Guess I’m A Rationalist Now
scottaaronson.blog
A week ago I attended LessOnline, a rationalist blogging conference featuring many people I’ve known for years—Scott Alexander, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Zvi Mowshowitz, Sarah Constantin, Carl…
  • lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systemsEnglish
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    8 months ago

    I have a lot to say about Scott, being that I used to read his blog frequently and it affected my worldview. This blog title is funny. It was quite obvious that he at least entertained, if not outright supported, rationalists for a long time.

    For me, the final break came when he defended SBF. One of his defenses was that SBF was a nerd, so he couldn’t have had bad intentions. I share a lot of background with both SBF and Scott (we all did a lot of math contests in high school), but even I knew that it’s not remotely an excuse for stealing billions of dollars.

    I feel like a lot of his worldview centers around nerds vs everyone else. There’s this archetype of nerds being awkward, but well-intentioned and smart people who can change the world. They know better than everyone else on how to improve the world, so they should be given as much power as possible. I now realize that this cultural conception of a nerd actually has very little to do with how smart or well-intentioned you really are. The rationalists aren’t very good at technical matters (experts in an area can easily spot their errors), but they pull off this culture very well.

    Recently, I watched a talk by Scott, where he mentioned an anecdote when he was at OpenAI. Ilya Sutskever asked him to come up with a formal, mathematical definition to describe if “an AI loves humanity”. That actually pissed me off. I thought, can we even define if a human loves humanity? Yeah, surely all the literature, art, and music in the world is unnecessary now, we’ve got a definition right here!

    If there’s one thing I’ve learned from all this, it’s that actions speak louder than any number of 10,000 word blog posts. Perhaps the rationalists could stop their theorycrafting for once and, you know, look at what Sam Altman and friends are actually doing.

    • PMMeYourJerkyRecipes@awful.systemsEnglish
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      8 months ago

      I feel like a lot of his worldview centers around nerds vs everyone else.

      He has the strongest in-group bias of anyone I’ve ever seen - if you say something bad about nerds or rationalists or men or Zionists or any other group he considers himself a part of, you must be motivated by cruelty and malice. It’s the kind of mindset that pretty much always ends with you denying the humanity of your enemies and embracing whichever fascist strongman promises to get rid of them.

      On a completely unrelated note: I just clicked though to his latest post; gleeful praise of Trump for striking Iran, which is of course irredeemably evil for opposing Israel and thus must be destroyed.

    • AVHeiro@awful.systemsEnglish
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      8 months ago

      I never really followed his blog so the thing that I mostly know him for is that during the days of metoo he wrote a post about “well I am an awkward nerd but I hope I haven’t sexually harassed my coworkers, but also I couldn’t possibly say because I’m a nerd and I feel bad for all the nerds that have sexually harassed their coworkers”. Got tweeted at angrily for a few days and half a decade later still holds a grudge about it.

      That said Vis A Vis nerds vs everyone else I recommend https://reallifemag.com/what-was-the-nerd/

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsMEnglish
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        8 months ago

        I’d disagree with the media analysis in “What Was The Nerd?” at a few points. For example, Marty McFly isn’t a bullied nerd. George McFly is. Marty plays in a band and has a hot girlfriend. He’s the non-nerd side of his interactions with Doc Brown, where he’s the less intellectual, and with George, where he’s the more cool. Likewise, Chicago in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off isn’t an “urban hellscape”. It’s the fun place to go when you want to ditch the burbs and take in some urban pleasures (a parade, an art gallery…).

  • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
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    8 months ago

    “You’re Scott Aaronson?! The quantum physicist who’s always getting into arguments on the Internet, and who’s essentially always right, but who sustains an unreasonable amount of psychic damage in the process?”

    And then everybody clapped.

    (This is extra funny because he lost friends over the gaza genocide debate when his leftwing (and Jewish) friend told him ‘well we do have power over them’ re the protesting students, to which he has a good Rationalist replied with ‘FUCK YOU’. He himself describes the situation slightly differently, but he has shown he doesn’t always have the best ability to understand others in these kinds of emotional moment, and he cannot fathom he might be wrong (and that is how you end up stealing from the tip jar)).

    E: And so much references to ‘the sneerers’ and our arguments again, he promised he would stop reading our shit because it is unhealthy for him. But looking at the arguments, I’m happy to see that he has indeed not read our stuff. The I in TESCREAL/TREACLES(*) stands for Incel.

    Also, while the Rationalists are not incels, what does the name of your blog stand for Scott? (E: wanted to edit in a link but can’t find the explainer page, wonder if he read it again and went ‘wow yeah I get why people think that isn’t great’ and deleted it (I did find this congrats on being consistently wrong)).

    *: still think these are dumb abbreviations, but not letting that get in the way of a dumb joke.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
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      8 months ago

      “I’m a rationalist because they let me put “quantum computer scientist (not physicist) who’s always right (despite the suffering of fools)” on my nametag”

      So what does the name of his blog stand for?