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SneerClub @awful.systems
David Gerard @awful.systems

How to explain our very good friends to normal humans?

Thinking about how the arsing fuck to explain the rationalists to normal people - especially as they are now a loud public problem along multiple dimensions.

The problem is that it's all deep in the weeds. Every part of it is "it can't be that stupid, you must be explaining it wrong."

With bitcoin, I have, over the years, simplified it to being a story of crooks and con men. The correct answer to "what is a blockchain and how does it work" is "it's a way to move money around out of the sight of regulators" and maybe "so it's for crooks and con men, and a small number of sincere libertarians" and don't even talk about cryptography or technology.

I dunno what the one sentence explanation is of this shit.

"The purpose of LessWrong rationality is for Yudkowsky to live forever as an emulation running on the mind of the AI God" is completely true, is the purpose of the whole thing, and is also WTF.

Maybe that and "so he started what turned into a cult and a series of cults"? At this point I'm piling up the absurdities again.

The Behind The Bastards approach to all these guys has been "wow these guys are all so wacky haha and also they're evil."

How would you first approach explaining this shit past "it can't be that stupid, you must be explaining it wrong"?

[also posted in sneer classic]

35 comments

  • I'm trying to imagine how a John Oliver sketch would introduce them. "The kind of nerds who make you think the jocks in '80s movies had a reasonable point got together and sold 'science' and 'rational thinking' as self-help, without truly understanding either, and it got very culty."

  • I don't think Yud is that hard to explain. He's a science fiction fanboy who never let go of his adolescent delusions of grandeur. He was never successfully disabused from the notion that he's always the smartest person in the room and he didn't pursue high school, let alone college education to give him the expertise to recognize just how difficult his goal is. Blud thinks he's gonna create a superhumanly intelligent machine when he struggles with basic programming tasks.

    He's kinda comparable to Elon Musk in a way. Brain uploading and superhuman AI are sort of in the same "cool sci fi tech" category as Mars colonization, brain implants and vactrain gadgetbahns. It's easy to forget that not too many years ago the public's perception of Musk was very different. A lot of people saw him as a cool Tony Stark figure who was finally going to give us our damn flying cars.

    Yudkowsky is sometimes good at knowing just a bit more about things than his audience and making it seem like he knows a lot more than he does. The first time I started reading HPMoR I thought the author was an actual theoretical physicist or something and when the story said I could learn everything Harry knows for free on this LessWrong site I though I could learn what it means for something to be "implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian" or what that those "timeless formulations of quantum mechanics" were about. Instead it was just poorly paced essays on bog standard logical fallacies and cognitive biases explained using their weird homegrown terminology.

    Also, it's really easy to be convinced of thing when you really want to believe in it. I know personally some very smart and worldly people who have been way too impressed by ChatGPT. Convincing people in San Francisco Bay Area that you're about to invent Star Trek technology is basically the national pastime there.

    His fantasies of becoming immortal through having a God AI simulate his mind forever aren't the weird part. Any imaginative 15 year old computer nerd can have those fantasies. The weird parts are that he never grew out of those fantasies and that he managed to make some rich and influential contacts while holding on to his chuunibyō delusions.

    Anyone can become a cult leader through the power of buying into your own hype and infinite thielbux.

    • Convincing people in San Francisco Bay Area that you’re about to invent Star Trek technology is basically the national pastime there.

      Ding! Ding! Ding! Upvote.

  • The latest in a chain of cults, after Mormonism, the Victorian-era spiritualist fad, Scientology and new-age “quantum” woo, each using the trappings of the exciting scientific/technological ideas of their time to sell the usual proposition (a totalising belief system that answers all questions).

  • @dgerard "carrying coal to Newcastle, for philosophy"

    "I wouldn't say there's such a thing as reading too much science fiction, but there is such a thing as not reading enough stuff that isn't science fiction"

    "a cargo cult based on Harry Potter fanfiction; a useful but by no means universally superior way of doing statistics; and the science fiction trope about being in a computer simulation"

    "an object lesson in the value of a good old liberal education"

  • It's eugenics but as a religious cult for reactionaries

    Yud is that creepy nerd from your middle school who wrote disturbing fan fiction, but it wasn't just a phase and now he has the aforementioned cult

  • "Rationalism" is to normal logical thinking what blindfolded multi-board speed chess is to tic-tac-toe: you can only see in retrospect how anyone could get there from here. The things which occupy a Rationalist's mind are completely divorced from ordinary concerns like ethics. Nobody would or could have predicted this quantity or quality of lunacy.

  • I've been contemplating this, and I agree with most everyone else about leaning heavily into the cult angle and explaining it as a mutant hybrid between Scientology-style UFO religions and Christian dispensationalist Book of Revelation eschatology. The latter may be especially useful in explaining it to USians. My mom (who works in an SV-adjacent job) sent me this Vanity Fair article the other day about Garry Tan grifting his way into non-denominational prosperity gospel Christianity: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/christianity-was-borderline-illegal-in-silicon-valley-now-its-the-new-religion She was wondering if it was "just another fad for these people," and I had to explain no, not really, it is because their AI bullshit is so outlandish that some of them feel the need to pivot back towards something more mainstream to keep growing their following.

