They are rationalists in the sense that they won through the application of their intellect. I don’t think that they were rationalists in the sense that they want to raise to rationality waterline.
I was hoping for the rational reason why Britain should have left (I’m only a portion of the way through ), instead of the lies about spending the money currently given to the EU on the NHS (which they had no way of influencing and made no plan for the current projects that would lose EU funding).
They are rationalists in the sense that they won through the application of their intellect. I don’t think that they were rationalists in the sense that they want to raise to rationality waterline.
While we shouldn’t get hung up on definitions, I’m pretty sure the most common meaning of “rationalist” in this community is the former, not the latter.
He says “rationalists have a lot of work to do”, but I don’t think that implies “people who don’t want to do this work are not rationalists”.
If someone uses their brainpower to reliably win, but isn’t interested in helping others do the same, I think you could say something like “they are rationalists, but not our kind of rationalists”. That would be totally reasonable. But I don’t think you could say “they aren’t rationalists”. The argument that exploiting others’ irrationality is net bad in the long run, is fairly specific and not obviously true for all sets of values and beliefs.
(This is a separate question from whether Cummings and Vote Leave are such people.)
If someone uses their brainpower to reliably win, but isn’t interested in helping others do the same, I think you could say something like “they are rationalists, but not our kind of rationalists”.
I’m not sure this is even reasonable. There’s a quiet majority of people on this site and other rationality blogs and in the real world (including Dominic Cummings, apparently) who learn these techniques and use their rationalist knowledge to “win.” And they don’t give back, other than their actions on the world stage. And personally, I think that’s okay. Not everyone needs to take on the role of teacher.
I consider what constitutes a modern rationalist up for our own definition. My wife gets annoyed that LW style rationalists aren’t like philosophical rationalists.
I don’t know of any other community apart from this one that uses rationalist to mean someone who uses their brainpower to reliably win.
Cummings probably doesn’t consider himself a rationalist (he used the term pejoratively in the article). So I considered The_Jaded_Ones comment describing them as rationalist as being akin to saying they were part of the in group, someone to be admired/emulated.
I’m an uneasy sometime member or the “rationality” community, I’ve been to a few LW meetups. So I’m interested in what people mean when they say someone is a rationalist. Is that the sort of person I will be hanging out with if I go again?
So, the thing I want to emphasize is that the community is not about the community. Other communities are about nothing more than themselves, and that’s fine, but this community has purpose. We can’t define a rationalist as being a member of the community, or that purpose gets lost.
So we have to be able to ask whether someone is a rationalist without talking about the community. We might decide later that yes, they’re a rationalist, but all the same we don’t think they’re a good person and we don’t want them in the community; but those have to be separate questions.
(Other communities use the word “rationalist” differently to us, and that’s fine too. I don’t claim there’s an objective definition of the word. Just that we need to use a definition that doesn’t talk about us.)
Similarly, rationality can’t be about rationality. If the goal of rationality is merely to spread rationality, then rationality might as well be herpes. If the goal is “to win, and also to spread rationality”, you have to ask what if those two goals conflict? Maybe you go for something like “the goal of rationality is to win, conditional that part of winning means spreading rationality”, but that seems like an unnatural carving of concept-space. And I question what the point is; if the point is simply that there are certain types of people who win but who we don’t like very much, then we’re going about it wrong. Instead of excluding them from the definition of “rationalists”, we can just exclude them from the community.
All that said, I personally wouldn’t exclude Cummings from the community, not based on this post. I don’t think you’re likely to meet many people like him at LW meetups, but as far as I’m concerned he’d be welcome at the London group.
And I question what the point is; if the point is simply that there are certain types of people who win but who we don’t like very much, then we’re going about it wrong. Instead of excluding them from the definition of “rationalists”, we can just exclude them from the community.
But the community is defined as a rationalist community right? Not a specific type of rationalist just plain simple rationalist. If we can’t explain why some people would be excluded from it, then the community seems ill defined and likely to drift and fall apart. Why do we even have one?
We could define rationalists as any of the following
people who want to use their brain meats to make humanity win (i.e. not lose and go extinct)
people who want to have correct and useful beliefs about the world and spread those beliefs and the methods of generating those beliefs aka epistemic rationalists.
