/ratanon/ - Rationalists Anonymous

Do you think Gwern is hot IRL?

>>13561

>if gwern were female

Why would you want this?

>>14747

Leaning "no", but wouldn't be surprised either way.

>>14596

I was going to say that this will never happen in the world as we know it, but who knows. What happens when the unstoppable Trans Rights meet the immovable Bioethics?

>>14526

Are you sure? When I lurked sex doll threads on 4chan and other imageboards posters who claimed to have bought a sex doll often said their doll was unwieldy and difficult to clean. Moving around and posing a doll was nothing like moving around and posing a living human sex partner, even one who is drunk or in bondage. (A minority of the posters claimed sexual experience.) Regret due to buying the doll was common. The one exception was child sex dolls. The purchasers did not regret buying them.

>* gwern reads this article about qanon and 8chan and is reminded that /ratanon/ probably still exists

><@gwern> 'I have never seen a single anon on /mlp/ in the plushie waifu threads regret having bought a lifesize. Descriptions of cuddling with your pony waifu by owners have been overwhelmingly positive. (I've seen anons regret buying from specific plushmancers due to quality issues though.)' https://8kun.top/ratanon/index.html ah. so it does. also wtf are they actually called 'plushmancers'

><@gwern> https://plushie.horse/content/Category:Plushmancer apparently yes

HELL YES

WELCOME BACK GWERN-SENPAI

>>14602

Which of the many definitions of "postrationalism" available in this thread should we use to examine the current year for signs of its presence?

>>14611

Maybe >>9515 or >>11925?

>>11902

No human tolerates realistic maps well. The autists of the rationalist core fall into different traps than normies, but they absolutely do, and a lot. And because they self-identify with rationality they, ironically, forget that they are only aspiring rationalists and come to view their geographically determined in-group social norms as "more evolved."

To name this group "the rationali(st|ty) community" was a huge mistake. They should have called it something more like "the slightly less shitty but still shitty thinking community."

>>11920

This is a very interesting question.

>>14617

Well, somehow I missed this SSC post the first time around: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret-of-our-success/

It seems like Scott is cautiously endorsing the idea of "trading epistemic virtue for effectiveness" in this review. If we consider SSC a good indicator of what "rationalism" is today, then it sounds like some good ideas of postrationalism are getting folded back in. On the other hand, I think there are some non-"rationalist" postrationalists still around, like the Lovecraft guy who has his own thread here. (I also sometimes see other assorted tweeters identifying as postrats, but it's unclear to me what influence rationalism actually had on their thinking. I suspect signalling.)

What happened to vgr? He used to be so much better, or at least that's how I remember it.

>>12007

>likes Robin Hanson

>hates chads

Dude, I've got some REALLY bad news for you.

>>12122

Hanson is a BrainChad.

Is he next?

>>14760

He's tenured, might be difficult.

>>13869

are you hard enough for superdeterminism?

Honestly, I think this book is basilisk-shaped. If the thesis is false, then it doesn't matter. If it's true, then sharing it and offering supporting arguments is basically malicious. (I'm not comparing severity of consequences or truthfulness of the argument to the basilisk, just its hazardous shape.)

>Humans routinely engage in self-deception, because this behavior is useful for accomplishing social goals.

Okay great, Robin. I'm glad my brain has this advanced capability that's helping me all the time without me even noticing.

>As evidence, here's a catalog of self-deceptions you personally might engage in, and here's why these selfish reasons are more likely to be the real reasons for the corresponding behaviors.

Fuck OFF. If the self-deceptions help me, then I want to remain deceived. Seriously, why would you write this?

It doesn't even have a spooky warning name, like "basilisk" or "Tome of Forbidden Knowledge". It's distilled infohazard packaged in some cheap book whose title is an autistic mangling of a barely-related English idiom.

>>14726

It didn't harm me and helped me a little by resolving a lot of existing confusion.

Before it I kept worrying "{social ritual} doesn't make sense, wouldn't it be better to change it or not do it?" and then did it anyway but felt weird about it.

After the book it's intuitively clear that it's some kind of signaling thing and I can just participate in it without overanalyzing the (incorrect) stated reasons for it.

This new state might be worse than the optimum where I'm blissfully unaware, but it's better than the state I actually had before.

And if you can stomach hundreds of pages of Robin Hanson then you're probably prone enough to overanalysis to benefit in the same way, or at least not be worse off.

>>14726

>>14728

It sounds like a Tome of Forbidden Knowledge that can only harm neurotypical.

>>14528

>species that consist of a relatively small number of large individuals are more vulnerable to extinction than species that consist of a large number of small individuals.

