to specification.
Yeah, this is just as much or more a narrativisation of the inevitable conceptual trend as it is an attempt to explain what actually happened one event after another. If I were writing a book it would go next to much longer passages about racism and race science in American and world history and about race science in California Ideology land and the rationalist movement itself. This story would appear with a “but LessWrong would always have turned out this way”.
It’s notable, I think, that you can tell the same sort of story about Spencer back in the 19th century: as long as you have the backbone of naive biologism, everything will come out right for your Imperial project.
People like TW are the perfect distillation of the booksmart Slate Star Codex fan class, who are so completely sealed in their bubble that they aren’t even in touch with major parts of themselves anymore. They lose, or never developed, the capacity to even simulate a coherent theory of mind which would make appropriate sense of what the other person is saying. Brains like a Frank Gehry building with a roof made from sheer enthusiasm supported by warped tent poles of Scott Alexander heuristics sticking out at odd angles from each other.
Wow, I went looking for something else and found a deeply sad illustration of exactly what I’m talking about:
https://twitter.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1772398359745012139
look at this incredibly offended dork
For a moment there I wanted to say, “ok hold on for a minute: you think EA doesn’t create cult-like behaviour, only woke creates cult-like behaviour, but even if I grant all that about woke, surely EVERY charitable enterprise in modern history has tended towards cult behaviour?”
“So what do you think makes EA so goddamn special?”
Then I realised it’s the “incredible epistemic norms” of EA, i.e. the strongest drivers of cult-like behaviour going almost worldwide at the moment, which are the primary bulwark against EA behaving like a cult
I said in a comment the other day that Roko’s view here is the natural consequence of Yudkowsky’s original naive physical-scientific reductionism. He proceeds from those (abysmally vague but superficially straightforward) premises here. In essence, if everything ultimately reduces to the physical, then when you perform the natural reduction on e.g. the status of black people in modern America, the causes must by physical-biological causes.
The reference to Lysenkoism is perfectly apt on this (stupid) model: attempts to thwart the reduction are merely ideologically driven cludges to the real theory, and the example of Lysenko demonstrates how easy it is for a whole discipline (in this case: biology in the USSR) to fall to that ideology. Liberal (read: communist) biologists are just pandering and making exceptions when they produce their own demonstrations that scientific racism is bunk.
It’s helpful that, for historical and political reasons, i.e. America and modern Europe’s original sins (colonialism and slavery) scientific racism is always waiting in the wings when the Rokos of the world reach their inevitable conclusions. Put it’s important not to conceive of scientific racism as a form of ignorance: it is, rather, an often highly organised political movement devoted to proving and promoting its claims by any means necessary - it is a knowing lie, with the caveat that insofar as scientific racists frequently show that they implicitly know that they lie (with absurd clandestine promotion strategies and revealing statistical sleights-of-hand), it’s rarely clear that they are wholeheartedly aware of it.
It’s a combination of those things.
Because rationalism the coherent phenomenon was founded with the more or less explicit intention of building a cult, Yudkowsky’s original rule-set incorporated all of the basic cult rules, which every cult leader tends to be able to work out mostly for themselves by looking at what they outwardly want to build (a movement) and what they inwardly want to do with it (retain personal power over that movement)
So, for example, the particular way that Yudkowsky frames “objectivity” coalesces later on around the “object level” vs “meta level” dichotomy, “low” vs “high” “decoupling”, the “grey tribe”, but it’s there from the beginning in his insistence on the highly specific and idiosyncratic framework proposed in The Sequences, his constant explicit insistence on the rarity of his chosen elect, and also just in (a) his consistent lambasting of people who work outside that framework in the text of The Sequences themselves, and (b) his sometimes hilarious neg/love-bombing of the reader
Of (b), my favourite example is that passage where he bizarrely takes an unnecessary moment to call you an idiot if you think that there’s a universal clock measuring time throughout the universe, in the full knowledge that his nerdy readers are aware of relativity
So the whole system, beginning with LessWrong’s very founding, is geared to control the framing in ways like not naming names. Naming names is a failure of objectivity, because it brings in the sorts of particulars that might exercise your ordinary human judgement - ordinary human judgement is bad, we know this from Daniel Kahneman, and that’s another rule of objectivity. So, moreover, the whole system is geared so as to keep “objective” framings which favour HBD “in-group”, and to displace good human judgements (‘Richard Hanania is a ridiculous mendacious racist’) into the “out-group”).
HBD hegemony within the movement (in influence if not in numbers), moreover, could not but have been the eventual outcome of the same rule-set. In spite of his own protestations, Yudkowsky’s pugilistic naturalism was sufficiently both insisted upon and theoretically naive as to ultimately yield hegemony to the HBDers by sheer inertia: once you have eliminated and salted the earth of any thinking which fails to embrace the most childish physical-scientistic reductionism, then when your rules for thinking enter the arena of politics (especially American politics) and human biology, you have already ceded all possible theoretical ground to HBD, and any counter-weight you try to introduce thereto becomes the pathetic mewling of Kahnemanian irrational beliefs. Your rhetoric already implied “it’s just basic biology” from the very beginning.
So, for anyone keeping score, the only way for anyone on LessWrong to win the rhetorical argument is, unfortunately, just to be normal, and violate one or more of the LessWrong standards for thinking.
Oh fuck. It took me to see the twitter avi to remember but I have Oliver Habryka registered as “absolute psychopath” in my tortured memory box since way back. Nice to see him doing so well but I wish I could remember what triggered the original mental note, assuming that it was ever anything that specific
Kelsey Piper holding herself up as some avatar of responsible tech journalism, as if she isn’t…not even compromised, because I can’t accuse her of being compromised when she is explicitly in this business not even to take the rationalist side but as a literal rationalism advocate
Like you can object when someone (allegedly) goofs in writing up an investigative takedown, but at least they’re in the fucking business of starting from the facts and working up to that. And you’re personally fucking offended? Jesus fucking Christ, how high is that fucking stables you’ve built on all that sand?
You know, fuck it, pick your side and have at it, be the “reasonable one” and do your best to make everything about both sides. Please, engage in long navel-gazing private discussions with Sam Bankman-Fried about how he never actually gave a shit about anything now, including your shared ideals, now that it turns out he’s being sent down for giga fraud - we love it when you ultimately decide that that shit makes good copy. But have the basic fucking decency to at least pretend to remember what you are.
I’m saying they abuse adderall, an amphetamine, which class of drugs I can tell you from personal experience do turn you into a gibbering asshole if you abuse them, and it has bugger all to do with the appropriate use of ADHD medication
But please, if you want to call me out, have the good grace to use the second-person pronoun, this “can we please not” shit is the single most disingenuous phrase that’s entered the language since “I’m not a racist, but”