    I also prefer to highlight Kurzweil's obsession with perpetual exponential growth curves as a central point. That's often what I start with when I'm explaining it all to somebody. It provides the foundation for the bullshit towers that Yudkowsky and friends have erected. And I also think that long-term, the historiography of this stuff will lean more heavily on Kurzweil as a source than Yudkowsky, because Kurzweil is better-organized and professionally published. It'll most likely be the main source in the lower-division undergraduate/AP high school history texts that highlight this stuff as a background trend in the 2010s/2020s. Right now, we live in the peak days of the LessWrong bullshit volcano plume, but ultimately, it will probably be interpreted by the specialized upper-division texts that grow out of peoples' PhD theses.

    awful.systems

    • And I also think that long-term, the historiography of this stuff will lean more heavily on Kurzweil as a source than Yudkowsky, because Kurzweil is better-organized and professionally published.

      That is interesting to think about. (Something feels almost defiant about imagining a future that has history books and PhD theses.) My own feeling is that Yudkowsky brought something much more overtly and directly culty. Kurzweil's vibe in The Age of Spiritual Machines and such was, as I recall, "This is what the scientists say, and this is why that implies the Singularity." By contrast, Yudkowsky was saying, "The scientists are insufficiently Rational to accept the truth, so listen to me instead. Academia bad, blog posts good." He brought a more toxic variation, something that emotionally resonated with burnout-trending Gifted Kids in a way that Kurzweil's silly little graphs did not. There was no Rationality as self-help angle in Kurzweil, no mass of text whose sheer bulk helped to establish an elect group of the saved.

      • Yes, Kurzweil desperately trying to create some kind of a scientific argument, as well as people with university affiliations like Singer and MacAskill pushing EA, are what give this stuff institutional strength. Yudkowsky and LW are by no means less influential, but they're at best a student club that only aspires to be a proper curriculum. It's surely no coincidence that they're anchored in Berkeley, adjacent to the university's famous student-led DeCal program.

        FWIW, my capsule summary of TPOT/"post-rationalists" is that they're people who thought that advanced degrees and/or adjacency to VC money would yield more remuneration and influence than they actually did. Equally burned out, just further along the same path.

      • There's something about how these weird ideologies grow and how people get trapped in them that reminds me of oncogenesis.

        When a cancer forms, cell lines experience a typical progression where a lineage accumulates mutations which aren't that bad individually, but combine in the aggregate to cause havoc. The cells close themselves off from outside communication and lose all capacity for repairing genomic damage or heeding signals to slow out-of-control growth. Environmental factors like pollution and ionizing radiation can predictably push otherwise benign cells in that direction; the same cancer can develop in thousands or millions of people independently via convergent shit-evolution.

        It rhymes, doesn't it?

  • It's pick-me objectivism, only more overtly culty the closer you are to it irl. Imagine scientology if it was organized around AI doomerism and naive utilitarianism while posing as a get-smart-quick scheme.

    It's main function (besides getting the early adopters laid) is to provide court philosophers for the technofeudalist billionaire class, while grooming talented young techies into a wide variety of extremist thought both old and new, mostly by fostering contempt of established epistemological authority in the same way Qanons insist people do their own research, i.e. as a euphemism for only paying attention to ingroup approved influencers.

    It seems to have both a sexual harassment and a suicide problem, with a lot of irresponsible scientific racism and drug abuse in the mix.

  • How would you first approach explaining this shit past “it can’t be that stupid, you must be explaining it wrong”?

    This is the question of the moment, isn't it?

    I have no answers, but i can say thanks for being a light in the dumbness.

  • I think for the Yud variety specifically a good summary is : "Taking all the wrong lessons from science fiction, and building a cult around it’s villains, and celebrating “Rational” villains + a belief in the inevitability of world changing technological progress"

  • I usually say the following. I'm paraphrasing a spiel I have delivered in person several times and which seems to get things across.

    'there's a kind of decentralized cult called rationalism. they worship rational thinking, have lots of little rituals that are supposed to invoke more rational thinking, and spend a lot of time discussing their versions of angels and demons, which they conceive of as all powerful ai beings.

    rationalists aren't really interested in experiments or evidence, because they want to figure everything out with pure reasoning. they consider themselves experts on anything they've thought really hard about. they come up with a lot of apocalypse predictions and theories about race mingling.

    silicon valley is saturated with rationalists. most of the people with a lot of money are not rationalists. but VCs and such find rationalists very useful, because they're malleable and will claim with sincerity to be experts on any topic. for example, when AI companies claim to be inventing really intelligent beings, the people they put forward as supporting these claims are rationalists.'

35 comments