A human extinction event wouldn't imply the extinction of eukaryotic cells. In the same way, an extinction of "global self-propagating systems" wouldn't imply the extinction of the human beings which make them up.

Maybe Ted makes a good argument that a globalized economy is inherently unstable, although I'm not sure. But it doesn't seem like a solution to the Fermi paradox. There's nothing here to suggest that humans or our ability to produce radio signals would be permanently destroyed. And even if somehow the "world-system" is a prerequisite to radio, surviving humans would rebuild the system in a very short time on a cosmic time scale. So he would need to demonstrate that industrial civilization will indeed destroy the climate and sterilize the planet. I suspect I am somewhat mindkilled in this area due to such a claim mainly being advanced by members of the hated outgroup, but I am generally skeptical that human activity can render the planet uninhabitable in a matter of centuries.

>>14725

Lol, after the first reply it doesn't even seem like they're talking to each other.

>. says:

>If infinite computation is possible, and the universe is a simulation, our universe almost certainly uses infinite computation

Why? Is this some kind of anthropic reasoning? Only events within humanity's light cone could possibly affect our experience, and this is a finite region. It's meaningless to make any kind of claim about computations happening outside this finite region. If computation = experience, then our experience is only what's inside our light cone, you could rip out the adjacent stick of hyperRAM storing the stuff going on outside it and it makes no difference to "our universe". (Really I'm just rehashing my earlier argument that reasoning about being inside a simulation is incoherent.)

>vitrifyher says:

>I think that "computations" are qualia

>reality really can't generate novel qualia ad infinitum

But there are infinitely many possible computations. These are contradictory.

>It seems awfully suspicious that there is so little novelty. There is a lot of recycling of the contents of consciousness.

Why would you expect your brain to be capable of performing novel computations just for fun? Survival and reproduction is Serious Business, and it involves doing the same types of computations (tiger checks, breast size and perkiness evaluations) over and over without wasting energy. Color spaces can have more dimensions than R,G,B, we could perceive color vectors in these spaces that aren't reducible to RGB if our eyes had the right hardware, and this would presumably create novel experiences, but Gnon determined that computing colors from three dimensional input was the best use of our limited computational ability.

>I doubt infinity, infinity itself, would come up with such a shitty and limited experience

9chan already got booted off its first domain and is now at https://9chan.tw/ ( https://9chan.tw/ratanon/ ).

>>14718

>9chan already got booted off its first domain

Why did it happen so quickly? Was there an incident?

>>14721

Someone reported it as "8chan persons, white supremacists"

>>14721

It happened a week ago, almost immediately. Apparently "free speech" (Gab, Infowars, Bitchute) is fine, but "anarchy" (dolphin sex) is not.

https://9chan.tw/9/thread/1209

I don't think there was an actual incident, it's just pre-emptive.

>>14616

>For example on #lesswrong.

done.

It would be ideal. Do you disagree, OP?

>>14719

>instead of having an iq, you can deadlift

>>14585

I should add:

- The number of notes is the sum for all copies of the chain. 10,000 of the reblogs and likes could be for a chain with a correction at the end and it would be hard to tell.

- You have almost zero control over your own post after it's reblogged. If you edit it, the edits won't show up in existing reblog chains, besides the one on your own blog with that post at the end. If you delete it, it'll just remove it from your own blog without altering the reblog chains.

>>14582

This seems insightful, but I can't quite grasp his explanation of consciousness on my first read through.

>Consciousness is the choice of which abstractions we experience. [footnote:] I'm not suggesting a "free-will" or conscious kind of choice. It is rather an implicit choice that has been made in the act of perception.

Who's the chooser? God? It doesn't seem to be an individual human, as I can't choose the level of abstraction I experience. Is there a cosmological constant of mind in play here? His use of the passive voice kills me.

Okay, just noticed footnote 29:

>Zombies will probably ask whether there is one dial per person, or one for the universe. I would reply that dials exist in "epistemological space" not physical space, so that question is not sensible.

wtf I'm a zombie now and this still makes no sense. I was not imagining a physical dial in the first place. Why is it on a particular setting for me, and what agent chose the setting such that it's a "choice"? Is it actually on all settings simultaneously, but only one setting is the level of experience? This is what makes me think I'm missing a large part of the argument.

Also, isn't this an example of the hated epiphenomenalism? Mental events don't have any causal effect on the physical world in this model, so there could be actual zombies talking about their ineffable inner lives which don't exist because "the dial" is on a the wrong setting, but their neurons have evolved to imitate zagnet speech on the concept in order to blend in. Does the author actually believe some people are zombies?

