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.
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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.
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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.
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19. Several long-running blogs have emerged from or intersected with this rationalist community space, such as Robin Hanson's "Overcoming Bias" http://www.overcomingbias.com/ and Scott Alexander's "Slate Star Codex"https://slatestarcodex.com/
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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24. Our first point of departure into postrat is in terms of community structure. There is no postrat equivalent to LessWrong, thus the postrats lack a real canon. Some postrat blogs exist (e.g. http://ribbonfarm.com ), but most discourse is on Twitter or in group chats.
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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.
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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!"
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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.
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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.
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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.
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30. But we must still ask: why is the question of meaning of such great concern within the postrat community? What sorts of people are attracted to the rats, and what leads them eventually to the postrats? Are any of the solutions effective?
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31. To continue, I want to sketch a general portrait of a rat turned postrat. This does not apply to everyone, as there's many reasons why one might engage with the communities. But I'm basing this on personal observations from the SSC discord, rationalist meetups, etc.
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32. Many rats found their way into the community through Yudkowsky's book "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality", which tends to resonate most with a particular group of late teens/early 20s who read Harry Potter growing up.
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33. A general portrait of a newbie rationalist: intelligent but lacking engagement with the philosophical tradition, middle or upper-middle class, tech savvy, often socially alienated irl (and thus seeking community online), in late high school, college, or recently graduated.
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34. In terms of religion, the rationalists have a peculiar relationship with the new atheists, with the two groups bleeding together during the late 00s/early 10s. Many rationalists were either raised secular or rejected their familial/communal religious traditions.
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35. In providing an eschatology and social circle, the rationalist community provides a meaningful community for those who seek it out. The willingness to ignore social bounds in conversation (low disgust) likely reflects a general social alienation that leads one online.
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36. The most important attitudes that lead people toward postrationalism from rationalism are (a) boredom, a desire to go beyond the rat's demarcated sphere, and (b) an aesthetic distaste, as much rationalist art is somewhat contrived "nerd art" (Harry pottery fanfic?!).
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37. Regarding boredom, a consequence of having a canon and a centralized point for sharing work is that the rationalist philosophy takes on an orthodox character. This is ironic, since much conversational energy in rationalist circles is spent critiquing social orthodoxy.
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38. Many now-postrats, myself included, were uncomfortable with the sense of orthodoxy, of "given truths", and wanted to seek out more "interestingness" in topics that rationalists themsleves had little to say about, beyond how they were inaccessible to or solved by Science.
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39. This desire for "interestingness" seemingly for its own sake is what led the "Intellectual Explorers Club" to describe postrats as "Insight Pornographers".https://medium.com/s/world-wide-wtf/memetic-tribes-and-culture-war-2-0-14705c43f6bb …
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40. Interestingness also plays into the aesthetic preferences of the postrat sphere, who prefer to avoid the quasi-religous rationalist art in favor of less specifically targeted works, often classics or avant-garde. cf.https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/09/10/why-nerds-have-bad-taste/ …
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41. My main point is that the rationalist meaning-wellspring failed on the postrats for some reason, whether they got bored and applied too much skepticism, or whether they failed to socially integrate such that a sense of intersubjective meaning could arise.
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42. This failure to achieve meaning is, as mentioned earlier, a main interest of the postrats. Works like meaningness (https://meaningness.com/ ) and several of Sarah Perry's ribbonfarm pieces (e.g. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/10/01/meaning-and-pointing/ …) have interrogated the topic extensively.
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43. As far as I can tell, meaning exists on a different plane of psychological existence than reason and rationality. I believe that the social experience of the rationalists can create meaning, but the logos of the postrats encourages a *return to the world* of experience.
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44. The statistical analyses and utilitarian calculus of the rationalists may be useful in governance, but to what extent can they stir an individual to enact life changes?
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