promethea.incorporated

brave and steely-eyed and morally pure and a bit terrifying… /testimonials /evil /leet .ask? .ask_long?

playinghardtolistento asked: i dont have much interest in rationalism-as-thought-techniques because from what i've observed it doesn't seem to have uniquely benefited people who subscribe to it in ways that a general purpose self-help book and associated social support structure wouldn't have, with the added detriment of being tangled up in rationalism-as-techno-libertarianism. if there actually are "one weird tricks" employed by rationalists that would be helpful to leftists i'd love to hear about them tho

soundlogic2236:

socialjusticemunchkin:

oligopsony-deactivated20160508:

I’ll have to think about this because it’s important, but my facial impression is indeed that there aren’t really any superpowers or whatever - I just like discussing weird ideas and some versions of The Community are good places to do that

well, I DO think everyone reading “how to do things with words” (I think that’s the title?“) would nip a lot of the dumber arguments we keep having in the bud, like for instance the definition of socialism or whatever, but the basic insights aren’t unique? There’s probably a number of small things like that that ppl are likely to point out in the comments

A Human’s Guide to Words

Then there’s CFAR which seems to be “self-help, except we try to apply ~optimization~ to it, which is 100% more optimization than other self-help things”

Rationality checklists and deliberate de-biasing (I’ve been working on trying to recognize when my brain does something unsavory and bring it to my own conscious attention instead of letting it fester unnoticed, and like “why doesn’t anyone else anywhere even recognize that this is a thing”)

Then there’s that thing which makes people really likely to turn out trans and I suspect is at least partially modulated by the same transhumanist-y “optimize everything” morphological freedom attitude which makes people also use nootropics and sign up for cryonics even though all of them may be perceived as weird by the general population, and partially by the emphasis on changing one’s mind and not getting tangled up in silly things such as whether or not one’s non-doll-playingwithness in childhood makes using estrogen in 20-somethings verboten or not

Then there’s the parts of “technolibertarianism” that are positive instead of normative and thus would be very good for leftists to understand and use, such as public choice theory, behavioral economics, the corrupted hardware problem, group and individual irrationality, the impossibility of efficiently regulating things one doesn’t understand (and the diaspora is very much linked to things that are regulated by people who don’t understand them, such as nootropics, transhumanism, cryonics, transgenderism, urban planning, etc. and it might help illuminate the reasons why regulating things excessively and not respecting autonomy is extremely harmful), the need to deal with the coming post-labor future in which traditional ideas don’t work even to the very small degree they currently work and thus things like “who owns the robots” are even more important than presently, and so on

In addition the diaspora’s technolibertarianism is overwhelmingly social-technolibertarianism and the non-libertarian right is basically a rounding error, suggesting that either rationalism turns people non-rightist or repulses the mainstream right to begin with, and that in turn suggests that leftists should be interested in why these “technolibertarians” nonetheless aren’t what people usually think of when they hear the word “technolibertarian” even though they sure look like it, and that people like Thiel are more outliers than median examples of the wider rationalist-adjacent population

Then there’s Effective Altruism which is basically applied communism, in a way that is not vulnerable to the failure modes of working for a revolution (such as “Lenin” or “the fiftieth anniversary of the discuss the imminent revolution and never actually get shit done club”); eg. GiveDirectly is redistributing capital to people who don’t have capital and these “technolibertarians” routinely claim this redistribution of capital is one of the best and most important humanitarian interventions in the world, usually only outclassed by things like “not having people die and suffer from diseases that are really cheap to prevent, simply because they are too poor to afford even the really cheap prevention”

Then there’s the fact that the community has managed to derive a lot of significant leftist-associated insights from first principles and in the process repackage them as something the STEM class can understand and hopefully even apply in action occasionally

Huh. Never seen a list like that. Nice.
Thoughts:
CFAR bit is admittedly a weak-nothing about the optimization actually doing anything
Trans bit is good, though the description of improving introspection and such so people can notice ways of helping themselves feels awkwardly phrased to me? I had to read it twice to understand the meaning (and I only optimistically assume I parsed it correctly now-if I didn’t please inform me). Might just be me having trouble with the phrasing though-can anyone confirm?
Technolibertarianism part seems just about perfect
‘Applied communism’. That… Something feels wrong about the opening sentences there.
‘Derive from first principles’ seems understated. I feel that having a strong theoretical justification and comprehension of something is worth a lot more than ‘explain to STEM people’. It lets you catch failure modes in advance, do more diagnostics on it, all sorts of things.
In conclusion:
I like having this list. It is a good list. I want a better one, but that is usually true of almost everything. Thank you for creating it, especially because just listing the stuff… somehow hadn’t occurred to me?