>>14585

>>14586

Strangely, this makes Tumblr's posting models more neocameral than that of other major social websites.

This is what I want our malicious AI overlords to sound like.

It is not trendy at all, unfortunately. It is one of the most important software projects in existence, and it has been compromised by Curtis Yarvin's love for the obscure. Decentralization of the Internet will determine the intellectual future of civilization. Continued centralized control by the likes of Google, Facebook and Cloudflare, the sheer difficulty of competing with them will retard technological progress and protect self-destructive government policy from criticism. Most players in the market are trying to decentralize data (IPFS) or federate data and identity (SOLID). Nobody is doing distributed applications in as fundamental and principled a way as Urbit. And at Tlon they are risking it all because CY couldn't bring himself to design a more conventional VM and programming language or to make the implementation easier for an outsider to comprehend and work on. For everyone's sake I hope this part of the design was his stroke of genius, not stupidity. If not, other developers inspired by Urbit will have to try to create a viable global computer.

>>14593

>And at Tlon they are risking it all because CY couldn't bring himself to design a more conventional VM and programming language or to make the implementation easier for an outsider to comprehend and work on.

There's no low-risk way to attempt a coup of Big Tech, so it looks like you're arguing that the particular risks he chose to take are misguided.

I think that while Yarvin does love the obscure for its own sake, he is using it instrumentally in the case of Urbit. Many verysmart HackerNews commenters argue that Urbit is like a cult but fail to specify why a cult is a bad thing. Having a uniquely dedicated group of early adopters seems like a potential strength. (And the tech does work. The cultists aren't drinking snake oil.) The tradeoff is that any casually interested programmers won't be able to contribute the odd bug fix or suggestion. I think 80/20 suggests that this isn't a huge detriment.

>a more conventional VM

My impression so far is that the unconventional aspects of Arvo are improvements rather than mere changes compared to current operating systems. If the Urbit network is actually going to replace the current paradigm, might as well break multiple things at once within a single period of chaos.

>>14574

If the only immortality available was like this, would you take it?

>>14579

No. Life is not worth living if it means eternal suffering. I would have killed myself long ago had I never found out about David Pearce and the prospect of paradise engineering.

>>14580

fun theory, wireheading, paradise engineering: all copes

there's no pain without pleasure

no pain or pleasure means no stimulation

removing loss/pain aversion eliminates motivation

no stimulation or motivation would grind the species to a halt

constant "happiness" becomes a baseline with a hard upper limit, pure novelty engines limited by compute and complexity

no goals, no rationality

just an opium den of NPCs

>>14588

"Paradise engineering" and compete abolition of suffering and its replacement with "gradients of cerebral bliss" of the type https://www.abolitionist.com/ advocates are dubious projects. But it would be strange indeed if you couldn't strictly improve on the human condition. A large percentage of human suffering (50%? 80%?) comes from medical conditions and mental illness. It is not adaptive. It is a product of weakness of the species. You could remove it and increase individual intelligence, productivity, rationality and every other positive quality.

>>13470

Hot take: all of these things are learned behaviors, but people differ in their innate propensities for learning them.

>>13622

That is the coldest fucking take, it's just a particular framing/rephrasing of "everything is 50% genetic, 50% environmental".

>>13487

>Submissive men are almost exactly as common as transwomen.

This seems clearly and obviously false if you judge by the amount of content aimed at submissive men that has and doesn't have a feminization element. Somewhat surprisingly, not every male sub wants to be mommy's little girl.

>>13508

Likely.

every dom has an inner sub; it feels good to do things to people because you have some concept of how it would feel good to have those things done to you. the latter is usually abstracted and subsumed by your dominant desires, but sometimes it leaks into the foreground. blurring the distinction between self and other is a normal sexual experience for a lot of people.

>>13497

>>13497 is wrong. 2% of women are doms, 20% of men are subs.

>>14450

how old are you ? just convert to judaism and move to the us

>>7612

>>7621

>>7623

>>7638

If quantum immortality is true, do you have arguments against quantum hell?

https://bqp.io/quantum-immortality-to-quantum-hell.html

>>7638

>http://chronopause.com/chronopause.com/index.php/2011/05/29/a-visit-to-alcor/index.html

>In one case, a patient’s head was removed in the field and, because they had failed to use a rectal plug, the patient had defecated in the PIB. The result was that feces had contaminated the neck wound, and Alcor personnel were seen pouring saline over the stump of the neck whilst holding the patient’s severed head over a bucket trying to wash the fecal matter off the stump. These are just a few of the grotesque problems I observed.

wow

>>14555

To evade hell, proactively commit suicide in response to negative life changes. Ideally, set up an explosive device that measures the neurotransmitter levels throughout your brain and detonates when something goes awry. Pray that you end up in the branches where a quantum miracle averts the negative life change rather than the branches where the device simply fails.

