simpolism

1. The obvious stuff first: "postrat" contains a prefix "post-" applied to a root "rat". The root refers to the "rationalist" community. Thus, postrats have an intrinsic tie to the rationalists.

2. The prefix "post-" in "postrat" means "subsequent to", "after", etc. So the postrat is distinguished by means of a spatial or temporal metaphor in relation to the rat: postrat is perhaps "what happens to a person after rationalism" or "a philosophy subsequent to rationalism".

3. Thus, "post" in "postrat" means some aspects of the person or philosophy have "moved past" rationalism, while other aspects have remained stable. What's different and what is the same? What changes if we talk about "a postrat" vs "postrat philosophy"?

4. For now I will bracket the question of "what makes one a rat or postrat" and address the philosophical component. I can describe the core of rat philosophy with the following terms: scientific-empiricist, skeptical, rationalist (duh), and universalist hedonic utilitarian.

5. I will elaborate on each term to sketch out what I see as the fundamental rat philosophy. Scientific-empiricist: empiricism as the fundamental mode of knowledge, often restricted tightly to scientific studies performed properly.

6. Skepticism: rats take a highly skeptical attitude toward knowledge, to such an extent that scientific studies which pass the bar of scrutiny are often (but not always) considered more reliable than knowledge gained from experience.

7. Rationalist: the rats are rationalist in the classic sense (which I will not be using throughout!) in that they attempt to apply reasoning to their conscious knowledge in order to determine how to act and what to believe.

8. This rationalist attitude of the rats is rather uncommon in the modern world, thanks to the popularity of hermeneutics of suspicion (e.g. "false consciousness", "the unconscious", etc) which draw into question the contents of our conscious knowledge.

9. Interestingly, the rats have their own quasi-hermeneutics of suspicion, in the form of "biases", which they consciously apply in order to achieve a higher standard of world-modelling capability thru reason.

10. The "rationalism" of the rats is likely responsible for their various attempts to create organizations and do activism (EA, etc): they want to manifest in reality their conclusions reached through reason. But how do they ground these conclusions, what is their ethics?

11. I call the rat ethics "universalist hedonic utilitarianism". Simply: utilitarianism = "maximize utility (well-being, goodness) in the world" hedonic = "conscious pleasure experience is good, suffering is bad" universalist = "everyone (or thing?) is subject to this ethics"

12. The rationalist strain of universalist hedonic utilitarianism (UHA) varies according to who you ask, and is often a negative utilitarianism (only minimizing suffering matters). But it always retains a focus (via modern theory of mind) on "states of suffering" as bad.

13. UHA has lead to interesting internal philosophical arguments, like: to what extent is the pain of animals comparable to humans? Can we convert between them? Can non-animals experience suffering? (incl. the infamous debate about whether atoms can suffer)

14. An element of rationalist philosophy that comes up a lot is the emphasis on Bayesian reasoning, as described in Eliezer Yudkowsky's "Sequences", a foundational text. It's an attempt to fix a "rationality deficit": _people are bad at understanding and applying statistics_.

15. The final element of the rationalist philosophy I'd like to address, and also the most controversial, is rationalist *eschatology*, in the sense of "man's final destiny". In particular, rationalists are concerned about *existential risks* (x-risks).

16. The rationalist philosophy posits, via thinkers like Nick Bostrom, that the rise of artificial intelligence has potential to destroy the world. A common thought experiment is the "paperclip maximizer", a paperclip-making AI that "accidentally" kills everyone in the process.

17. In a sense, the point of the philosophical ground in skepticism and rationality and UHU is to provide tools for modeling the entire world, such that, when universal AI comes, we might know how to avoid this paperclip end of the world.

----I will pause here before returning to the postrats----

18. Jk, first I need to talk about community structure. The rationalist community has for over a decade converged around user-submitted content on the site LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/ . Yudkowsky's Sequences were originally posted there.

20. The Rationalist community itself tends to converge in social spaces built around these main points of reference. There is a whole rationalist Tumblr sphere, and the public Slatestarcodex discord was my first point of entry into this world.

21. The result of the major centralization of written material in the rationalist space, combined with directly associated social channels, is that a set of strong common beliefs can form, a general picture of which I gave above.

22. This emergence of consensus on the Rationalist sphere is aided by their conversational norms: these spaces prize dispassionate intellectual conversation, as so to permit consideration of diverse topics that may fall outside the realm of social acceptability.

23. This willingness to avoid consideration of social acceptability has led to attacks on the Rationalist community. Media sources or motivated individuals (/r/sneerclub) love to accuse the discourse of ThoughtCrime. Scott Alexander has written about his suffering as a result.

25. Lacking a canon, a defining set of postrat views is hard to pin down. The typical postrat has negated at least one of the above rationalist qualities (either consciously or not), but which one they choose to negate varies.

26. Ironically, this lack of definite ideology has become a key feature, perhaps THE defining feature, of the postrat community: "postrat doesn't mean anything!"

27. In practice, the main negations focus on the scientific-rational elements, leading postrats to think about topics such as phenomenology, ritual, meaning, etc, which cannot be easily studied experimentally or quantitatively.

28. Most postrats also reject the eschatological claims of the rats, but not all. Many are skeptical of our actual ability to build a general AI, likely as a result of the tangles one finds when studying phenomenology and psychology.

29. A major element of discussion in the postrat sphere is the idea of "meaning". What matters anyway? If you remove the grand threat of a world-ending AI, this is a perfectly reasonable and common question to ask in our alienated world.