Is it impossible to be an x-rationalist and still value people?
This is something I’ve thought a lot about. I’m worried about the consequences of certain negative ideologies present here on Less Wrong, but, actually, I feel that x-rationality, combined with greater self-awareness, would be the best weapon against them. X-rationality—identifying facts that are true and strategies that work—is inherently neutral. The way you interpret those facts (and what you use your strategies for) is the result of your other values.
Consider, to begin with, the tautology that 99.7% of the population is less intelligent than 0.3% of the population, by some well-defined, arbitrary metric of intelligence. Suppose also, that someone determined they were in the top 0.3%. They could feel any number of ways about this fact: completely neutral, for example, or loftily superior, or weightily responsible. Seen in this way, feeling contempt for “less intelligent” people is clearly the result of a worldview biased in some negative way.
Generally, humanity is so complex that however anyone feels about humanity says more about them than it does about humanity. Various forces (skepticism and despair; humanism and a sense of purpose) have been vying throughout history: rationality isn’t going to settle it now. We need to pick our side and move on … and notice which sides other people have picked when we evaluate their POV.
I always find it ironic, when ‘rationalists’ are especially misanthropic here on Less Wrong, that Eliezer wants to develop a friendly AI. Implicit with this goal—built right in—is the awareness that rationality alone would not induce the machine to be friendly. So why would we expect that a single-minded pursuit of rationality would not leave us vulnerable to misanthropic forces? Just as we would build friendliness into a perfectly logical, intelligent machine; we must build friendliness into our ideology before we let go of “intuition” and other irrational ways we have of “feeling” what is right, because they contain our humanism, which is outside rationality.
We do not want to be completely rational because being rational is neutral. Being more neutral without perfect rationality would leave us vulnerable to negative forces, and, anyway, we want to be a positive force.
This is something I’ve thought a lot about. I’m worried about the consequences of certain negative ideologies present here on Less Wrong, but, actually, I feel that x-rationality, combined with greater self-awareness, would be the best weapon against them. X-rationality—identifying facts that are true and strategies that work—is inherently neutral. The way you interpret those facts (and what you use your strategies for) is the result of your other values.
Consider, to begin with, the tautology that 99.7% of the population is less intelligent than 0.3% of the population, by some well-defined, arbitrary metric of intelligence. Suppose also, that someone determined they were in the top 0.3%. They could feel any number of ways about this fact: completely neutral, for example, or loftily superior, or weightily responsible. Seen in this way, feeling contempt for “less intelligent” people is clearly the result of a worldview biased in some negative way.
Generally, humanity is so complex that however anyone feels about humanity says more about them than it does about humanity. Various forces (skepticism and despair; humanism and a sense of purpose) have been vying throughout history: rationality isn’t going to settle it now. We need to pick our side and move on … and notice which sides other people have picked when we evaluate their POV.
I always find it ironic, when ‘rationalists’ are especially misanthropic here on Less Wrong, that Eliezer wants to develop a friendly AI. Implicit with this goal—built right in—is the awareness that rationality alone would not induce the machine to be friendly. So why would we expect that a single-minded pursuit of rationality would not leave us vulnerable to misanthropic forces? Just as we would build friendliness into a perfectly logical, intelligent machine; we must build friendliness into our ideology before we let go of “intuition” and other irrational ways we have of “feeling” what is right, because they contain our humanism, which is outside rationality.
We do not want to be completely rational because being rational is neutral. Being more neutral without perfect rationality would leave us vulnerable to negative forces, and, anyway, we want to be a positive force.