In terms of "arguments that quantum hell isn't real" all I have is the old doomsday argument, where if I had an eternity of hellish existence awaiting me, I would have been much more likely to find myself in said eternity than in a normal day of a plain old life when I woke up this morning.

>>14555

>quantum immortality

On a tangential note, I am generally disturbed by Google's sentence completion / retroactive correct. Not just in the standard

>le ebil megacorp can predict my private thoughts D:

way, although that is creepy. I am concerned that this technology actually gives Google a rudimentary form of *write* access to the thoughts of those who use it. When you accept Google's proposed sentence or its revision to your words, you take ownership of them as if you'd written them yourself.

Consider the experiment where direct electrical stimulation to the brain caused a subject to stand up.

>Why did you stand up?

>I wanted to get a Coke.

Compare:

>Why did you write this sentence?

>Because it's true for reason xyz.

Compare also the case of American POWs "brainwashed" by the Chinese through the simple tactic of incentivizing them to write pro-Communism essays. Certainly they would have started out with the belief that the words they were writing were not their own thoughts, they were simply complying for a reward, but this distinction did not persist. I think this fits well with the model of the conscious mind that Robin Hanson describes in Elephant in the Brain, where it serves in large part as a Press Secretary that observes the actions the subconscious mind dictates and seamlessly assumes ownership, rationalizing them into a coherent narrative.

At the moment, Google's suggestions are harmless boilerplate and their corrections appear to be benign revisions towards higher-frequency phrasing. When they happen to correct a wrongthought into a more common sentiment, well, it's just because most people aren't wrongthinkers and the algorithm doesn't know any better. But as people come to accept Google's role in composing their words, the potential rises for Google to weaponize their friendly little algorithm into a component of a propaganda engine more powerful than any yet witnessed on this planet.

Remember that this is the same institution that makes internal videos like this:

Is the b*s*l*sk actually disproven? For me, I resolve to not give in to blackmail, making it pointless for the b*s*l*sk to attempt acausal blackmail.

But now I have an issue, in that I am tempted to give in to blackmail. Hiroshima blocked the non-JS captchas on 4chan, forcing everyone to use Google's malicious JS captchas which punish you in proportion to how hard you try to evade the Google botnet. When he did this, it was speculated that the real motivation was to force the purchase of additional 4chan Passes, and in one thread I exclaimed that I do not give in to blackmail. As the months drag on of being abused by Google (e.g. slow fade-in effects that do nothing to hinder a machine while wasting human time; challenges that force you to agree with falsehoods when the botnet thinks it sees a crosswalk but it's definitely not a crosswalk), I long for freedom. I want to buy a 4chan Pass, but if I did so, there would be a digital record of me stating that I consider a certain event to be a form of blackmail, and then proceeding to give in to the blackmail.

Will I be safe from the b*s*l*sk if I buy a 4chan Pass?

>>14544

Purchasing a 4chan pass is difficult enough right now (cryptocurrencies only) that I don't think they actually have enough of an incentive to make the captchas harder on purpose.

>>14519

So, you think his model is wrong? Or just risky, or a violation of some moral principle? (Remember he proposes voluntary infection via incentives to volunteers, if this changes the relevance to whichever moral principles you are seething about.)

>>14521

I don't know nearly enough about it to properly judge it (i.e. not by inflammatory imageboard post) but it smells suspiciously galaxy-brain, like most of Robin's proposals.

I'm worried that it perhaps has predictably worse outcomes than other approaches.

If it did come from Robin Hanson via Domic Cummings (it surely didn't, but it's fun to think about) I wouldn't be confident that it works.

>>14522

Is there some history of Hanson's ideas failing? My impression is that he mainly proposes things that will never happen. Maybe all of his galaxy-brain ideas actually would improve the world.

>it perhaps has predictably worse outcomes

They don't seem very predictable if you can't identify what they are.

>>14523

Replacing the justice system by an insurance system is a neat idea with a good chance of massively improving society, though I wouldn't want to roll it out everywhere at once.

A court system for assigning derogatory nicknames to second graders seems a little less promising, though it is interesting.

In general I think his ideas are often better as thought experiments to point out inconsistencies in the way we think about different things than as serious policy proposals.

>They don't seem very predictable if you can't identify what they are.

A greater net cost in QALYs.

They have revised their approach now so I think it was a reasonable concern.

>>14520

>It has hastened at least one suicide.

Sauce?