Every time I talk to journalists about how ridiculous the effective altruism, longtermism, rationality cults are, I also make a point of letting them know how much I resent having to spend energy explaining why these cults are harmful. Wouldn't have had to do spend all this energy explaining their ridiculous ideologies if they didn't amass so much $$ and influence.
@timnitGebru I feel like we could make a whole list of these timewasters:
1) EA/longtermism
2) "robots rights"
3) Our LM understands!
4) Debiasing "foundation"/general purpose models
Uninformed
@emilymbender @timnitGebru Can someone inform me what "rationalist" means in this context? To an outsider, being rational sounds good, but I assume the term has been co-opted / abused by what sounds like a cult of some kind? Can someone point me to which cult it is?
Uninformed
@escarpment @emilymbender @timnitGebru It's an intellectual and pseudo-intellectual movement, arising in the 2000s and early 2010s, claiming that through rigorous rational inquiry one can get certain things right that nobody else does. The key people in rationalism are Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander. Effective altruism, which heavily overlaps, is Yudkowsky again but also Nick Bostrom, Toby Ord, and William MacAskil.
Uninformed
@Alon @emilymbender @timnitGebru Great, thank you. I will read up on this with a critical eye (but also, frankly, an open mind, because I think the solution is always *more philosophy*; I just keep reading points and counterpoints and points and counterpoints). The rationality thing seems a bit reminiscent of "Verificationism" which has a fascinating "decline" section on its Wikipedia page. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verificationism Of course only things we can verify empirically are true, right? Right?!
Uninformed
@escarpment @emilymbender @timnitGebru So, as I understand it, none of the philosophers within EA is especially acclaimed by the broad community of academic philosophers, which is a big difference from verificationism, which was. In general, rationalists kinda look down on academics, I think because so many of them are tech workers who outearn professors; Scott Alexander (who was a psychiatrist until recently) has a post comparing the expansion of college degrees to the Tulip Mania.
Uninformed
@Alon @emilymbender @timnitGebru That raises red flags for me. How much you earn is indicative, to some degree, of the irrational ways populations assign value. Monetary value seems to fall victim to basic issues like "what people want not what they need." I still believe in academia. We invest in it so that academics may think freely and not be biased by commercial interests.
Uninformed
@escarpment @emilymbender @timnitGebru Yeah, so rationalists tend to be familiar enough with academia to know its shortcomings (e.g. extremely slow peer review and grant processes) and then go out there with their belief that a) there's too much education, b) explicitly commercial research (e.g. when Uber funds favorable studies) is great, and C) social hierarchy should be based on innate smartness detectable in one's teens rather than on how much and what kind of education one has.
Uninformed
@Alon Hm, this is the first part of your characterization I disagree with, unless you are talking about a very specific subgroup. I've been in this movement (excluding longtermism, which I always had philosophical misgivings about and which I believe is the source of most current problems with EA) since very early on (although remotely, perhaps these approaches are much more popular in the Bay Area?) and while criticisms of the education system or academia are common I have seen literally no one arguing for either a or b. c I have seen and uh, this would require a long post to explain, suffice to say I think it's obviously bad but does not discredit the whole movement -- it's mostly the fucking neoreactionaries which most of the rest of the community shuns, but not too loudly lest fucking Thiel stops throwing money at them.
tl;dr as often is the case, I blame billionaires, they ought not to exist
Oh, since I am already tagging @timnitGebru , thanks for the link to the critiques, I'll definitely read it carefully, do you by any chance also have something that's less focused on longtermism, since this is the part I already disagree with?
Uninformed
@timorl @escarpment @emilymbender @timnitGebru There's a Slate Star Codex post comparing university degrees to the Tulip Mania. It doesn't explicitly argue for a but only because Scott ~never explicitly argues for anything, he just makes meta points and interminable comparisons and expects the intended point to be obvious.
Uninformed
@Alon I know that post, but I'm pretty sure it only argues against credentialism, not against education itself. I've never met anyone who would consider it to be against education, the closest thing I have seen in the community to being against education is the dislike of schools, as they are currently organized, but even that was for much more organizational reasons (essentially children's lib, but the whole community suffers a terrible unawareness of actual leftist politics, so they wouldn't call it that... and I do agree that is a problem) rather than education itself.
@escarpment @emilymbender @timnitGebru
