Conversation

Jan 26, 2021

so "the memes are true" is complicated. the rationalist worldview embeds a lot of other mostly unspoken assumptions in it, and those assumptions *together* with a reasonable case for AGI can be disastrous

Quote Tweet

Chana

@ChanaMessinger

· Jan 26, 2021

Replying to @QiaochuYuan

I mean, yeah, it matters that the memes are true.

QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID

)

@QiaochuYuan

Jan 26, 2021

it's hard to even spell some of these assumptions out in words but

@Meaningness

has done a better job than anyone i know. stuff like "people are minds. the job of minds is to think real hard. that's how decisions get made. the way to improve your decisions is to think gooder"

QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID

)

@QiaochuYuan

Jan 26, 2021

also other stuff like peter singer's drowning-child argument. this is a bigger argument than i want to get into but i think it is bad ethics, i think utilitarianism is bad generally, *and* it is a very tempting trap for a particular kind of hyperanalytical person to fall into

QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID

)

@QiaochuYuan

Jan 26, 2021

meaningness hit me really hard when i first encountered it ~2018 because it clearly articulated what i now consider to be serious philosophical mistakes implicit in the rationalist and EA worldviews. huge breath of fresh air. eg:

meaningness.com

Utilitiarianism is an eternalism | Meaningness

Utilitarianism promises to eliminate ethical uncertainty, but instead replaces a difficult, messy problem with an impossible, tidy one.

QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID

)

@QiaochuYuan

one of the dirty secrets of the rat community is that people go insane semi-regularly, like maybe once or twice a year, and i mean full-blown psychotic break i know at least one of these incidents to be tied to rationalist memes interacting poorly with anxiety

12:45 AM · Jan 26, 2021Twitter Web App

Likes

QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID

Replying to

there are people in the rat and EA communities who have big "scrupulosity" issues - moral anxiety, having to do the most good thing always or else things are terrible and i'm terrible and etc. interacts very poorly with "AI safety is the most important thing"

QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID

)

@QiaochuYuan

Jan 26, 2021

idk how the psychotic break rate compares to the baseline rate in the general population but in any case, to me, it reads as an extreme symptom of bigger more systemic problems. motherfuckers putting themselves under a lot of pressure and way up in their heads

Replying to

I was trying to work on this for a few months several years ago and I never got a good idea of what the base rate of psychotic breakdowns are in a comparable population (people I was collaborating with all had different ideas about defining comparable population)

alex is in the uk (cambridge)

@pawnofcthulhu

Jan 26, 2021

I think any conversation about how screwed up rationalist culture is needs to have "if you build a church, you attract sinners" as a large part of the story