Either of those would fit a large part of the people on lesswrong and capture bits of the the spirit of CFAR.
A community that is truly only about “people that use their brain to win” has very little useful to say to each other. Under many goal/belief systems I should hide my goal and beliefs so that people can’t interfere with them. I should actively mess up other peoples goal and belief systems so that they are ineffectual agents.
You could for example use user research and marketing to generate highly persuasive materials to convince people to join an evangelical church and get lots of money from those people. If your goal was simply to get lots of money would you count as a rationalist?
I think communities are always ill-defined, and just because we’re a rationalist community doesn’t mean we have to include every rationalist. We don’t need a formal account of who is and isn’t welcome.
We already have some definition, “rationalist”. I think that definition isn’t very good at letting people know in advance who they will be interacting with and helping. We could improve that definition without making it too formal.
If the point of “rationality” is evangelism, count me out. But anyway if you want to point to EY quotes, then consider “rationalists win” or the 12 virtues of rationality (which are about winning, not evangelizing).
It is not about evangelising for me. It is about not using tool sets that rely on other people being irrational. If your incentives are to keep people uninformed so that they will do what you want and you “win” then you are reinforcing the status quo of a world of misinformation/fraud and spin. This I think will cause us all to lose long term.
lies about spending the money currently given to the EU on the NHS
What they said is that in the longer run, money that used to go to the EU could be redirected to domestic priorities, including the NHS. And many current destinations of “EU funding” are quite silly indeed—do you think paying wealthy English landowners to mismanage their land is a good use of funding, whether “EU” or otherwise?
I’m cynical enough to think that big landowners will still get paid to mismanage their land. They managed to get the EU to do it, I suspect they’ll manage to get Britain outside the EU to do it.
I’m intrigued to find out Cumming’s solution to the political classes, I’ve not found it in all the verbiage yet though.
I think Cummings wants to “raise the sanity waterline.” But rather than argue about that, I think a better definition of “rationalist” is someone who writes about how to think and how to win, particularly in a way comprehensible to LW. He certainly fits that definition.
(I would like to exclude Scott Adams who claims to write about these subjects, and from whom I do learn, but who does not write precisely.)
They are rationalists in the sense that they won through the application of their intellect. I don’t think that they were rationalists in the sense that they want to raise to rationality waterline.
I was hoping for the rational reason why Britain should have left (I’m only a portion of the way through ), instead of the lies about spending the money currently given to the EU on the NHS (which they had no way of influencing and made no plan for the current projects that would lose EU funding).
While we shouldn’t get hung up on definitions, I’m pretty sure the most common meaning of “rationalist” in this community is the former, not the latter.
Things may have changed in 8 years. I’m not sure if you noticed that I got the phrase, “raising the sanity waterline,” from this sites founder.
I’m a bit sad that this has been lost if it has.
He says “rationalists have a lot of work to do”, but I don’t think that implies “people who don’t want to do this work are not rationalists”.
If someone uses their brainpower to reliably win, but isn’t interested in helping others do the same, I think you could say something like “they are rationalists, but not our kind of rationalists”. That would be totally reasonable. But I don’t think you could say “they aren’t rationalists”. The argument that exploiting others’ irrationality is net bad in the long run, is fairly specific and not obviously true for all sets of values and beliefs.
(This is a separate question from whether Cummings and Vote Leave are such people.)
I’m not sure this is even reasonable. There’s a quiet majority of people on this site and other rationality blogs and in the real world (including Dominic Cummings, apparently) who learn these techniques and use their rationalist knowledge to “win.” And they don’t give back, other than their actions on the world stage. And personally, I think that’s okay. Not everyone needs to take on the role of teacher.
FWIW I agree with this, but it wasn’t necessary to the point I was making and I didn’t feel like defending it.
I consider what constitutes a modern rationalist up for our own definition. My wife gets annoyed that LW style rationalists aren’t like philosophical rationalists.
I don’t know of any other community apart from this one that uses rationalist to mean someone who uses their brainpower to reliably win.
Cummings probably doesn’t consider himself a rationalist (he used the term pejoratively in the article). So I considered The_Jaded_Ones comment describing them as rationalist as being akin to saying they were part of the in group, someone to be admired/emulated.