CFAR:

I can’t comment on how much they have actually achieved with it because I haven’t researched it properly, but my prior is on “will attend a workshop as soon as I can afford it”.

The part with trans people:

Something keeps making them in the diaspora, and the obvious candidates are:

  1. transhumanism and the general attitude of “if you don’t like it, you don’t need to put up with it just because of some ~natural order~”
  2. the rejection of ontological bullshit about The True Metaphysics Of Gender or tying the social to the biological
  3. ideology that demands allegiance to evidence even when it suggests weird things about oneself

“Applied communism”:

The entire point of communism is to socialize the means of production (afaiaa). Historically this has been attempted mostly by taking them away from people who haven’t been interested in giving them away and thus getting in fights with them. This has resulted in communism being applied in ways that are optimized for winning fights, or not applied that much at all.

EA is the radical new idea that maybe charity should stop being charity (as in optimizing for fuzzies and good feelings for rich people) and start being world optimization (as in actually helping the receivers, not just the egos of the givers). I claim that traditional leftists should take the fact that EA has resulted in rich people redistributing capital to poor people as evidence that:

  1. the distribution of capital in the world is indeed a serious problem because redistributing capital has basically become the gold standard of “how to improve the world for humans” against which all other interventions are measured and which only a select few can surpass in effectiveness
  2. the traditional means for pursuing said redistribution should be at the very least reassessed, because it’s highly likely that the marginal impact of revolutionary discussion clubs and tribal political polemics is way worse than the marginal impact of actually getting shit done and redistributing; and the ingenious plan of sneakily “”“expropriating”“” capitalists by performing services they think they want in exchange for currency, and then giving said currency to people who don’t have capital so they can purchase some, should be seriously considered as it’s not only an immediately actionable strategy, but also one whose marginal effect is predictable, consistently positive, and individually achievable without needing to solve massive coordination problems first
  3. whatever made rich people arrive to the conclusion that yes, this should be done, is worth checking out because it seems to be outputting leftist conclusions without explicitly leftist input, and thus if one believes that such leftist conclusions are correct, this is evidence in favor of the patterns of thought that resulted in EA being correct as well
  4. and whenever said patterns of thought generate outputs that disagree with traditional leftism, the correctness of said patterns of thought on some questions should be taken as evidence that such traditional leftist may be flawed (or to stop vagueblogging: if people who derive “let’s redistribute capital” from first principles think that anti-market biases are a problem, traditional leftists should seriously reconsider their anti-market attitudes)

Thus, greater engagement by leftists with the diaspora ideas would be likely to be positive as there are some rather obvious convergences that should make people assign even the ones they initially disagree about as being worthy of consideration as any processes outputting correct ideas must inevitably converge, and the more correctness something outputs the more likely the rest of it is to be correct as well. And then there’s the reasons why the memeplexes diverge, and understanding the mechanisms that cause it is quite crucial in not ending up with bad ideas just because one made a mistake in choosing the process to generate the ideas with.

(Similarly, the diaspora converges with libertarianism in many ways, but when it comes to conservative ideas I can’t really think of any others than “go to church lol is actually not always terrible advice and reddit atheism is in some ways quite naive” that would have been “derived from first principles” in the sense of the diaspora tending to adjust people’s opinions on them against stereotypes (for example, I used to be much more of a reddit atheist before encountering the diaspora’s way of dealing with religion, and early LW antitheism seems to be very reddit-atheisty compared with the modern diaspora’s “religion as a social technology, its upsides and downsides” approach) and thus I consider it to be evidence in favor of some leftist ideas (such as the inequality in capital distribution being a severe humanitarian loss) and some libertarian ideas (such as markets being a very neat piece of social technology for information-processing in allocation problems) but not that much in favor of conservatism.)

1 month ago · 27 notes · .permalink

  1. almostcoralchaos reblogged this from soundlogic2236
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    CFAR: Well, I can hardly blame you for lack of money. What am I supposed to say? “Go win the lottery?” Trans: Good,...
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  6. collapsedsquid said: I think the “rationalist powers” thing is pretty much Tetlock, since his work is used as the justification that their ideas are solid, even if he isn’t affiliated.
  7. nostalgebraist said: “a human’s guide to words,” most usefully indexed by “37 ways that words can be wrong,” and yeah, it’s the closest to being an actual “one weird trick” thing IMO. the ideas /are/ common but are rarely stated explicitly, instead taken to be either false or obvious, depending on the social circle