Thank you for the optimistic words. However, when I look at historical examples, this still seems like a bad news in long term:
rationalism has had a lot of children that are winning, even if they aren’t looking back to improve rationalism later
Consider Alfred Korzybski, the author of Science and Sanity, founder of General Semantics. He was an “x-rationalist” of his era, 80 years ago. He inspired many successful things; for example Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy can be traced to his ideas. So, we can attribute a lot of “wins” to him and to people inspired by him.
He also completely failed at him main goal, preventing WW2. Also, it doesn’t seem like humanity became more rational, which was his instrumental goal for achieving the former. (On the second thought, maybe humanity actually is more rational than back then, and maybe he even contributed to this significantly, but I don’t see it because it became the new normal.)
If today’s rationalist movement will follow the same path, the analogical outcome would be a few very successful startup owners, and then… an unfriendly AI kills us all, because everyone was too busy using rationality for their personal goals, and didn’t contribute to the basic research and “raising the rationality waterline”.
And in the Everett branch where humanity fails to develop a smarter-than-human AI, 80 years later the rationalist movement will be mostly forgotten; there will be some pathetic remains of CFAR trying to make people read “Rationality from AI to Zombies” but no one will really care, simply because the fact that they had existed for so long without having conquered the world will be an evidence against them.
I’d like to do better than this. I think I am progressing in my personal life, a few of those improvements are even measurable, but it is really slow and takes a lot of time. And I believe a long-term solution consists of rationalist groups, not isolated individuals. Making money individually is great, but to change humanity we need some social technology that can replicate rationalist groups. Something like a scout movement equivalent for LW meetups would be a nice beginning.
Thank you for the optimistic words. However, when I look at historical examples, this still seems like a bad news in long term:
Consider Alfred Korzybski, the author of Science and Sanity, founder of General Semantics. He was an “x-rationalist” of his era, 80 years ago. He inspired many successful things; for example Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy can be traced to his ideas. So, we can attribute a lot of “wins” to him and to people inspired by him.
He also completely failed at him main goal, preventing WW2. Also, it doesn’t seem like humanity became more rational, which was his instrumental goal for achieving the former. (On the second thought, maybe humanity actually is more rational than back then, and maybe he even contributed to this significantly, but I don’t see it because it became the new normal.)
If today’s rationalist movement will follow the same path, the analogical outcome would be a few very successful startup owners, and then… an unfriendly AI kills us all, because everyone was too busy using rationality for their personal goals, and didn’t contribute to the basic research and “raising the rationality waterline”.
And in the Everett branch where humanity fails to develop a smarter-than-human AI, 80 years later the rationalist movement will be mostly forgotten; there will be some pathetic remains of CFAR trying to make people read “Rationality from AI to Zombies” but no one will really care, simply because the fact that they had existed for so long without having conquered the world will be an evidence against them.
I’d like to do better than this. I think I am progressing in my personal life, a few of those improvements are even measurable, but it is really slow and takes a lot of time. And I believe a long-term solution consists of rationalist groups, not isolated individuals. Making money individually is great, but to change humanity we need some social technology that can replicate rationalist groups. Something like a scout movement equivalent for LW meetups would be a nice beginning.