I’m an uneasy sometime member or the “rationality” community, I’ve been to a few LW meetups. So I’m interested in what people mean when they say someone is a rationalist. Is that the sort of person I will be hanging out with if I go again?
So, the thing I want to emphasize is that the community is not about the community. Other communities are about nothing more than themselves, and that’s fine, but this community has purpose. We can’t define a rationalist as being a member of the community, or that purpose gets lost.
So we have to be able to ask whether someone is a rationalist without talking about the community. We might decide later that yes, they’re a rationalist, but all the same we don’t think they’re a good person and we don’t want them in the community; but those have to be separate questions.
(Other communities use the word “rationalist” differently to us, and that’s fine too. I don’t claim there’s an objective definition of the word. Just that we need to use a definition that doesn’t talk about us.)
Similarly, rationality can’t be about rationality. If the goal of rationality is merely to spread rationality, then rationality might as well be herpes. If the goal is “to win, and also to spread rationality”, you have to ask what if those two goals conflict? Maybe you go for something like “the goal of rationality is to win, conditional that part of winning means spreading rationality”, but that seems like an unnatural carving of concept-space. And I question what the point is; if the point is simply that there are certain types of people who win but who we don’t like very much, then we’re going about it wrong. Instead of excluding them from the definition of “rationalists”, we can just exclude them from the community.
All that said, I personally wouldn’t exclude Cummings from the community, not based on this post. I don’t think you’re likely to meet many people like him at LW meetups, but as far as I’m concerned he’d be welcome at the London group.
But the community is defined as a rationalist community right? Not a specific type of rationalist just plain simple rationalist. If we can’t explain why some people would be excluded from it, then the community seems ill defined and likely to drift and fall apart. Why do we even have one?
We could define rationalists as any of the following
people who want to use their brain meats to make humanity win (i.e. not lose and go extinct)
people who want to have correct and useful beliefs about the world and spread those beliefs and the methods of generating those beliefs aka epistemic rationalists.
Either of those would fit a large part of the people on lesswrong and capture bits of the the spirit of CFAR.
A community that is truly only about “people that use their brain to win” has very little useful to say to each other. Under many goal/belief systems I should hide my goal and beliefs so that people can’t interfere with them. I should actively mess up other peoples goal and belief systems so that they are ineffectual agents.
You could for example use user research and marketing to generate highly persuasive materials to convince people to join an evangelical church and get lots of money from those people. If your goal was simply to get lots of money would you count as a rationalist?
I think communities are always ill-defined, and just because we’re a rationalist community doesn’t mean we have to include every rationalist. We don’t need a formal account of who is and isn’t welcome.
We already have some definition, “rationalist”. I think that definition isn’t very good at letting people know in advance who they will be interacting with and helping. We could improve that definition without making it too formal.
If the point of “rationality” is evangelism, count me out. But anyway if you want to point to EY quotes, then consider “rationalists win” or the 12 virtues of rationality (which are about winning, not evangelizing).
It is not about evangelising for me. It is about not using tool sets that rely on other people being irrational. If your incentives are to keep people uninformed so that they will do what you want and you “win” then you are reinforcing the status quo of a world of misinformation/fraud and spin. This I think will cause us all to lose long term.
If you read the whole thing (quite an ask, I know!) then Cummings does go into how he thinks we can fix politics.
He also gives his argument as to why leave was the right choice, but that section is fairly brief.
What they said is that in the longer run, money that used to go to the EU could be redirected to domestic priorities, including the NHS. And many current destinations of “EU funding” are quite silly indeed—do you think paying wealthy English landowners to mismanage their land is a good use of funding, whether “EU” or otherwise?
I’m cynical enough to think that big landowners will still get paid to mismanage their land. They managed to get the EU to do it, I suspect they’ll manage to get Britain outside the EU to do it.
I’m intrigued to find out Cumming’s solution to the political classes, I’ve not found it in all the verbiage yet though.
ctrl+f “Why do it?” and “The political media and how to improve it” in the article
I think Cummings wants to “raise the sanity waterline.” But rather than argue about that, I think a better definition of “rationalist” is someone who writes about how to think and how to win, particularly in a way comprehensible to LW. He certainly fits that definition.
(I would like to exclude Scott Adams who claims to write about these subjects, and from whom I do learn, but who does not write precisely.)